=458. Competition in manufactures of high-grade labor.=—More serious, because capable of far greater extension, was the competition which the Englishman had begun to experience from advanced western peoples. This confined itself to no one branch of production, but spread over the whole broad field of manufactures. Americans and Germans had begun to supply not only the British dependencies but England herself with manufactured wares, in increasing measure. Some of the reasons suggested to explain their superiority were as follows: (1) Elementary education had been developed only recently in England, and had been hampered by sectarian questions; the average laborer in Germany and the United States was better equipped for modern methods of manufacture than was the Englishman. (2) It was asserted that trade unions had seriously detracted from the productiveness of English manufactures, by preventing the introduction of improved machinery and by limiting output. (3) Technical education was even more backward than general education; improved processes were introduced earlier and developed further in other countries, for lack of a class of trained manufacturers in England. (4) Finally, and probably the most important point of all, English manufactures appeared to suffer from the very fact that they had been long established. An industry was divided among many independent firms, each clinging resolutely to the plant, the processes and the methods which had won for it success in the past. Foreign countries learned all that the English had to teach, and applied the lessons in a new field in which they could build up great manufacturing units, with fresh machinery adapted to production on a large scale, and with a more flexible and more efficient organization. It was charged that the directing class in England had lost its original energy, and did not realize its serious responsibilities. An English expert who investigated the American cotton industry reported that there was a great difference in the energy, intelligence, and adventurousness of the managing class in the two countries, all to the advantage of the United States.