Nor is Canada alone in resenting our methods of disposing of agricultural surpluses. Strong complaints have been lodged by Australia and New Zealand (British Commonwealth countries), by Denmark and the Netherlands (partners of ours in NATO), by Mexico and Argentina (partners of ours in the Organization of American States).
Meanwhile the United States, through GATT, is constantly charging certain foreign countries with undue delay in reducing the import quotas which they have laid upon imports from the United States because of socalled "balance of payments" difficulties. All member countries are always on the lookout for evasions of the treaty by fellow members. A few months ago, for example, the United States charged Canada with a GATT violation for imposing a 20-percent tax on advertising revenues of international magazines. Only in GATT can all these charges and countercharges be subjected to the climate of friendly negotiation among 37 national defenders of the world's freedom.
To improve the efficiency of GATT, the President has proposed that Congress authorize U.S. membership in the newly negotiated Organization for Trade Cooperation, designed to administer GATT's affairs in between GATT's annual sessions. Some Congressmen maintain that our membership in OTC would put total control of U.S. tariff duties and import quotas into the hands of a "foreign body." But the U.S. Council of the International Chamber of Commerce, our most diligent student of international commercial affairs, has said: "Neither GATT nor the Organization for Trade C000peration can compel the United States to raise or lower any tariff duty or import quota. GATT operates—and the OTC will operate—only through argument and persuasion." We come, then, to the ultimate problem: Can the countries of the free world, through argument and persuasion, produce results internationally achieved by the dictatorial decrees of Communist governments? Every year the Communist governments are increasing their international trade, largely through concerted action. We shall do ourselves no good by calling these countries "slave states." Sir David Eccles, British statesman and president of the British Board of Trade, writing in the U.S.
magazine Freedom and Union, contemplates the possibility of a Communist world victory in the economic field and says: "Then efficient slavery will have defeated inefficient freedom." Freedom can no longer afford to be inefficient. Let us of the free world highly resolve that our freedom shall issue into international effectiveness. Sir David gives us this rallying cry: "The day will be ours only if we organize for victory."