Mr. Britling Sees It Through | Page 6

not even let me choose my
roads. I should have got myself a car long ago, and driven it, if it wasn't
for that infernal business with a handle one had to do when the engine
stopped. But here, you see, is a reasonably cheap car with an electric
starter--American, I need scarcely say. And here I am--going at my
own pace."
Mr. Direck glanced for a moment at the pretty disorder of the hedge in
which they were embedded, and smiled and admitted that it was

certainly much more agreeable.
Before he had finished saying as much Mr. Britling was talking again.
He had a quick and rather jerky way of speaking; he seemed to fire out
a thought directly it came into his mind, and he seemed to have a
loaded magazine of thoughts in his head. He spoke almost exactly
twice as fast as Mr. Direck, clipping his words much more, using much
compacter sentences, and generally cutting his corners, and this put Mr.
Direck off his game.
That rapid attack while the transatlantic interlocutor is deploying is
indeed a not infrequent defect of conversations between Englishmen
and Americans. It is a source of many misunderstandings. The two
conceptions of conversation differ fundamentally. The English are
much less disposed to listen than the American; they have not quite the
same sense of conversational give and take, and at first they are apt to
reduce their visitors to the rôle of auditors wondering when their turn
will begin. Their turn never does begin. Mr. Direck sat deeply in his
slanting seat with a half face to his celebrated host and said "Yep" and
"Sure" and "That is so," in the dry grave tones that he believed an
Englishman would naturally expect him to use, realising this only very
gradually.
Mr. Britling, from his praise of the enterprise that had at last brought a
car he could drive within his reach, went on to that favourite topic of all
intelligent Englishmen, the adverse criticism of things British. He
pointed out that the central position of the brake and gear levers in his
automobile made it extremely easy for the American manufacturer to
turn it out either as a left-handed or a right-handed car, and so adapt it
either to the Continental or to the British rule of the road. No English
cars were so adaptable. We British suffered much from our insular rule
of the road, just as we suffered much from our insular weights and
measures. But we took a perverse pride in such disadvantages. The
irruption of American cars into England was a recent phenomenon, it
was another triumph for the tremendous organising ability of the
American mind. They were doing with the automobile what they had
done with clocks and watches and rifles, they had standardised and

machined wholesale, while the British were still making the things one
by one. It was an extraordinary thing that England, which was the
originator of the industrial system and the original developer of the
division of labour, should have so fallen away from systematic
manufacturing. He believed this was largely due to the influence of
Oxford and the Established Church....
At this point Mr. Direck was moved by an anecdote. "It will help to
illustrate what you are saying, Mr. Britling, about systematic
organisation if I tell you a little incident that happened to a friend of
mine in Toledo, where they are setting up a big plant with a view to
capturing the entire American and European market in the class of the
thousand-dollar car--"
"There's no end of such little incidents," said Mr. Britling, cutting in
without apparent effort. "You see, we get it on both sides. Our
manufacturer class was, of course, originally an insurgent class. It was
a class of distended craftsmen. It had the craftsman's natural enterprise
and natural radicalism. As soon as it prospered and sent its boys to
Oxford it was lost. Our manufacturing class was assimilated in no time
to the conservative classes, whose education has always had a mandarin
quality--very, very little of it, and very cold and choice. In America you
have so far had no real conservative class at all. Fortunate continent!
You cast out your Tories, and you were left with nothing but Whigs
and Radicals. But our peculiar bad luck has been to get a sort of
revolutionary who is a Tory mandarin too. Ruskin and Morris, for
example, were as reactionary and anti-scientific as the dukes and the
bishops. Machine haters. Science haters. Rule of Thumbites to the bone.
So are our current Socialists. They've filled this country with the idea
that the ideal automobile ought to be made entirely by the hand labour
of traditional craftsmen, quite individually, out of beaten copper,
wrought iron and seasoned