The same spirit is found, as well, in fields other than the industrial. When the American travels he prefers to pay out round sums rather than to haggle over the price of things, even although he pays considerably more thereby than he otherwise would. And nothing makes him more angry than to find that instead of stating a high price at the outset, the person with whom he is dealing ekes out his profit by small additional charges. This large point of view involves such a contempt of petty detail as to astonish Europeans. Machines costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, which were new yesterday, are discarded to-day, because some improvement has been discovered; and the best is everywhere found none too good to be used in this magnificent industrial system. If the outlay is to correspond to the result, there must be no parsimony.
A similar trait is revealed in the way in which every man behaves toward his neighbour. It is only the petty man who is envious, and envy is a word which is not found in the American vocabulary. If one’s own advantage is not the goal, but general economic progress, then the success of another man is almost as great a pleasure as one’s own success. It is for the American an æsthetic delight to observe, and in spirit to co-operate with economic progress all along the line; and the more others accomplish the more each one realizes the magnificence of the whole industrial life. Men try to excel one another, as they have to do wherever there is free competition; and such rivalry is the best and surest condition for economic progress. Americans use every means in their power to succeed, but if another man comes out ahead they neither grumble nor indulge in envy, but rather gather their strength for a new effort. Even this economic struggle is carried on in the spirit of sport. The fight itself is the pleasure. The chess-player who is checkmated in an exciting game is not sorry that he played, and does not envy the winner.
This conviction, that one neither envies nor is envied, whereby all competitive struggle comes to be pervaded with a certain spirit of co-operation, ennobles all industrial activities, and the immediate effect is a feeling of mutual confidence. The degree to which Americans trust one another is by no means realized on the European Continent. A man relies on the self-respect of his commercial associates in a way which seems to the European mind almost fatuous, and yet herein lies just the strength and security of the economic life of this country.