is not excellence of workmanship, but ability in administration, in control, in being adaptable to the necessities of the day. We in England must go back thirty or sixty years to find the origin of most of the huge manufacturing concerns in Great Britain. They began in small, insignificant ways, and they climbed to eminence in far less than a generation. Their founders were, in the main, superior artisans; long-sighted, industrious men, having little concern for anything outside their own trade; concentrating all their physical and mental energies; tumbling back, year after year, all their earnings into the business, and so rearing firms famed the world over not only for capacity but for the excellence of work. Those men sprang from a robust, unpampered, common people. Their grammar might have been shaky, but they knew everything about every department of their works. They had rather a contempt for the tinsel life of society. They gave body and soul to business. Such men, builders-up of Great Britain's industrial greatness, belong to a past generation. Their works are now under the control of their sons or their grandsons, excellent men, but lacking the grit of the man whose portrait, in oils, hangs in the main office. It is not in any reason to be expected they should have that grit. They have lacked the essential that spurred the founder of the business to success-necessity. They were born into success. They have spent several years following academic courses at a university; they have developed cultured tastes; their range of interests has been widened; the calls of public life have induced them to give a portion of their time to educational, philanthropic, municipal, or political affairs; the demands of society have not infrequently led them to sporting with time in a way which must make "the old gentleman" whose portrait is in the office positively spin in his grave with wrath. They are charming men, the heads of Great Britain's industrial concerns; they play golf and they entertain well. But they would never have been as wealthy as they are if it hadn't been for their fathers or grandfathers. They are touched with the inertia consequent on riches. The reputation of their firms has been so high for a |