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