After a time, other countries began to use more modern methods, and English watches could no longer stand competition in the world's markets. However, the bulldog quality still held; English manufacturers preferred to lose ground rather than change their methods. The introduction of machinery and the employment of women operatives were each bitterly opposed. Factory production was never adopted on a large scale, nor was there much combination of small independent manufacturers. Necessarily, these things did, at last, come to be done; but half-heartedly, and without much success. At one time, for example, there were some forty small factories making various parts which each watch manufacturer assembled and adjusted for himself. The Clock-makers' Company is still in existence; although now, of course, it has developed into a society like the ordinary modern association of manufacturers. Under pressure of change and competition, English manufacturers were compelled unwillingly to change their system of production, but the character of the watches they would not change. The same country which had made so many of the mechanical inventions finally settled down into satisfaction with its models at a time when other nations were continuing to make improvements, as, for example, when they clung to the fusee after watchmakers abroad had found a better substitute. The English watch has remained heavy, substantial, and reliable; it is an excellent mechanism produced regardless of expense. Such a watch cannot be made cheaply, least of all by British methods. There has been something obstinate in the maker's attitude; if the law of supply and demand called for something different, so much the worse for the law. The English have been slow to see the possibilities in the cheap watch. They have not realized that a watch need not be expensive in order to keep good time. They _started_ to put the watch into universal use, but left to other nations the completion of the process. CHAPTER ELEVEN _What Happened in France and Switzerland_ Across the English Channel lives a race of a very different character. The French are people of highly adaptable minds; often they see possibilities in the inventions of other nations which those other nations have failed themselves to see. The automobile was first made in the United States, but the French soon developed it into something that was better than our early clumsy cars, and we were years in overtaking them. The Wright Brothers first learned the secret of aerial flight, and then Wilbur Wright sailed for France, where the people went wild with enthusiasm over the idea of flying; it was in France that aviation really became what it is to-day.