And then it was lunch-time for about a couple of thousand employees, and in the boundless restaurant I witnessed the working of the devices which enabled these legions to choose their meals, and pay for them (cost price) in a few moments, and without advanced mathematical calculations.  The young head of the restaurant showed me, with pride, a menu of over a hundred dishes—­Austrian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Scotch, French, and American; at prices from one cent up as high as ten cents (prime roast-beef)—­and at the foot of the menu was his personal appeal:  “I desire to extend to you a cordial invitation to inspect,” etc. “My constant aim will be,” etc.  Yet it was not his restaurant.  It was the firm’s restaurant.  Here I had a curious illustration of an admirable characteristic of American business methods that was always striking me—­namely, the real delegation of responsibility.  An American board of direction will put a man in charge of a department, as a viceroy over a province, saying, as it were:  “This is yours.  Do as you please with it.  We will watch the results.”  A marked contrast this with the centralizing of authority which seems to be ever proceeding in Europe, and which breeds in all classes at all ages—­especially in France—­a morbid fear and horror of accepting responsibility.

[Illustration:  LUNCHEON IN A DOWN-TOWN CLUB]

Later, I was on the ground level, in the midst of an enormous apparent confusion—­the target for all the packages and baskets, big and little, that shot every instant in a continuous stream from those spiral planes, and slid dangerously at me along the floors.  Here were the packers.  I saw a packer deal with a collected order, and in this order were a number of tiny cookery utensils, a four-cent curling-iron, a brush, and two incredibly ugly pink china mugs, inscribed in cheap gilt respectively with the words “Father” and “Mother.”  Throughout my stay in America no moment came to me more dramatically than this moment, and none has remained more vividly in my mind.  All the daily domestic life of the small communities in the wilds of the West and the Middle West, and in the wilds of the back streets of the great towns, seemed to be revealed to me by the contents of that basket, as the packer wrapped up and protected one article after another.  I had been compelled to abandon a visitation of the West and of the small communities everywhere, and I was sorry.  But here in a microcosm I thought I saw the simple reality of the backbone of all America, a symbol of the millions of the little plain people, who ultimately make possible the glory of the world-renowned streets and institutions in dazzling cities.