CHAPTER XIV
A Contrast in Principles
The Commercial Power of the United States—British Workmanship—Tin-tacks and Conservatism—A Prophetic Frenchman—Imperialism in Trade—The Anglo-Saxon Spirit—About Chaperons—"Insist upon Thyself"—English and American Banks—Dealing in Futures—Dog Eat Dog—Two Letters—Commercial Octopods—Trusts in America and England—The Standard Oil Company—And Solicitors—Legal Chaperons—The Sanctity of Stamped Paper—Conclusions—American Courts of Justice—Do "Honest" Traders Exist?
The Englishman, even the Englishman with industrial experience and commercial training, generally, when he makes a short visit to the United States, comes away with a certain distrust of the stability of the American commercial fabric—a distrust which he cannot altogether explain to himself. The rapidity of movement, the vastness of the results, these things are before his eyes; but there insists on obtruding itself a sense of unsubstantiality. Habituated to English surroundings, with their ages-old traditions, the rugged deep-rooted institutions, the deliberate revolutions of all the fly-wheels of a long-constituted society, he cannot believe that the mushroom establishments, thrust up as it were from the soil of a continent which is yet one half but partially broken wilderness, have permanence. He cannot deny the magnitude or the excellence of the work that is being done now, at this moment, under his eyes; but it all has too much the seeming of unreality, as though suspended in midair, unsupported. He misses the foundations of centuries of civilisation below and the lines of shafting running back into the past. Often, it is to be feared, having all his life been accustomed to see power exerted only in cumbersome processes and through old-fashioned channels, he has come to regard the cumbersomeness and the antiquity as necessary conditions of such exertion—nay, even to confuse them with the sources of the power themselves. It will be remembered that the first pig that was roasted in China was roasted by the accidental burning down of a house; and for a long time the Chinese supposed that only by burning down a house was it possible to come at roast pig. Finally arose a great philosopher ("like our Locke") who discovered that it was not necessary to burn houses, but that pigs might be cooked by much less costly and more rapid methods. Unquestionably many of those who had been accustomed to house-burning must have looked at the new and summary culinary processes with profound distrust. It may even be asserted with confidence that many of the older generation died unconverted, though pig-roasting over all sorts of makeshift fires had been going on around them for some years.
After a more or less prolonged residence in the United States, the Englishman finds his distrust lessening. He in turn becomes accustomed to doing without those traditions, those foundations, those lines of shafting, which once he considered so essential to all sound workmanship. When in due time he returns to England he is not seldom amazed to see how many of the things which he was wont to regard as effective links in the machinery are really no more than waste parts which do but retard the motion and cause loss of power. It is not difficult to make machinery so complicated that the power exhausts itself in overcoming the resistance of belts and pulleys and cogs.
I had lived in the United States for many years before I ceased to cling to the notion—which I never hesitated to impart cheerfully to Americans when occasion offered—that though American workmen turned out goods that served their purpose well enough, for really sound and honest workmanship you had, after all, to come to England. It was only after I had been back in England and had experience of the ways of English workmen once more that doubts began to accumulate. English furniture makers told me that England nowadays did not produce such well-made or solid furniture as pieces that I showed them from America, and which are made in America in wholesale quantities. English picture-frame makers marvelled at the costliness of material and the excellence of the work in American frames. A Sackville Street tailor begged me to leave in his hands for a few days longer some clothes which he was pressing for me, made in a far Western State, in order that he might keep them—where they then were—hanging in his work-room as an object-lesson to his men in how work ought to be done. These are but isolated instances out of many which have bred misgiving in one who for many years cherished the conviction that a British-made article was always the best. That English workmen should be slower, less quick-minded, more loth to take up new ideas, or to make things as you wanted them and not as they had always made them—these things I had expected to find, and found less often than I had expected. But that the English workman did ultimately produce a better and more trustworthy article—that I never doubted, till I found it, from the confessions of the workmen and manufacturers themselves, far from necessarily true.
Few Englishmen returning to England after many years of residence in the United States (unless perchance they have lived on a ranch where their contact with the industrial or commercial life of the people has been slight) do not find themselves more or less frequently appealed to for opinions, in giving which they are compelled, however reluctantly, to pose as prophets, warning their countrymen to flee from the wrath to come, telling them that they underestimate the commercial power of the United States. Sometimes it may be that there will be some one in the company who has spent some few weeks, perhaps, in the United States. "Now, I don't agree with you there," this traveller will say. "When I was in the States, I saw . ." He saw, in fact, pigs being roasted at a commonplace sort of fire, made for the purpose, of logs and sticks and coal and things, whereas everybody knows that no pig can be duly roasted unless chimney stacks and window-casings and front-door handles be mixed up with the combustibles. And the others present take comfort and are convinced that the Old Country is a long way from going to the dogs as yet. Of course she is, bless her! But it is not many years since an eminently distinguished authority on iron and steel (was he not President of the Iron and Steel Association?), after having made a tour of the United States, assured British manufacturers that they had nothing to fear from American competition in the steel trade. It was some years earlier that Chatham declared that he would not allow the American colonies to manufacture even one hobnail for themselves.
I have no desire now to join the band of those who are urging England so insistently to "wake up." This is not the place for such evangelism, for that is not the gospel which this book is intended to spread. None the less one story I must tell, told to me many years ago in America by one who claimed to have had some part in the transactions; a story that has to do with (let us say, to avoid hurting any susceptibilities) the sale of tin-tacks to Japan. And whether the story is true or not, it is at least well found.