The foreign manufacturer appreciates the advantage of having it said that his eight horse-power machine will run faster and climb better than the eight horsepower machine of a rival maker; hence the tendency to increase the power without changing the nominal rating.  The American manufacturer caters to the demand of his customers for machines of high power by advancing the nominal rating quite beyond the power actually developed.

But already things are changing here, and makers show a disposition to rate their machines low, for the sake of astonishing in performance.  A man dislikes to admit his machine is rated at forty horse-power and to acknowledge defeat by a machine rated at twenty, when the truth is that each machine is probably about thirty.

The tendency at the present moment is decidedly towards the French type,—­two or four cylinders placed in front.

In the construction of racing-cars and high-speed machines for such roads as they have on the other side, we have much to learn from the French,—­and we have been slow in learning it.  The conceit of the American mechanic amounts often to blind stubbornness, but the ease with which the foreign machines have passed the American in all races on smooth roads has opened the eyes of our builders; the danger just now is that they will go to the other extreme and copy too blindly.

In the hands of experts, the foreign racing-cars are the most perfect road locomotives yet devised; for touring over American roads in the hands of the amateur they are worse than useless; and even experts have great difficulty in running week in and week out without serious breaks and delays.  To use a slang phrase, “They will not stand the racket.”  However “stunning” they look on asphalt and macadam with their low, rakish bodies, resplendent in red and polished brass, on country roads they are very frequently failures.  A thirty horse-power foreign machine costing ten or twelve thousand dollars, accompanied by one or more expert mechanics, may make a brilliant showing for a week or so; but when the time is up, the ordinary, cheap, country-looking, American automobile will be found a close second at the finish; not that it is a finer piece of machinery, for it is not; but it has been developed under the adverse conditions prevailing in this country and is built to surmount them.  The maker in this country who runs his machine one hundred miles from his factory, would find fewer difficulties between Paris and Berlin.

The temptation is great to purchase a foreign machine on sight; resist the temptation until you have ridden in it over a hundred miles of sandy, clayey, and hilly American roads; you may then defer the purchase indefinitely, unless you expect to carry along a man.

Machine for machine, regardless of price, the comparison is debatable; but price for price, there is no comparison whatsoever; in fact, there is no inexpensive imported machine which compares for a moment with the American product.