CAUSES OF MANUFACTURERS' SUCCESS 285 



is not excellence of workmanship, but ability in administra- 

 tion, in control, in being adaptable to the necessities of the 

 day. 



We in England must go back thirty or sixty years to find 

 the origin of most of the huge manufacturing concerns in Great 

 Britain. They began in small, insignificant ways, and they 

 climbed to eminence in far less than a generation. Their 

 founders were, in the main, superior artisans; long-sighted, 

 industrious men, having little concern for anything outside 

 their own trade; concentrating all their physical and mental 

 energies; tumbling back, year after year, all their earnings 

 into the business, and so rearing firms famed the world over 

 not only for capacity but for the excellence of work. Those 

 men sprang from a robust, unpampered, common people. 

 Their grammar might have been shak} r , but they knew every- 

 thing about every department of their works. They had 

 rather a contempt for the tinsel life of society. They gave 

 body and soul to business. 



Such men, builders-up of Great Britain's industrial great- 

 ness, belong to a past generation. Their works are now under 

 the control of their sons or their grandsons, excellent men, 

 but lacking the grit of the man whose portrait, in oils, hangs 

 in the main office. It is not in any reason to be expected they 

 should have that grit. They have lacked the essential that 

 spurred the founder of the business to success — necessity. 

 They were born into success. They have spent several years 

 following academic courses at a university; they have devel- 

 oped cultured tastes; their range of interests has been wid- 

 ened ; the calls of public life have induced them to give a por- 

 tion of their time to educational, philanthropic, municipal, or 

 political affairs ; the demands of society have not infrequently 

 led them to sporting with time in a way which must make 

 "the old gentleman" whose portrait is in the office positively 

 spin in his grave with wrath. They are charming men, the 

 heads of Great Britain's industrial concerns; they play golf 

 and they entertain well. But they would never have been as 

 wealthy as they are if it hadn't been for their fathers or grand- 

 fathers. They are touched with the inertia consequent on 

 riches. The reputation of their firms has been so high for a 



