Each year, more improved methods are being introduced into England. Typewriters have been used for a number of years, and of late years adding machines have made headway. It is more difficult there to introduce new methods, but, once installed, it is difficult to dislodge them for other ones. Some of the wholesale houses have very old methods. In one house in London, an order was copied twenty-nine times from the time it was received until it was finally charged. The concern was over two hundred years old and had never made any effort to improve its methods. It had four boys whose duty it was to hunt orders lost about the warerooms. A system of manifolding was installed, which eliminated so much waste of time in copying and recopying orders that it was difficult to convince the firm that something had not been overlooked. After four weeks they were delighted. An American going abroad is much impressed by the deliberation of Europeans and is inclined to criticise them for it. After a time, they can point out enough Americans who have worn out at forty years of age, and are in Europe seeking health, to convince them that perhaps the Europeans are not wholly wrong. In Germany, the railroads are controlled by the government. When one attempts to introduce short-cut methods, he is confronted by the fact that work is needed to keep busy old soldiers for whom the government has to care. In asking an agent of an American firm dealing in labor-saving devices why he did not use any of the devices, the answer was given that in Germany the young men work three years for nothing; he did not feel the necessity of doing away with any of them. At the end of three years' work in an office, a young man receives a diploma for efficiency, if he has attained it. The government exercises a strict supervision over all commercial concerns, and inspects their books at periodic intervals. Commercial failures are therefore more rare there than at home. Fraudulent schemes are dealt with severely. There are many large firms in Germany, both jobbers and manufacturers, that are striving to be progressive. The Siemens-Halske Electric Co. are just as progressive in their order and billing methods as any American firm in the same line. To show the attention to details given by the Germans—a managing director of one of the large department stores in Berlin, when asked how long he had lived in the United States, said he had never been there. Upon being complimented upon his American accent, he replied that when talking to an American he always used the American accent, slang, intonation, etc., and when talking to an Englishman he changed his accent, etc., to correspond. He had all the American devices in his accounting department which one would find in any department store in the United States, and sent out monthly typewritten bills the same as John Wanamaker, Altman, and others of New York, and the same as all large department stores do in all American cities.