"
This English crusade is more likely to succeed than our Made-in-U.S.A.
attempt, for the simple reason that the government is squarely behind
it.
This same spirit dominates newspaper publicity. You find a British
fountain pen glowingly proclaimed in a big display advertisement,
illustrated with the picture of men trundling boxes of gold down to a
waiting steamer. Alongside are these words:
"The man who buys a foreign-made fountain pen is paying away gold, even
if the money he hands across the counter is a Treasury note. The British
shop may get the paper; the foreign manufacturer gets gold for all the
pens he sends over here. What is the sense of carrying an empty
sovereign-purse in one pocket if you put a foreign-made fountain pen in
another?"
Behind all this British exclusion is an old prejudice against our wares.
There has never been any secret about it. I found a large body of
opinion headed by brilliant men who have bidden farewell to the
Hands-Across-the-Sea sentiment; who have little faith in the theory that
blood is thicker than water when it comes to a keen commercial clash.
What of the human element behind the whole British awakening? Will
organised labour, an ancient sore on the British body, rise up and
complicate these well-laid schemes for economic expansion? As with the
question of practicability of the Paris Pact, there is a wide difference
of opinion.
On one hand, you find the air full of the menace of post-war
unemployment and the problem of replacing the woman worker by the man
who went away to fight.
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