The Twentieth Century American / Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great Anglo-Saxon Nations

by Harry Perry Robinson

Then the manufacturer called for his manager.

"Mr. Smith," he said, as the manager came in, "this is Mr. Brown of Tokio, Japan. He tells me that if we do up tacks in two third of an ounce lots and stick that label on each package, we might do some good business out there. That label—it don't matter which is the top of the thing—calls for a price that figures out to us at about two cents a pound more than our regular export rates. I want this gentleman to have a trial lot shipped out to him and he'll see what he can do. Just go ahead will you and see to it?"

"Yes, sir," said the manager; and when the trader sailed from San Francisco a couple of weeks later the same vessel carried out a trial order of tacks consigned to him at Tokio, made up in two thirds of an ounce packages with mysterious hieroglyphics on the labels. It only took the trader a few days, after his return, to satisfy himself that the sooner he cabled the American manufacturer to duplicate the order the better. There never has been anybody in the American works who has been able to read what is on that label; but when instructions were given for printing new labels after six months of trial the order was for a quarter of a million, and British manufacturers were astonished to discover that by some unexplainable chicanery they had lost the Japanese market for tacks.

I have said that I do not know whether the story is true or not; but fifty similar stories are. And in the aggregate they explain a good deal.

But let me say again that the conservatism of British manufacturers is not now my theme. But I do most earnestly believe that Englishmen as a whole—even English traders and manufacturers—unwisely underestimate the commercial power of the United States. What the United States has accomplished in the invasion of the world's markets in the last ten years (since the trade revival of 1896-97) is only a foretaste of what is to come. So far from there being anything unsubstantial—any danger of lack of staying power, any want of reserve force—the power has hardly yet begun to exert itself. Of Europeans who have recently written upon the subject, it seems to me that none has shown a truer appreciation of the situation than M. Gabriel Hanotaux, the former French Minister for Foreign Affairs.[378:1] He sees the shadow of America's commercial domination already falling across Europe; and, so far as France is concerned, he discerns only two directions from which help can come. He pleads with young Frenchmen to travel more, so that the rising generation may be less ignorant of the commercial conditions of the modern world and may see more clearly what it is that they have to fight, and, second, he points to the Colonial Empire of France, with an area not much inferior to that of the United States, and believes that therein may be laid the foundations of a commercial power which will be not unable to cope even with that of America.

It may be only the arrogance and superciliousness of the Anglo-Saxon that prevent one sharing the sanguineness of M. Hanotaux as to any relief coming to the help of France from these two sources, for British hopes can only lie in analogous directions. Englishmen also need to understand better the conditions which have to be met and the power of their competitors; and it is the young men who must learn. Also, if it be impossible that the British Isles should hold their own against the United States, there appears no reason why the British Empire should not be abundantly able to do so.

It is not easy for one who has not lived all his life in England to share the satisfaction with which the English papers commonly welcome the intelligence that some great American manufacturing concern is establishing branch works in Canada. It is well for Canada that such works should be established; but it is pitiable for the Empire that it should be left to the United States to establish them. British capital was the chief instrumentality with which the United States was enabled to build its own railways and conduct the other great enterprises for the development of the resources of its mighty West, and it is, from the point of view of a British Imperialist, deplorable that British capitalists should not now be ready to take those risks for the sake of the Empire which American capital is willing to take with no other incentive than the probable trade profits.

His conservatism, it should be noticed, has a tendency to fall away from the Englishman when he goes out from the environment and atmosphere of the British Isles. The Canadian, or the Englishman who has gone to Canada young enough to imbibe the colonial spirit, is not easily to be distinguished from the citizen of the United States in his ways of doing business. Even the Anglo-Indian refuses to subject himself, in India, to all the cumbersome formalities with which he is compelled to conduct any business transaction when at home. Mr. Kipling in one of his latest stories has given us a delightful picture of the bafflement of the Australasian Minister struggling to bring his Great Idea for the Good of his Colony and the Empire to the attention of the officials in Whitehall.

The encumbering conservatism which now hangs upon the wheels of British commerce is no part of—no legitimate offshoot of—the English genius. It is a fungoid and quite alien growth, which has fastened upon that genius, taking advantage of its frailties. Englishmen, we hear, are slow to change and to move; yet they have always moved more quickly than other European peoples as the Empire stands to prove. And if the people of Great Britain had the remodelling of their society to do over again to-day, they, following their native instincts, would hardly rebuild it on its present lines. With the same "elbow room" they would, it may be suspected, produce something but little dissimilar (except in the monarchical form of government) from that which has been evolved in the United States.