284 JOHN FOSTER FRASER 



England don't live to work: we work to live. What is the 

 good of being alive if you have to slave from morning till night 

 as those Yanks do? Look at the price they are paying ! They 

 are old men before they are forty. They are all anxious and 

 careworn. They can talk about nothing but money making. 

 We've no city of suicides, as Allegheny is, outside Pittsburg — 

 where the life is sapped out of the workpeople — and, thank 

 God, we have no hustling commercialism as in Chicago. We 

 can do without the rush the Americans think so necessary. 

 We haven't got so many millionaires, but we've got healthy 

 men. Old England is good enough for us." 



As I have heard something like this from manufacturers 

 in all parts of Great Britain, my recollection has skipped back 

 to what the Spaniard said. The thought has crept into my 

 mind that the Spaniard was a little envious of England's com- 

 mercial greatness, and yet made himself quite happy by giving 

 a modern turn to the old story of the fox and the grapes. And, 

 honestly, I have not yet convinced myself that the average 

 British manufacturer — in his inclination to suggest that he 

 could do as well as the American if he were disposed, but that 

 he does not simply because he doesn't think it worth while — 

 is not taking up a point of view regarding America the same 

 as the Spaniard took regarding England. It is a happy but 

 dangerous point of view, because it is so plausible, because 

 is produces a placid contentment and a serene, superior smile 

 that the Englishman is not such a fool as the American. At 

 the best, however, it is a little bit of ingenious self-deception. 



What we British people have first to get rid of in con- 

 sidering industrial America is the Spanish attitude. We have 

 only to look round our own country to admit in our minds, if 

 we hesitate to express it with our lips, that the reason British 

 manufacturers do not commercially go the pace is not because 

 they do not want to, but because they cannot. 



As the result of my investigation in the United States two 

 things came out most prominently: first, that the British 

 artisan is superior to the American workman; and, secondly, 

 that the American manufacturer, the employer, the director 

 of labor, is infinitely superior to his British prototype. The 

 chief reason America is bounding ahead as an industrial nation 



