erican; they have not quite the same sense of
conversational give and take, and at first they are apt to reduce their
visitors to the role of auditors wondering when their turn will begin.
Their turn never does begin. Mr. Direck sat deeply in his slanting seat
with a half face to his celebrated host and said "Yep" and "Sure" and
"That _is_ so," in the dry grave tones that he believed an Englishman
would naturally expect him to use, realising this only very gradually.

Mr. Britling, from his praise of the enterprise that had at last brought
a car he could drive within his reach, went on to that favourite topic
of all intelligent Englishmen, the adverse criticism of things British.
He pointed out that the central position of the brake and gear levers in
his automobile made it extremely easy for the American manufacturer to
turn it out either as a left-handed or a right-handed car, and so adapt
it either to the Continental or to the British rule of the road. No
English cars were so adaptable. We British suffered much from our
insular rule of the road, just as we suffered much from our insular
weights and measures. But we took a perverse pride in such
disadvantages. The irruption of American cars into England was a recent
phenomenon, it was another triumph for the tremendous organising ability
of the American mind. They were doing with the automobile what they had
done with clocks and watches and rifles, they had standardised and
machined wholesale, while the British were still making the things one
by one. It was an extraordinary thing that England, which was the
originator of the industrial system and the original developer of the
division of labour, should have so fallen away from systematic
manufacturing. He believed this was largely due to the influence of
Oxford and the Established Church....

At this point Mr. Direck was moved by an anecdote. "It will help to
illustrate what you are saying, Mr. Britling, about systematic
organisation if I tell you a little incident that happened to a friend
of mine in Toledo, where they are setting up a big plant with a view to
capturing the entire American and European market in the class of the
thousand-dollar car--"

"There's no end of such little incidents," said Mr. Britling, cutting in
without apparent effort. "You see, we get it on both sides. Our
manufacturer class was, of course, originally an insurgent class. It was
a class of distended craftsmen. It had the craftsman's n