Yankee and European manufactures.
One of the gratifying results of this war will be, we trust, getting rid of Yankee manufactures, and supplying their places as much as possible with our own and with
European fabrics, to make up the deficit of our own industry in supplying our wants.
Independently of the feelings of eternal hatred for the
Yankee engendered by this war, there are considerations which would make this change of the source of our supplies most agreeable to our people.
The Yankee is a great swindler — a great deceiver.
He introduced fraud into his manufactures to the full extent of the gullibility of those who purchased them.
He was a close calculator, and just went in all cases as far as he could in trick and fraud!
He employed arts and devices which no manufacturers of any nation ever dreamed of employing:--not that people in other countries were less ingenious or shrewd, but that they were more scrupulous.
In the world of manufacturing it had not been deemed honest or safe to resort to such arts to deceive purchasers and increase profits.
Examine all the fabrics of Yankee industry and invention, and those practices which hide defects and impose cheats upon the world are multifarious and ever apparent.
The
French and the
English and the Germans are more honest.
They are older workers, and their vocations being directed by longer-established usages and laws, there is an order and system in all departments of manufactures that shuts out the suggestions of fraud and the arts of swindling.
You know what you buy when you make purchases from them.
You are sure that the articles will not fall to pieces before you get home, or be soon abandoned as useless after you have tried them.
The
Englishman makes his goods and wares especially in a substantial and reliable manner.
The
Frenchman will make in some branches a more elegant and a lighter fabric, but one that combines strength with lightness.
In one of
Scott's novels there is a trial of prowess between Richard of the
Lion Heart and
Saladin.
The former with his battle-axe breaks in pieces a large iron bar. The latter, with his scimitar, severs at a stroke a feather pillow!
The comparison illustrates to some degree the difference between the
French and
English handiwork, at least in some of their departments — the one distinguished for strength, solidity, and massiveness, the other for lightness, elegance, and that sort of force and strength introduced into them by art and skill.
Nor do we mean to say that the
British fabrics are wanting in taste and polish.
Their
Sheffield wares, cutlery, and cloths, show these in the highest degree.
John Bull is, nevertheless, a stout, solid man, and the Frenchman is of lighter frame, more elastic, and of a more active and polished social demeanor.
They are both first- rate in their way, and if they would only recognize us, and thus help, to some extent, to end this war, we should be soon a large customer for their manufactures.
If they don't cooperate, however, our favors will be due and given to that one of them who best shows a sense of what is due to us and to national consistency in the matter of recognition.
