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 role 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