611.60F31/66
Memorandum by the Secretary of State
The Minister of Czechoslovakia came in and handed me two notes, which are hereto attached.8 One pertains to a request that this Government accept the seed and plant inspections of Czechoslovakian officials in the importation of nursery stock and other plants and seeds. The other note contains statistics of the trade between the United States and Czechoslovakia, in which is emphasized the unfavorable trade balance against the latter country. I promised the Minister that the Department would offer some reply to his two notes.
I then inquired whether Czechoslovakia had a favorable balance of trade with any other countries, to which the Minister reluctantly replied that it did have favorable balances with some of the countries. He then sought to throw out the idea that the only way his country could participate in a triangular trade arrangement with us would be to buy more cotton from Brazil and less from the United States, and he expressed an earnest desire to continue to buy our cotton. I expressed my appreciation of this, and then proceeded to say that nothing could be more discouraging to the future of international trade than for the various nations to remain down in the deep rut of purely bilateral bartering and bargaining trade; that this meant more and more trade restrictions and less and less trade, or at least no material increase of the present skeleton amount of international trade. I stated that the British, for example, had used every sort of device and method to force trade, also to increase it in every other way, but with the result that for 1934 the increase of British exports outside of the Empire was no more than 30 million dollars; that, in comparison, the exports of the United States were 450 million dollars, or perhaps more than those of all the European countries combined notwithstanding that they had been operating several hundred of these narrow bilateral trade arrangements. I added that unless important countries like that of the Minister were willing to go against the current somewhat and get behind this broad program which the United States was supporting in order to encourage others to do likewise, his country and mine and all others would gradually go from bad to worse economically speaking.
[Page 141]The Minister showed keen interest and sympathy with this view. He many times requested that Dr. Grady and his associates point out just what the discriminatory practices of his country against the United States were, in order that he might use all possible efforts to bring about their removal to a satisfactory extent. I assured him that we would be entirely candid and frank about the matter and would undertake to follow this suggestion.
- Neither printed.↩