Any man who is at all concerned with the entire field of operations, or who is moving constantly from one special process to another, can never come to that fully absorbed state of the attention which takes cognizance of the slightest detail. Only the man who has concentrated himself and specialized, learns to note fine details; and it is only in this way that he becomes so much a master in his special department that any one else who attempts to direct him succeeds merely in interfering and spoiling the output. In short, such a workman is face to face with intricate natural processes, and is learning straight from nature. It is in the matter of industrial technique exactly as in science. A person not acquainted with science finds it endlessly monotonous, and cannot understand how a person should spend his whole life studying beetles or deciphering Assyrian inscriptions. But a man who knows the method of science realizes that the narrower a field of study becomes, the more full of variety and unexpected beauties it is found to be. The triumph of technical specialization in America lies just in this. If a single man works at some special part of some special detail of an industrial process, he more and more comes to find in his narrow province an amazing intricacy which the casual observer looking on cannot even suspect; and only the man who sees this complexity is able to discover new processes and improvements on the old. So it is that the specialized workman is he who constantly contributes to perfect technique, proposes modifications, and in general exercises all the intelligence he has, in order to bring himself on in his profession. Just as we have seen how the spirit of self-determination which resides at the periphery of the body politic has been the peculiar strength of American political life, so this free initiative in the periphery, this economic resourcefulness of the narrow specialists, is the peculiar strength of all American industry.
The spirit of self-initiative does not know pettiness. Any one who goes into economic life merely for the sake of what he can get out of it, thinks it clever to gain small, unfair profits; but whosoever views his industry in a purely idealistic spirit, and really has some inner promptings, is filled with an interest in the whole play—sees an economic gain in anything which profits both capital and labour, and only there, and so has a large outlook even within his narrow province. The Americans constantly complain of the economic smallness of Europe, and even the well-informed leaders of American industry freely assert that the actual advance in American economic culture does not lie in the natural resources of the country, but rather in the broad, free initiative of the American people. The continental Europeans, it is said, frustrate their own economic endeavours by being penny-wise and observant of detail in the wrong place, and by lacking the courage to launch big undertakings. There is no doubt that it was the lavishness of nature which firstly set American initiative at work on a broad scale. The boundless prairies and towering mountains which the pioneers saw before them inspired them to undertake great things, and to overlook small hindrances, and in laying out their first plans to overlook small details. American captains of industry often say that they purposely pay no attention to a good many European methods, because they find such pedantic endeavour to economize and to achieve minute perfections to be wasteful of time and unprofitable.