ircles immediately connected
with New York. Most Western papers found it necessary to explain to
their readers (if they could) who the Mr. Morgan was at whose house the
meeting was being held.

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. F