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remember coming back and saying, “We can never do it like the English. If we have to do it that way, we might as well give it up, because the American mind will just not grasp or cope with anything so complicated, so time-consuming and so inefficient as the record-keeping at Kew.”

The English had a record card for every employee that was covered by unemployment insurance out in Kew. That's a suburb of London. Kew Gardens is the great botanical gardens and Kew is the town in which that botanical garden is located. The government had bought a piece of land and had built a huge building, which though not over three stories high covered many acres. It was so enormous that you could hardly walk through it. Except for the principal offices which were near the entrance it had the aspect of a great warehouse - that is, it was almost unfinished. It was one of these deep buildings, so that although there were windows on the side, as soon as you had gone two tiers in, you had to have artificial light. There were pipes going around and it just looked like a warehouse, although it was all in good order.

There were stacks like in an old-fashioned library. They were wooden stacks and I remember saying, “What would you do if this thing were to burn up?” I was impressed at once with the non-fireproof character of the whole place.