The industrial working class is the most numerous and politically important in Britain. It is also the least informed about the United States. Scholarships for Oxford and Cambridge students at Harvard or Princeton and visiting professorships for English dons do not, as a rule, help this class. The ideal would be an exchange system under which hundreds of working-class men and women from Bradford, Manchester, Liverpool, and the back streets of London were given the opportunity to see America plain. The English Speaking Union in the United States and the United Kingdom is attempting to bring this about. Only through such contact, I believe, could the picture of the United States built up by some Labor Party politicians be erased. There remains a dangerous lack of understanding not only of our political system but of what mass production and greater productivity in the United States have done for the average workingman here. Newspaper articles, television series, books help, but it is a thing that must be felt as well as seen. It can be felt only in the United States. The attention paid to differences and difficulties should not obscure the value that Britons place on their relationship with Americans. Materially, Britain's interest in maintaining the relationship is much the greater; undoubtedly they need us more than we need them. But here we must remember the national character of Britain. The British have been an independent people for a thousand years. Even when the fortunes of the nation have been at their lowest ebb, the people have been outspoken in defense of what they considered their rights. The earliest Continentals who traveled to England lamented the blunt independence of the yeomen and the absence of subservience among the noisy city crowds. Some sociologists have concluded that all this has changed and that the industrial revolution and other social changes have transformed the British from the rowdiest and most belligerent of nations into law-abiding conformists. The national boiling-point, they report, is high. Certainly a superficial view of the British working class in its high noon of full employment, security, high wages, and new housing would seem to confirm this conclusion. Personally, I doubt that the turbulent passions which sent Britons out to singe the beard of the King of Spain and to make rude noises when Hitler proposed peace in 1940 are spent.