That English
workmen should be slower, less quick-minded, more loth to take up new
ideas, or to make things as you wanted them and not as they had always
made them--these things I had expected to find, and found less often
than I had expected. But that the English workman did ultimately produce
a better and more trustworthy article--that I never doubted, till I
found it, from the confessions of the workmen and manufacturers
themselves, far from necessarily true.

Few Englishmen returning to England after many years of residence in the
United States (unless perchance they have lived on a ranch where their
contact with the industrial or commercial life of the people has been
slight) do not find themselves more or less frequently appealed to for
opinions, in giving which they are compelled, however reluctantly, to
pose as prophets, warning their countrymen to flee from the wrath to
come, telling them that they underestimate the commercial power of the
United States. Sometimes it may be that there will be some one in the
company who has spent some few weeks, perhaps, in the United States.
"Now, I don't agree with you there," this traveller will say. "When I
was in the States, I saw . ." He saw, in fact, pigs being roasted at a
commonplace sort of fire, made for the purpose, of logs and sticks and
coal and things, whereas everybody knows that no pig can be duly roasted
unless chimney stacks and window-casings and front-door handles be mixed
up with the combustibles. And the others present take comfort and are
convinced that the Old Country is a long way from going to the dogs as
yet. Of course she is, bless her! But it is not many years since an
eminently distinguished authority on iron and steel (was he not
President of the Iron and Steel Association?), after having made a tour
of the United States, assured British manufacturers that they had
nothing to fear from American competition in the steel trade. It was
some years earlier that Chatham declared that he would not allow the
American colonies to manufacture even one hobnail for themselves.

* * * * *

I have no desire now to join the band of those who are urging England so
insistently to "wake up." This is not the place for such evangelism, for
that is not the gospel which this book is intended to spread. None the
less one story I must tell, told to me many years ago in America by one
who claimed to have had some part in the transactions