ENGLISH BUSINESS METHODS.
[To THE EDITOR OE TIIII "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—It is said that the Colonial editors, after a tour through business England, wondered that there was so much pessimism written about English commerce. Perhaps the tone is taken from the London Press, whose writers probably come from the cloistered shades of mediaeval Universities. You, Sir, follow the London rule in a review of a book in your issue of June 26th on technical education published in Paris. You say :
"Formerly French and English merchants and manufacturers at in their counting-houses and received all the orders they could execute. They still sit there, but ubiquitous German commercial travellers thoroughly well versed in modern languages go out and get an increasingly large share of those orders."
Sir, I wish the writer for his sins could spend a year in a. Manchester shipping house. I do not think he would come out with the idea that orders fell from the clouds, or believe our vast export trade in England was done by sitting on a stool waiting for it. Such statements are on a par with those made periodically by our aristocratic Consuls, whose ideas of business are similar to those of these gentlemen of the Press. I would just like to say that my experience goes back over forty years, and that when I was a boy, even, in a Manchester shipping house—not a particularly large one—we had travellers all over the world who could speak the languages and even sold "rendu" there,—which for your information means delivered free of all charges, freight, packing, &c., in the money, width, and length of the country of the buyer.—
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