atural
enterprise and natural radicalism. As soon as it prospered and sent its
boys to Oxford it was lost. Our manufacturing class was assimilated in
no time to the conservative classes, whose education has always had a
mandarin quality--very, very little of it, and very cold and choice. In
America you have so far had no real conservative class at all. Fortunate
continent! You cast out your Tories, and you were left with nothing but
Whigs and Radicals. But our peculiar bad luck has been to get a sort of
revolutionary who is a Tory mandarin too. Ruskin and Morris, for
example, were as reactionary and anti-scientific as the dukes and the
bishops. Machine haters. Science haters. Rule of Thumbites to the bone.
So are our current Socialists. They've filled this country with the idea
that the ideal automobile ought to be made entirely by the hand labour
of traditional craftsmen, quite individually, out of beaten copper,
wrought iron and seasoned oak. All this electric-starter business and
this electric lighting outfit I have here, is perfectly hateful to the
English mind.... It isn't that we are simply backward in these things,
we are antagonistic. The British mind has never really tolerated
electricity; at least, not that sort of electricity that runs through
wires. Too slippery and glib for it. Associates it with Italians and
fluency generally, with Volta, Galvani, Marconi and so on. The proper
British electricity is that high-grade useless long-sparking stuff you
get by turning round a glass machine; stuff we used to call frictional
electricity. Keep it in Leyden jars.... At Claverings here they still
refuse to have electric bells. There was a row when the Solomonsons, who
were tenants here for a time, tried to put them in...."

Mr. Direck had followed this cascade of remarks with a patient smile and
a slowly nodding head. "What you say," he said, "forms a very marked
contrast indeed with the sort of thing that goes on in America. This
friend of mine I was speaking of, the one who is connected with an
automobile factory in Toledo--"

"Of course," Mr. Britling burst out again, "even conservatism isn't an
ultimate thing. After all, we and your enterprising friend at Toledo,
are very much the same blood. The conservatism, I mean, isn't racial.
And our earlier energy shows it isn't in the air or in the soil. England
has become unenterprising and sluggish because England has been so
prosperous and comfortable...."

"Exactly,