Fiscal reform alone will, however, never enable Great Britain to compete more vigorously with either the United States or Germany.  The diminished economic vitality of England must be partly traced to her tradition of political and social subserviency, which serves to rob both the ordinary and the exceptional Englishmen of energy and efficiency.  American energy, so far as it is applied to economic tasks, is liberated not merely by the abundance of its opportunities, but by the prevailing idea that every man should make as much of himself as he can; and in obedience to this idea the average American works with all his might towards some special personal goal.  The energy of the average Englishman, on the other hand, is impaired by his complacent acceptance of positions of social inferiority and by his worship of degrading social distinctions; and even successful Englishmen suffer from a similar handicap.  The latter rarely push their business successes home, because they themselves immediately begin to covet a place in the social hierarchy, and to that end are content with a certain established income.  The pleasure which the average Englishman seems to feel in looking up to the “upper classes” is only surpassed by the pleasure which the exceptional Englishman seems to feel in looking down on the “lower classes.”  Englishmen have always congratulated themselves because their nobility was not a caste; but the facts that the younger sons of the peers are commoners, and that a distinguished commoner may earn a peerage, only makes the poison of these arbitrary social discriminations the more deadly.  An Englishman always has a chance of winning an irrelevant but very gratifying social and political privilege.  He may by acceptable services of the ordinary kind become as good as a lord.  Some such ambition is nearly always the end to which the energy of the successful Englishman is directed, and its particular nature hinders him from realizing the special purpose of his own life with an unimpeded will.

The net result of the English system is to infect English social, political, military, and industrial life with social favoritism, and the poison of the infection is only mitigated by the condition that the “favorites” must deserve their selection by the maintenance of a certain standard.  This standard was formed a good many years ago when the conditions of efficiency were not so exacting as they are to-day.  At that time it was a sufficiently high standard and made, on the whole, for successful achievement.  It demanded of the “favorite” that he be honest, patriotic, well-educated, gentlemanly, courageous, and a “good sort,” but it wholly failed to demand high special training, intense application, unremitting energy, or any exclusive devotion to one’s peculiar work.  If an Englishman comes up to the regular standard, he can usually obtain his share of the good things of English life; but if he goes beyond, he falls under the social disqualification