I hope you've enjoyed "Rose Wilder Lane Week" these past few days. Her refreshingly direct love of country struck me as being perfectly suited, thematically, to the Fourth of July holiday. Nevertheless, "all good things," eh?

I have to say, it was harder for me than I expected, moderating the amount of her work that I posted here. The temptation to overindulge was ever present, let me assure you. I must have reluctantly discarded more than half the wordage that I originally transcribed, all of it seeming worthy of your attention.

What with her being a popular novelist, journalist, ghost-writer, etc., she knew how to get and keep the reader's attention, all the while making it look easy. I imagine she would have been a wonderful blogger.

I had thought I'd conclude with something light-hearted. The saga of purchasing a car (Zenobia, perhaps?) in post-war Paris looked like a winner, but I had a last minute change of heart. Instead, we're going to wrap up with thread. Perhaps not so humorously, but a little more on topic...

Suppose that during the Armistice you bought a spool of thread in a French department store. Not that it is a spool; the thread is wound on a scrap of paper, for the thrifty French do not waste wood.

It takes a few seconds to say, “A reel of cotton thread, please; white, size sixty.” With leisurely grace, the clerk takes the thread in her hand, comes from behind the counter, and courteously asks you to accompany her.

She escorts you across the store, perhaps half a block, and indicates your place at the end of a waiting line. In twenty minutes or so, you reach the cashiers grating. He sits behind the bars on a high stool, a wide ledger open before him, ink bottle uncorked, and pen in hand.

He asks you, and he writes in the ledger, your name, your address, and—to your dictation—one reel of thread, cotton, white, size sixty. Will you take it, madame, or have it delivered? You will take it. He writes that. And the price? Forty centimes. You offer in payment, madame? One franc. He writes these amounts, and the date, hour, and minute.

You give the franc to the clerk, who gives it to the cashier, who gives you the change, looks at the thread, and asks if you are satisfied. You are. A stroke of the pen checks that fact.

The clerk then wraps the thread, beautifully, at a near-by wrapping counter, and gives you the package. You have spent thirty minutes; so has she; the cashier has spent perhaps five. An hour and five minutes, to buy a reel of thread.

French department stores were as good as the best in the world. The French are expert merchandisers. They knew pneumatic-tube systems; the Paris government owned one that carried special-delivery notes more quickly than anyone could get a telephone number. Department store owners admired the cash-systems in American stores. But if they had installed them, they would still have been obliged to keep the cashier, his ledger, and his pen and ink.

Why? Because in the markets of Napoleon’s time, sellers cheated buyers. Napoleon protected the buyers. He decreed that the details of every sale must be written in a book, with pen and ink, in the presence of both seller and buyer, by a third person who must see the article and the transfer of money; the buyer must declare himself satisfied, and the record must be kept , permanently, to verify the facts if there were any future complaint.

During this past century, French merchandising had grown enormously. It had completely changed; but not this method of protecting buyers.

I asked an owner of the largest French department store why Napoleon’s decree was not repealed. He said, But, madame, it has been in operation for more than a hundred years! It cannot be repealed; think of the sales girls, the cashiers, the filing clerks,the watchmen who guard the warehouses of ledgers. They would lose their jobs. He was shocked. He saw me as the materialist American, thinking only of profit, caring nothing for all those human beings.

I thought they were unemployed. They did not appear as unemployed on any record, but the actual unemployment in France and throughout Europe, was enormous. For every purchase in a French department store, something like an hour’s time was unemployed; millions of hours a day. And the cashiers, the filing clerks, the watchers of those records, never did a stroke of productive work.

Amazing. The past really is a foreign country.

Mrs. Lane was of the firm opinion that government regulation was much more adept at smothering and impeding economic development than it was at increasing it. Many corroborating anecdotes might occur to the modern reader, but back in 1943 such sentiments ran against the popular wisdom.

All this enforced unemployment made it impossible to do anything quickly. European life was leisurely; it had to be. This charmed the Americans gaily passing by, all the tedious waiting for them, all the red tape untied, all the police stamps got onto their papers by Cook’s or Amexco or their bankers or hotel porters. How serene, how cultured was European life, they said. No one hurrying, everyone with time for meditation and enjoyment, walking through the parks, sitting at café tables under the plane trees. How harassed, how hurried and rude and crude was American life in comparison, they said.

Being as it's still Fourth of July (in spirit), the following display of unabashed pride in America strikes me as fitting and appropriate.

You recognized an American as far as you could see him, by the way he walked. Chin up, head high, briskly going somewhere, with an unconscious mastery of the earth he trod. No European moved like that. Europeans walked prudently, slowly. Their every gesture consumed time in merely letting time pass. That made their lives and their countries seem so restful, to Americans. And you can see precisely that same way of walking, that same sense of useless time, in the prisoners in any American prison-yard.