Among the many things for which the American has time, by reason of his economical management of it, are even some which seem unnecessary for a busy man. He expends, for example, an extraordinary large fraction of his time in attending to his costume and person, in sport, and in reading newspapers, so that the notion which is current in Europe that the American is not only always in a hurry, but has time for nothing outside of his work, is entirely wrong.
This saving of strength by the proper disposal of time corresponds to a general practicality in every sort of work. Business is carried on in a business-like way. The banker, whose residence is filled with sumptuous treasures of art, allows nothing unpractical to come into his office for the sake of adornment. A certain strict application to duty is the feeling one gets from every work-room; and while the foreigner feels a certain barrenness about it, the American feels that anything different shows a lack of earnestness and practical good sense. The extreme punctuality with which the American handles his correspondence is typical of him. Statistics show that no other country in the world sends so many letters for every inhabitant, and every business letter is replied to on the same day with matter-of-fact conciseness. It is like a tremendous apparatus that accomplishes the greatest labour with the least friction, by means of the precise adaptation of part to part.
A nation which is after self-initiative must inspire the spirit of initiative in every single co-operator. Nothing is more characteristic of this economic body than the intensity with which each workman—taking the word in its broadest sense—thinks and acts for himself. In this respect, too, outsiders often misunderstand the situation. One hears often from travellers in America that the country must be dwarfing to the intelligence of its workmen, because it uses so much machinery that the individual workman comes to see only a small part of what is being done in the factory and, so to say, works the same identical lever for life. He operates always a certain small part of some other part of the whole. Nothing could be less exact, and a person who comes to such a conclusion is not aware that even the smallest duties are extremely complex, and that, therefore, specialization does not at all introduce an undesirable uniformity in labour. It is specialization on the one hand which guarantees the highest mastery, and on the other lets the workman see even more the complexity of what is going on, and inspires him to get a full comprehension of the thing in hand and perhaps to suggest a few improvements.