Omaha Daily Bee Newspaper, February 1, 1903, Page 26

How American Goods Are Flooding the Netherlands —_— DUTCH GIRLS LIKE THE AMERICAN SEWING MACHINES—SCENE IN THE SCHOOL OF SEW- ING AT ALKMAAR, HOL LAND. (Copyright, 1903, by Frank G. Carpenter.) TTERDAM, Jan. 21.—(Special Cor- respondence of The Bee.)—I stubbed my toe on the American invasion the moment I landed in Rotterdam. The obstruction was box marked: Organ, From Meriden, Connecticut, U. 8. A. C. Keltners Groote Magazijnen van Planos. Kalverstraat, Amsterdam. A little further on were barrels of ma- chine oll from New York, and next to tham a lot of American sewing machines 1n crates. Out in the river Maas, anchored to a floating buoy, were great steamers un- loading Minneapolis flour into two large barges to be sent up the Rhine, and all along the Boompjes were American goods of various kinds. I took a carriage and drove for several miles up the wharves, crossing the bridges to the Noorderelland and onto the left bank of {he Maas. We went by warehouse after warehouse, and everywhere I saw more or less stuff from the United States. On the Holland-American quay chere was an acre or so of cotton bales from Galves- ton awalting transshipment for the Dutch cotton mills, Nearby was a yard filled with ‘resin barrels from Savannah which gave forth a smell llke a canning factory, which stuck In my nostrils until driven out by the coffee warehouses where the rich- smelling beans of Java and Sumatra were being loaded on a ship for New York. At one place I stopped my carriage and photographed a wagon load of Standard Ol1 barrels, and at anotler I took a snap- shot of a gang of Dutch emigrants about to board a ship for New York. 1 saw car- goes of American lumber, buckets and boxes of American meats, wagon loads of lard and tailow and all sorts of crates holdiug American machinery. One item was a cargo of Chicago mowing machines bdelng loaded on barges for the interior of north- ern Europe, and another was barge after barge of American cottonseed oil which passed through under one of the draw- bridges as I waited to cross. At the same time I saw a score of ocean steansers loading for Asia, Africa and the Dutch East Indies and rode past miles and miles of river and canal craft. As 1 went on I could see something of the enormous business whick the Dutch have with the rest of the worid. They are the little giants of commercial Europe. They do not nu:nber as many as three times the population of Chicago, but they have twice as much foreign trade as the 120,000,000 Russians, three times as much as the Span- fards or Italians and twice as much as the whole South American continent. Holland stands sixth iz the point of business done among the commercial nations of the world, and about one-tenth of its trade is with the United States. It makes exchanges to the extent of more than $1,000,000,000 a year, and it annually buys more than $100,000,000 worth of guods from us. Let us stop a moment and think what this means. This iittle country has in round numbers just about 5,000,000 people, cr 1,000,000 tamilies, but it buys $100,000,000 worth of Uncle Sam's goods every year. This means that on the average every family buys $100 worth annually and this notwithstanding its sales to us will not average more than $12 or $156 per family. Of course, mvch of the goods are bought to sell again, and some go to the Dutch Bast Indies, which are eighty times as large as Holland itself, but the trade is there all the same, and the business ‘s so big that it will pay the most careful nurs- ‘ng and the most enthuslastic pushing. The South American continent is less im- portant to us than Holland. Our trade with the Chinese brings in nothing like as much as our trade with the Dutch, and in its possibilities it Is worth as much as the business of any of the countries of Burope with the exception of England, Germany and France and that undeveloped empire, Russia. Just now is the best time to Increase this a équare trade. The Dutchmen do not like the English. They can’'t get over the troubles of their South African cousins, the Beers, and other things being equal, they will glve the United States the preference every time. There are hundreds of articles which we make that ought to be sold here, and by studying the wants of the people snd drum- ming the trade there can be an enormous increase. But first let me tell you what our busi- ness now consists of. I have before me the Dutch reports from the United States for the first half of the year 1900. They are a little old, but the trade is practically the same today. I will give you some of the items. They consist of cotton, cottonseed oil, lard, tallow, margarine, meat and to- bacco, as well as a large variety of othet articles. The cottun they bought amounted to 20,- 000,000 pounds, equal to more than 3,000,000 pounds of cotton per month. This went to the Dutch mills and a large part of it was made into clothes for Java, Sumatra and different parts of Africa. The cottonseed oll weighed just twice as much as the cotton itself, and thereby hangs a tale. These Dutch are among the chief artificial butter makers of the world. They bought 43,000,000 pounds of margarine of us during that six months, but at the same time they used this forty-odd mil- lion ‘pounds of cottonseed oil to make other margarine and low-grade butter, for use not only in Holland, but in England and other parts of Europe. There is one factory here which makes over 3,000,600 pounds of such butter every month. A Frenchman invented the process of mak- ing this butter, but the Dutch have the biggest factories and they 1o the bulk of the world’'s business along this line. They make also cow butter for export, so much, indeed, that Holland has been called the dairy farm of London. Our biggest Dutch export in point of welght is American corn. In this six months it amounted to almost 100,000,000 pounds per month and brought in several millions of dollars. What do you suppose it was used for? To feed the Holstein cat- tle, to turnish butter for London? No, the grass here is good and it makes the sweet- est of milk. For cornbread for the peopl:? No, the Dutch don't eat maize, though they take vast quantities of our second- grade flour and like it. What, then? I can easily show you if you will come with me to Schiedam, a little way out from Rot- terdam. At that place are the great dis- tilleries which make the Holland gin or schonapps. There are 200 of them, and their business is to grind up American corn and reduce it to alcohol, which mixed in a cer- tain way with the juice of the juniper berry forms gin. Holland gin is considered the best, and the Dutch think it is the best drink of the world. They consume vast quantities of it and it warms them body aud soul. It is used not only here, but tbroughout the Dutch East Indies, where the hotels give you free gin cocktails be- fore every meal and where the people drink gin almost every hour of the day. A large part of what Holland sells to 1s is gin, alcohol and wines. She sends us Java coffee and something like 2,000,000 pounds of spices every year, all of which comes from her colonies in the East Indies. Rotterdam is by far the best place for pushing our trade. It is, with the excep- tion of Hamburg, the best distributing point on the coast of northern Europe, and it has fewer trade restrictions than Ham- burg. The city is about sixteen miles back from the sea, built upon piles on both Lanks of the Maas. The piles are driven as much as fifty feet imto the soil and upon them have beun constructed miles of stone quays enormous warehouses and a city of about 350,000 people. The town controls all pub- lic improvements, and it is spending vast sums to increase its shipping facilities end trade. If I remember correctly the cost of deepening the river Maas, so that the big- AMERICAN SKYSCRAPER gest ocean steamships could come right into the city, was more than $16,000,000. This work, however, hus made Rotterdam su- perior to Amsterdam as a port, and it now ranks second among the ports of con- tinental Europe, and is surpassed by none in its safety and in ite conveniences for handling goods. I have spoken of its miles of stone quays. It has also shipyards and floating dry docks and every means of repairing and taking care of shipping. It has mooring buoye in the Maas, so that the vessels can unload into the barges in midstream, and its quays are so fitted with cranes that all sorts of freight can be rapidly moved. At present there are seventy-five ocean lines which call regularly at Rotterdam, and the river and canal craft which annually enter this port number 125,000. The river is al- ways free from ice, and business goes on all the year round. In my ride around the wharves I was surprised at the number of ships loading for and unloading from the United States. Our trade Is very important to Holland. Of all its tonnage more than 26 per cent comes from our country, and the only ccuntry which surpasses the United States in this is Great Britain, which has about 26 per cent of the total tonnage, but some of this consists of American goods which come to Holland via England There are more than 400 ships leaving Rotterdam every year for the United States, or more than one every day. There are thirteen regular steamship lines, which do business between the two countries. The Holland-American line is the great- est. It has a passenger line to New York and freight steamers for Newport News WAGON LOAD OF STANDARD OIL BARRELS. IN ROTTERDAM, The passenger ships make the journey from Rotterdam in eight or ten days, while the freight steamers take from nine to twenty days. This line is making money and it has for several years paid dividends of 10 per cent aud vpward, Outside of the Holland-American line the chief steamship companies which deal with the United States are freighters, the most of the vessels going to the southern states. There are tank steamers belonging to the German-American Petroleum com- pany and the American Petroleum compauy which ply regularly between New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Rott:rdam, and there are tramp steamers which carry oil. The Neptune line has one steamers a week to Baltimore. The Cos- mopolitan and the Kevstone lines make regular shipments to Philadelphia, and the Johnson Blue Cross line and North Amerj- can Transport line do a business beiween here and Norfolk and Newport News. Then there is the Charleston Transport line, with irregular sailings, the Tcxas Trans- port and the Terminal Transport, with steamers to New Orleaus and Galveston, and the Gulf Stream line, which sails bi- weekly to the same ports. Barnard & Co. have steamers from Savannah to Rot- terdam, and the Cuban line goes from Rot- terdam or Antwerp to New Orleans every three weeks. There is also a line Holland to Boston, with steamers eve y ten days and other lines to Philadelphia and New York. So you see that the Dutch- American trade keeps the Gulf stream siz- zling the greater part of the year. I have letters from Chicago to the Hol- land representatives of Armour & Co. awd or more from Swift and Company, and I asked my porter at my hotel where to find them. He took me to the corner and pointed to a big white building facing the river at the end of the Boompjes. “That,” said he, “is the Witte Huis. It is the only American build- ing in Holland and is the headquarters of the chief American firms.” 1 crossed several bridges and, strolling down to it, found it even go. The building is on the American plan, although it was erected by a Belgian. It is made of bricks faced with white porcelain tiles. The Dutch call it a sky-scraper and talk of the dangerous height, although it has only ten stories. It is, I am told, the only ten-story buiiding in Europe; it is a giant in Rotter- dam, although in New York it would be but a baby. It is perfectly plumb, notwith- standing 900 trees were driven down into the sand to make its foundation. The av- erage building of Rotterdam is of from three to five stories, and many bulld\\‘:s lean this way and that so that parts of th® city are apparently drunk. The American house has electric elevators worked by little Dutch boys dressed in white smocks. It was by them that I went from story to story calling on some of our largest American agents. I find that the meat men here are selling vast quanutiiies of our meat and lard not only to Holland, but to all the countries along the Khine, and that the American Cereal company {is pushing its goods into this part of Europe. 1t has its offices in the American building, and its advertisements are everywhere, In- deed, the Americans are far better adver- tisers than the Europeans and you sece “Kwaker Oats,” American typewriters, ko- daks and California fruits everywhere. I find a great many American sewing ma- chines used in Holland. They are scattered over the continent, and are considered far superior to any made in Europe. One ur two of our firms are pushing their foreign busi- Dess more than any other, and especially the Singer company, which has its adver- tisements everywhere and branch houses in all the cities of England and the conti- nent. In fact, I found a store here on the Hoogstraat—the Broadway of Rotterdain— which had photographs of some o the sew- ing schools of Holland, in which the little Dutch girls are working away on American machines. One of these plctures Is of a school at Alkmaar, one of the oldest towus of Holland. Not far from this shop are hardware stores, with a great variety of American goods, including Philadelphia lawn mow- e€rs and Michigan pitchforks, and in the music store, just over the way, I saw win dows fllled with the marches of Sousa printed with the American flag on the cover. They are made by a Rotterdam firm and sell in sets at 40 cents a copy. The American shoe does not seem to be walking into Holland as rapidly as could be desired. The climate is so wet that thicker soles than ours are needed. Never- theless, it is no worse than England, ang our shoes will sell it properly push There is oue store in Rotterdam with a big sign above it advertising American foot- wear, and another store, which was in- tended for selling American shoes, is vacant. The Dutch merchant opened his place on contracts which he had with Americans, leasing one of the best places and planning to make our shoes a specialty His goods, owing to the carelessness of the American exporters, faileda to come on time, and the result was that he compromised his lease and gave up the business. Indeed, the Americans have a bad reputa- tion in Europe as exporters and traders We make the best goods, but we don’'t know how to sell them. Such trade as we have is because our goods are so good, and not because of our business ability in selling or care in filling orders. Take for instance an order which a sta- tionery dealer here sent to New York and had filled at a loss. The man his a shop right next to the Witte Huis, and 1 dropped (Continued on Seventh Page.)