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Four nations-Colombia, Central America, Peru, and Mexico -were represented when the General Assembly of the American Republics met. Between June 22 and July 15 the Assembly held ten meetings and drafted one treaty of union, two agreements, and two conventions, all of which were to be submitted to the respective Governments represented for ratification. None of the States ratified any of the documents, except Colombia, and the Congress may be said to have been a failure. Nevertheless, it established a precedent and made subsequent conferences easier.

Mexico was very anxious for another Congress to carry out the work begun at Panama, and issued repeated invitations in 1831, 1838, 1839, and 1840, but to no avail. In 1847, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, New Granada, and Peru, held a Congress at Lima, and drafted several treaties and conventions, but these were not ratified by the Governments represented, and the attempt to establish a union was again a failure. This Congress was expressly a Spanish American conference, and the United States was not invited. Again in 1856, and later in 1864, attempts were made to hold a Spanish American conference without inviting this country, but both attempts failed. It was not until after the French intervention in Mexico in 1865-66 that the Spanish American countries were brought to realize the true significance of the friendship of the United States. As soon as the Civil War closed, the American Government notified the French that the pursuance of their enterprise in Mexico would be looked upon with disfavor. The American note had its immediate effect. Maximilian, deprived of help, soon fell.

Similar services were rendered by this country in 1870, when through the good offices of the Secretary of State the war between Spain on one side and Peru, Chile, and Ecuador on the other was practically terminated. Nevertheless, the various States of Spanish America still seemed to feel that a union including the United States was not plausible nor advisable, for they considered that the Spanish States were bound by close ties of blood, tradition, and customs to which their neighbor to the north was not a party.

In May, 1888, the Congress of the United States passed an act authorizing the President to invite the republics of Mexico,

Central America, South America, Haiti, Santo Domingo, and the empire of Brazil to meet in a conference at Washington on October 2, 1889. This conference was "to discuss the adoption of a customs union, the improvement of the means of communication between the various countries, uniform customs regulations, a uniform system of weights and measures, laws for the protection of patents and copyrights, extradition, the adoption of a common silver coin, and the formulation of a definite plan for the arbitration of international disputes of every character". The only tangible result of this ambitious First International Conference of American States was the establishment of the Bureau of American Republics in Washington, which was to publish a monthly bulletin in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, giving official and timely information concerning the commercial conditions and opportunities in the various countries. But this unpretentious Bureau became the forerunner of the present Pan-American Union.

The Second International American Conference was held in the City of Mexico in 1901-1902. It was arranged at this Conference for the States of Latin America to become parties to the Hague Convention of 1899 for the pacific settlement of international disputes. A treaty for the compulsory arbitration of pecuniary claims was adopted and signed by the delegates of seventeen States, including the United States of America. The first article of this treaty read: "The High Contracting Parties agree to submit to arbitration all claims for pecuniary loss or damage which may be presented by their respective citizens, and which cannot be amicably adjusted through diplomatic channels and when said claims are of sufficient importance to warrant the expense of arbitration."

In 1906 the Third International Conference of American States was held in Rio de Janeiro. At this Conference the pecuniary claims convention drafted at the previous meeting was extended for a period of five years, and a recommendation was made to the Governments represented to invite the Second Hague Conference, which had been called for 1907, "to examine the question of the compulsory collection of public debts, and, in general, means tending to diminish between nations conflicts having an exclusive

pecuniary origin." It was at the time of this Conference that Secretary Root made his famous series of addresses in South America that gave a new impetus to Pan Americanism and strengthened the bonds of friendship and good feeling between this country and the South American States.

The Fourth International Conference met in Buenos Aires in 1910. More important than the previous conferences, it enlarged the scope of the organization and changed the name to Pan-American Union. Treaties relating to patents, trade-marks, and copyrights were drafted, and the pecuniary claims convention was again extended for an indefinite period of time. The chief executive officer of the Union was made Director-General, and the Secretary was made Assistant Director and Secretary of the Governing Board. The present organization, therefore, may be said to date from this Conference. The dream of the visionary author of the Pan-American Union has at last become a reality. Under its auspices there have been held a number of International Conferences such as the two Pan-American Congresses, the two Pan-American Financial Conferences, the Pan-American Congress of Uniformity of Specifications, and the recent Pan-American Congress of Journalists.

In the last report made by the Director-General in 1923, he gives a detailed account of the activities and work carried on by the Union under its present organization. He classifies them under five heads: publications, the establishment of closer cultural ties between the republics of the American continent, the maintenance of a Bureau of Education, a Bureau of Commerce, and a Bureau of International Sanitation; and a Department of Statistics. Under each one of these heads multiple and various activities are being undertaken, all of which are tending to strengthen friendship and good will among the different republics of America, and to establish a better understanding among the peoples of the various countries.

All the Governments of the New World will join to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the First Pan-American Congress at Panama, out of which the present Pan-American Union developed.

CARLOS E. CASTAÑEDA.

PRUSSIANIZING AMERICA

BY SHAW DESMOND

"THESE United States" have become the battleground of two principles, each struggling for mastery in a silent, tense struggle which, by the mass of the American people, is almost unnoticed. Yet, upon the issue of this struggle turns the future of America.

In five visits, some of them as long as six months, and over one hundred thousand miles of traveling, I have watched this struggle for it is always the outsider who sees the most of the game. It is the struggle between "standardization" and "individualism", between "Prussianism" and "Americanism". By "standardization" I mean, generally, anything that tends to make the Man subservient to the Machine.

Behind the American Machine-Mind stand the heavenly twins worshipped by the mass of the American people. They are "System" and "Service". Their gospel is the gospel of "Efficiency". Now, much can be said for the Machine, when it is controlled. But in the United States there is a steadily increasing tendency for the Machine to control the Man. It may even be said of to-day's America that it is a country where the Man serves the Machine instead of the Machine serving the Man.

In the business office; in the factory; in the hotel, there is a stealthy tendency to stamp everything and everybody with the same stamp; to "control"; to limit individual initiative; in a word, to hobble intelligence all in the name of "efficiency". It is the superimposition of the "superior" intelligence upon the supposedly "inferior" by over-organization, and the result often is the "putting of square pegs into round holes.”

It is the contention of this admirer of the American people's vitality and humanness, that this standardization is a brake upon the intelligence and spirit of the American citizen which is costing the United States at least twenty-five per cent. of its potential; that it purchases a temporary machine-efficiency at the price of

essential success and healthy individualist thought; and that, unless checked, it means that these United States are riding for a fall. I will go further. I claim that standardization upon the present excessive lines in America is often a time-waster as well as an energy- and intelligence-waster. I claim that it is efficient only in a narrow and dangerous sense. And I claim, finally, that in these nervous, dangerous days, when personal initiative and quick thinking alone can accommodate itself to the kaleidoscopic changes in modern life and industry, standardization and the machine-mind mean ultimate disintegration and disaster.

Let us examine as dispassionately as possible the case for standardization.

The case for it, in business, and, to a degree, in education, is that it reduces "overhead", that it reduces costs by making the parts of machines interchangeable, that it makes the "superior" brains at the top effective throughout the organization, and that, in a word, it makes for smoothness of working and therefore for efficiency. It is claimed by the men who lead American industry that iron discipline, alone, working through unquestioning obedience down to the tiniest cog in the industrial machine, can reduce costs of production to a point that gives America a chance to hold her own in the world markets. The educator, and even the social reformer, are now beginning to make the same claims. An associate of the late Mr. Pierpont Morgan who, with that financial phenomenon, helped to steer America through her banking crisis in 1907, said to me as we stepped into our lift in a Wall Street office: "You see that man there?"—he pointed as he spoke to a department head-"That man once ran this lift. He has reached his present position because he did what he was told to do without question or criticism. In the modern army of business, we don't want the non-coms. doing the thinking. The men at the head do that." It never seemed to occur to my friend, himself a man of much vigor of thought, that a persistence in this policy must ultimately lead to the Marxian "slave-state," in which the official and "expert" would be supreme and in which the wheels, under the clammy hand of the Bureaucrat, would cease to turn. For the New Prussianism must lead ultimately to the very thing it professes to hate to Bureaucratic Socialism.

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