inally 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.