England don't live to work: we work to live. What is the good of being alive if you have to slave from morning till night as those Yanks do? Look at the price they are paying! They are old men before they are forty. They are all anxious and careworn. They can talk about nothing but money making. We've no city of suicides, as Allegheny is, outside Pittsburg— where the life is sapped out of the workpeople—and, thank God, we have no hustling commercialism as in Chicago. We can do without the rush the Americans think so necessary. We haven't got so many millionaires, but we've got healthy Old England is good enough for us." men. As I have heard something like this from manufacturers in all parts of Great Britain, my recollection has skipped back to what the Spaniard said. The thought has crept into my mind that the Spaniard was a little envious of England's commercial greatness, and yet made himself quite happy by giving a modern turn to the old story of the fox and the grapes. And, honestly, I have not yet convinced myself that the average British manufacturer-in his inclination to suggest that he could do as well as the American if he were disposed, but that he does not simply because he doesn't think it worth while— is not taking up a point of view regarding America the same as the Spaniard took regarding England. It is a happy but dangerous point of view, because it is so plausible, because is produces a placid contentment and a serene, superior smile that the Englishman is not such a fool as the American. At the best, however, it is a little bit of ingenious self-deception. What we British people have first to get rid of in considering industrial America is the Spanish attitude. We have only to look round our own country to admit in our minds, if we hesitate to express it with our lips, that the reason British manufacturers do not commercially go the pace is not because they do not want to, but because they cannot. As the result of my investigation in the United States two things came out most prominently: first, that the British artisan is superior to the American workman; and, secondly, that the American manufacturer, the employer, the director of labor, is infinitely superior to his British prototype. The chief reason America is bounding ahead as an industrial nation |