The Commercial Power of the United States--British Workmanship-- Tin-tacks and Conservatism--A Prophetic Frenchman--Imperialism in Trade--The Anglo-Saxon Spirit--About Chaperons--"Insist upon Thyself"--English and American Banks--Dealing in Futures-- Dog Eat Dog--Two Letters--Commercial Octopods--Trusts in America and England--The Standard Oil Company--And Solicitors-- Legal Chaperons--The Sanctity of Stamped Paper--Conclusions-- American Courts of Justice--Do "Honest" Traders Exist? The Englishman, even the Englishman with industrial experience and commercial training, generally, when he makes a short visit to the United States, comes away with a certain distrust of the stability of the American commercial fabric--a distrust which he cannot altogether explain to himself. The rapidity of movement, the vastness of the results, these things are before his eyes; but there insists on obtruding itself a sense of unsubstantiality. Habituated to English surroundings, with their ages-old traditions, the rugged deep-rooted institutions, the deliberate revolutions of all the fly-wheels of a long-constituted society, he cannot believe that the mushroom establishments, thrust up as it were from the soil of a continent which is yet one half but partially broken wilderness, have permanence. He cannot deny the magnitude or the excellence of the work that is being done now, at this moment, under his eyes; but it all has too much the seeming of unreality, as though suspended in midair, unsupported. He misses the foundations of centuries of civilisation below and the lines of shafting running back into the past. Often, it is to be feared, having all his life been accustomed to see power exerted only in cumbersome processes and through old-fashioned channels, he has come to regard the cumbersomeness and the antiquity as necessary conditions of such exertion--nay, even to confuse them with the sources of the power themselves. It will be remembered that the first pig that was roasted in China was roasted by the accidental burning down of a house; and for a long time the Chinese supposed that only by burning down a house was it possible to come at roast pig. Finally arose a great philosopher ("like our Locke") who discovered that it was not necessary to burn houses, but that pigs might be cooked by much less costly and more rapid methods. Unquestionably many of those who had been accustomed to house-burning must have looked at the new and summary culinary processes with profound distrust. It may even be asserted with confidence that many of the older generation died unconverted, though pig-roasting over all sorts of makeshift fires had been going on around them for some years.