e of conveniences, but no real
necessities. Why is it that America has been prolific in novel devices
and clever improvements in this department of manufacture as in so
many others, while England has gone on stolidly copying ancient forms,
changing only to cheapen by the introduction of poor material and sham
construction? Mr. Smith mentions several reasons that English
manufacturers have given him for the state of things he, as an
Englishman, so greatly deplores; but evidently he is not satisfied
with any of them, and very justly; for none of them touches the real
cause--the radically different attitude of the public mind toward
inventions, characteristic of the two countries.

In England the user of household inconveniences accepts them as
matters of fact; or if he grumbles at them he never thinks of trying
to change them. It is not his business; and if he should devise an
improvement, ten to one he could not get it made. To patent it is
practically out of the question, for if it were not condemned off-hand
as trivial, the patent fees would make it cost more than it was likely
to be worth. The mechanic who makes such things is trained to work to
pattern, and not waste his time on experiments. Besides, if he should
make a clever invention he would not be able to raise the necessary
fees for a patent, or to get any one to help him thereto. The
manufacturer "makes what his customers call for." Why should he spend
his money and spoil his plant to introduce improvements? So things go,
until some pestilent Yankees flood the markets with better articles at
a lower price; and British consumers suddenly discover that they want
something that the native manufacturer cannot make. The need was
there; but invention did not follow. How happened it that the American
manufacturer did not pursue the same uninventive course? What produced
the radically different attitude of the American mind toward
newfangled notions out of which inventions proceeded and flourished?

No doubt several causes have been at work: freedom of thought and
action; popular education; a blending of races; and the tide of
adventurous spirits naturally resorting to a new and free land. These
have had their influence undoubtedly; but all these have existed, more
or less completely, in other new lands, without that outburst of
creative energy which has made America the nursery of inventions,
great and small. The determining cause, the one condition that
prevailed