All through the motor business in England I found a strong disposition on the part of the British manufacturer and dealer to create a market for his own car as soon as the war is over.  Some even talked of a large output of low-priced machines to meet the competition of the familiar car that put the automobile joke on the map.  The only American comeback to this growing prejudice is to build factories or assembling plants within the British Isles.  This will save excessive freight rates, keep down the costly-tariff “overhead,” and get the benefit of all the goodwill accruing from the employment of British labour.

A by-product of British exclusion is the inauguration of a Made-in-England campaign.  Buy a hat in Regent Street or Oxford Street and you see stamped on the inside band the words, “British Manufacture.”  This English crusade is more likely to succeed than our Made-in-U.S.A. attempt, for the simple reason that the government is squarely behind it.

This same spirit dominates newspaper publicity.  You find a British fountain pen glowingly proclaimed in a big display advertisement, illustrated with the picture of men trundling boxes of gold down to a waiting steamer.  Alongside are these words: 

“The man who buys a foreign-made fountain pen is paying away gold, even if the money he hands across the counter is a Treasury note.  The British shop may get the paper; the foreign manufacturer gets gold for all the pens he sends over here.  What is the sense of carrying an empty sovereign-purse in one pocket if you put a foreign-made fountain pen in another?”

Behind all this British exclusion is an old prejudice against our wares.  There has never been any secret about it.  I found a large body of opinion headed by brilliant men who have bidden farewell to the Hands-Across-the-Sea sentiment; who have little faith in the theory that blood is thicker than water when it comes to a keen commercial clash.

What of the human element behind the whole British awakening?  Will organised labour, an ancient sore on the British body, rise up and complicate these well-laid schemes for economic expansion?  As with the question of practicability of the Paris Pact, there is a wide difference of opinion.

On one hand, you find the air full of the menace of post-war unemployment and the problem of replacing the woman worker by the man who went away to fight.  To offset this, however, there will be the undoubted scarcity of male help due to battle or disease, and the inevitable emigration of the soldier, desirous of a free and open life, to the Colonies.

On the other hand, there is the conviction that unrestricted output, having registered its golden returns, will be the rule, not the exception, among the English artisans.  England’s frenzied desire for economic authority proclaims a job for everybody.

I asked a member of the British Cabinet, a man perhaps better qualified than any other in England to speak on this subject, to sum up the whole after-war labour situation, as he saw it, and his epigrammatic reply was: