Certain outward manifestations of the change which has been wrought, the peoples of Europe have been unable to ignore;—the immense growth in the power of the United States as a nation, her invasion of the markets of the world even in lines wherein, twenty years ago, the internal markets of America herself were at the mercy of British manufacturers, the splendid generosity which individual citizens of the United States are showing in buying wherever they can all that is most beautiful or precious among the treasures of the Old World for the enrichment of their museums and galleries at home—these things the people of Europe cannot help but see. It would be well if they would strive also to understand the development of the moral forces which underlies these things, which alone has made them possible.
What has been the course of events in England in the same period? I have already said that I believe that Englishmen justly earned the reputation of being the most upright of all peoples in their commercial dealings; and for the sake of the context perhaps Americans who have had little opportunity of gauging the opinions of the world will accept it as true. It is probable that the world has seen no finer set of men engaged in commerce than those who laid the foundations of England's commercial greatness; and I imagine that there are more honest men in England to-day than ever there were—more men of what is, it will be noticed, instructively called "old-fashioned" honesty. Yet no one will be quicker than just one of these "old-fashioned" honest men to declare that the standard of commercial morality in England is deteriorating.
The truth is that a vast new trading community has sprung up with new ideas which no longer accepts the old canons or submits to the old authority. The old maxims pass current; there is the same talk of honest goods and honest methods, but under stress of keener competition and the pressure of the more rapid movement of modern life, there is more temptation to allow products to deteriorate, greater difficulty in living always up to the old rigid standards. The words "English made" no longer carry, even to English minds, the old guarantee of excellence.
In no small measure it may be that it is the example and influence of America itself which is working the mischief; which by no means implies that American example and influence must in themselves be bad. American methods, both in the production and sale of goods, might be wholly good, but the attempt to graft them upon established English practice might have nothing but deplorable results. It is not necessarily the fault of the new wine if old bottles fail to hold it. One factory may have the capacity to turn out one thousand of a given article, all of the highest quality and workmanship, per diem. If a factory with one tenth the capacity strains itself to compete and turns out the same number of articles of the same kind in the same time, something will be wrong with the quality of those articles. I am not prepared to say that in any given line English manufacturers are overstraining the capacity of their plants to the sacrifice of the quality of their goods in their effort to keep pace with American rate of production; but I do most earnestly believe that something analogous to it is happening in the commercial field as a whole, and that neither English commercial morality nor the quality of English-made goods has been improved by the necessity of meeting the intense competition of the world-markets to-day, with an industrial organisation which grew up under other and more leisurely conditions.
Postscript.—Not necessarily as a serious contribution to my argument but rather as a gloss on Professor Münsterberg's remark that the American has no talent for lying, I have often wondered how far the Americans reputation for veracity has been injured by their ability as story-tellers. "Story" it must be remembered is used in two senses. The American has the reputation of being the best narrator in the world; and he loves to narrate about his own country—especially the big things in it. In nine cases out of ten, when he is speaking of those big things, he is conscientiously truthful; but not seldom it happens that what may be a mere commonplace to the American seems incredible to the English listener unacquainted with the United States and unable to give the facts as narrated their due proportion in the landscape.
More than a quarter of a century ago, when electric light was still a very new thing to Londoners, an American casually told myself and three or four others that the small town from which he came in the far Northwest of America was lighted entirely by a coronal of electric lights of some prodigious candle-power on the top of a mast, erected in the centre of the town, of a, to us, incredible height. It was, at the time, quite unbelievable; but in less than a year chance took me all the way to that identical little town in the far Northwest, and what the American had said was strictly true—true, I doubt not, to a single candle-power and to a fraction of a foot of mast. And a costly and indifferent method of lighting, for a whole town, it may be remarked, it was.
In an earlier stage of my youth I lost all confidence in an elderly and eminently respectable friend of the family who had travelled much because he once informed me that the Japanese watered their horses out of spoons. Of course I knew that the old gentleman was a liar.
An American travelling in an English railway carriage fell into conversation with the other occupants, who were Englishmen. Among divers pieces of information about things in the United States which he gave them he told (it was at the time when the steel construction of high buildings was still a novelty) of a twenty-storey "sky-scraper" which he passed daily on his way to and from his office on which, to save time, the walls were being put up simultaneously at, perhaps, the second, eighth, and fifteenth floors, working upwards from each point, the intervening floors being in the meanwhile left untouched. He explained that, in the system of steel construction, the walls did not support the building; that being done by the skeleton framework of metal, on which the walls were subsequently hung as a screen. They might, theoretically, be of paper; though as a matter of fact the material used was generally terra-cotta or some fire-proof brick. The American said that it was queer to see a house being built at the eighth storey in midair, as it were, with nothing but the thin steel supports and open sky below.
