 This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. What I Saw in America by G. K. Chesterton. Section 22, Chapter 10, Part 2. Fads and Public Opinion It sounds like a poem about an earthly paradise, to say that in this land the old women can be more beautiful than the young. Indeed, I think Walt Whitman, the national poet, has aligned somewhere almost precisely to that effect. It sounds like a parody upon Utopia, an image of the lion lying down with a lamb, to say it is a place where a man might almost fall in love with his mother-in-law. But there is nothing in which the finer side of American gravity and good feeling does more honorably exhibit itself than in a certain atmosphere around the older women. It is not a canned phrase to say that they grow old gracefully, for they do really grow old. In this, the national optimism really has in it the national courage. The old women do not dress like young women. They only dress better. There is another side to this feminine dignity in the old, sometimes a little lost in the young, with which I shall deal presently. The point for the moment is that even Whitman's truly poetic vision of the beautiful old woman suffers a little from that bewildering multiplicity and recurrence. That is indeed the whole theme of Whitman. It is like the green eternity of leaves of grass, when I think of the eccentric spinsters and incorrigible grandmothers of my own country. I cannot imagine that any of them could possibly be mistaken for another, even at a glance. And in comparison, I feel as if I had been traveling in an earthly paradise of a more decorative harmonies. And I remember only a vast cloud of gray and pink, as of the plumage of cherry-bum in an old picture. But on second thoughts, I think this may be only the inevitable effect of visiting any country in a swift and superficial fashion and that the gray and pink cloud is probably an illusion, like the spinning prairies scattered by the wheel of the train. Anyhow, there is enough of this equality and of a certain social unity favorable to sanity to make the next point about America very much of a puzzle. It seems to me a very real problem, to which I have never seen an answer, even such as I shall attempt here. Why a democracy should produce fads and why, where there is so genuine a sense of human dignity, there should be so much of an impossible petty tyranny. I am not referring solely or even especially to prohibition, which I discuss elsewhere. Prohibition is at least a superstition, and therefore next door to a religion. It has some imaginable connection with moral questions, as have slavery or human sacrifice. But those who ask us to model ourselves on the states which punish the sin of drink, forget that there are states which punish the equally shameless sin of smoking a cigarette in the open air. The same American atmosphere that permits prohibition, permits of people being punished for kissing each other. In other words, there are states psychologically capable of making a man a convict, or wearing a blue necktie, or having a green front door, or anything else that anybody chooses to fancy. There is an American atmosphere in which people may someday be shot for shaking hands or hanged for writing a postcard. As for the sort of thing to which I refer, the American newspapers are full of it, and there is no name for it but mere madness. Indeed, it is not only mad, but it calls itself mad. To mention but one example of many, there was actually boasted that some lunatics were teaching children to take care of their health, and it was proudly added that the children were health-mad, that it is not exactly the object of all mental hygiene, to make people mad, did not occur to them, and they may still be engaged in their earnest labors to teach babies to be valetudinarians and hypochondriacs in order to make them healthy. In such cases we may say that the modern world is too ridiculous to be ridiculed. You cannot caricature a caricature. Imagine what a satirist of saner days would have made of the daily life of a child of six, who was actually admitted to be mad on the subject of his own health. These are not days in which that great extravaganza could be written, but I dimly see some of its episodes like Uncompleted Dreams. I see the child pausing in the middle of a cartwheel, or when he has performed three-quarters of a cartwheel in, consulting a little notebook about the amount of exercise per diem. I see him pausing halfway up a tree, or when he has climbed exactly one-third of a tree, and then producing a clinical thermometer to take his own temperature. But what would be the good of imaginative logic to prove the madness of such people when they themselves praise it for being mad? There is also the cult of the infant phenomenon, of which Dickens made fun and of which educationalists make fusses. When I was in America another newspaper produced a marvelous child of six, who had the intellect of a child of twelve. The only test given, and apparently one on which the experiment turned, was that she could be made to understand and even to employ the word annihilate. When asked to say something proving this, the happy infant offered the polished aphorism. When common sense comes in, superstition is annihilated. In reply to which, by way of showing that I also am as intelligent as a child of twelve, and there is no arrested development about me, I will say in the same elegant diction, when psychological education comes in, common sense is annihilated. Everybody seems to be sitting round this child in an adoring fashion. It did not seem to occur to anybody that we do not particularly want even a child of twelve to talk about annihilating superstition. That we do not want a child of six to talk like a child of twelve, or a child of twelve to talk like a man of fifty, or even a man of fifty to talk like a fool. And on the principle of hoping that a little girl of six will have a massive and mature brain, there is every reason for hoping that little boy of six will grow a magnificent and bushy beard. Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among American cranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive eugenics, or enforce psychoanalysis, that is to enforce confession without absolution. And I confess I cannot connect this feature with the genuine democratic spirit of the mass. I can only suggest in concluding this chapter two possible causes, rather peculiar to America, which may have made this democracy so unlike all other democracies, and in this so manifestly hostile to the whole democratic idea. The first historical cause is Puritanism, but not Puritanism merely in the sense of prohibitionism. The truth is that prohibitions might have done far less harm as prohibitions if a vague association had not arisen on some dark day of human unreason between prohibition and progress. And it was the progress that did the harm, not the prohibition. Men can enjoy life under considerable limitations if they can be sure of their limited enjoyments. But under progressive Puritanism we can never be sure of anything. The curse of it is not the limitation, it is the unlimited limitation. The evil is not in the restriction but in the fact that nothing can ever restrict the restriction. The prohibitions are bound to progress point by point. More and more human rights and pleasures must of necessity be taken away, for it is of the nature of this futurism, that the latest fad is the faith of the future, and the most fantastic fad inevitably makes the pace. Thus the worst thing in the seventeenth century aberration was not so much Puritanism as sectarianism. It searched for truths not by synthesis but by subdivision. It not only broke religion into small pieces, but it was bound to choose the smallest piece. There is, in America I believe, a large religious body that has felt it right to separate itself from Christendom, because it cannot believe in the morality of wearing buttons. I do not know how the sism arose, but it is easy to suppose, for the sake of argument, that there had originally existed some Puritan body which condemned the frivolity of ribbons, though not of buttons. I was going to say badges, but not buttons. But on reflection I cannot bring myself to believe that any American, however insane, would object to wearing badges. But the point is that as the Holy Spirit of Progressive Prophecy rested on the first sect, because it had invented a new objection to ribbons, so that Holy Spirit would then pass from it to the new sect who invented a further objection to buttons, and from them it must inevitably pass to any rebel among them who shall choose to rise and say that he disapproves of trousers because of the existence of trouser buttons. Each succession in turn must be right because it is recent, and progress must progress by growing smaller and smaller. That is the Progressive Theory, the legacy of 17th century sectarianism, the dogma implied in much modern politics and the evident enemy of democracy. Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right, but progress says that the minority is always right. Progressives are the prophets, and unfortunately not all the people are prophets. Thus in the atmosphere of this slowly dying sectarianism, anybody who chooses to prophesy and prohibit can tyrannize over the people. If he chooses to say that drinking is always wrong, or that kissing is always wrong, or that wearing buttons is always wrong, people are afraid to contradict him for fear they should be contradicting their own great-grandchild. For the superstition is an inversion of the ancestor worship of China, and instead of vainly appealing to something that is dead, they appeal to something that may never be born. There is another cause of this strange survival disease in American democracy. It is to be found in American feminism, and feminist America is an entirely different thing from feminine America. I should say that the overwhelming majority of American girls laugh at their female politicians, at least as much as the majority of American men despise their male politicians. But though the aggressive feminists are a minority, they are in this atmosphere which I have tried to analyze, the atmosphere in which there is a sort of sanctity about minority. And it is this superstition of seriousness that constitutes the most solid obstacle and exception to the general and almost conventional pressure of public opinion. When a fad is frankly felt to be anti-national, as was evolutionism before Civil War, or pro-Germanism in the Great War, or the suggestion of racial admixture in the South at all times, then the fad meets far less mercy than anywhere else in the world. It is snowed under and swept away. But when it does not thus directly challenge patriotism or popular ideas, a curious halo of hopeful salenities surrounds it, merely because it is a fad, but above all, if it is a feminine fad. The earnest lady reformer who really utters a warning against the social evil of beer or buttons is seen to be walking clothed in light, like a prophetess. Perhaps it is something of the Holy Oriole, which the East sees shining around an idiot. But I think there is another explanation, feminine rather than feminist, and proceeding from normal women and not from abnormal idiots. It is something that involves an old controversy, but one upon which I have not, like so many politicians, changed my opinion. It concerns the particular fashion in which women tend to regard, or rather to disregard, the formal and legal rights of the citizen, insofar as this is a bias. It is a bias in the directly opposite direction, from that now lightly alleged. There is a sort of underbred history going about according to which women in the past have always been in the position of slaves. It is much more to the point to note that women have always been in the position of despots. They have been despotic because they ruled in an area where they had too much common sense to attempt to be constitutional. You cannot grant a constitution to a nursery, nor can babies assemble like barons and extort a great charter. Tommy cannot plead a habeas corpus against going to bed, and an infant cannot be tried by twelve other infants before he is put in a corner. And as there can be no laws or liberties in a nursery, the extension of feminism means that there should be no more laws or liberties in a state than there are in a nursery. The woman does not really regard men as citizens, but as children. She may, if she is a humanitarian, love all mankind, but she does not respect it. Still less does she respect its folks. Now a man must be very blind nowadays, not to see that there is a danger of a sort of amateur science, or pseudo-science, being made the excuse for every trick of tyranny and interference. Anybody who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street, but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman halfway down the chimney, or even under the bed. In other words it is a danger of turning the policeman into a sort of benevolent burglar. Against this protests are already being made, and will increasingly be made, if men retain any instinct of independence or dignity at all. But to complain of the woman interfering in the home will always sound like complaining of the oyster intruding into the oyster shell. To object that she has too much power over education will seem like objecting to a hen having too much to do with eggs. She has already been given an almost irresponsible power over a limited region in these things, and if that power is made infinite it will be even more irresponsible. If she adds to her own power in the family, all these alien fads external to the family, her power will not only be irresponsible but insane. She will be something which may well be called a nightmare of the nursery. A mad mother. But the point is that she will be mad about other nurseries as well as her own, or possibly instead of her own. The results will be interesting, but at least it is certain that under this softening influence, government of the people, by the people, for the people, will most assuredly perish from the earth. But there is always another possibility. Hints of it may be noted here and there like muffled gongs of doom. The other day some people preaching some low trick or other for running away from the glory of motherhood were suddenly silenced in New York by a voice of deep and democratic volume. The prigs who potter about the great plains are pygmies dancing round a sleeping giant. That which sleeps so far as they are concerned is the huge power of human unanimity and intolerance in the soul of America. At present the masses in the Middle West are indifferent to such fancies, or faintly attracted to them, as fashions of culture from the great cities. But any day it may not be so. Some lunatic may cut across their economic rights or their strange and buried religion, and then he will see something. He will find himself running like a black who has wronged a white woman, or a man who has set the prairie on fire. He will see something which the politicians fan in its sleep and flatter with the name of the people, which many reactionaries have cursed with the name of the mob, but which, in any case, has had under its feet the crowns of many kings. It was said that the voice of the people is the voice of God, and this at least is certain, that it can be the voice of God to the wicked. And the last antics of their arrogance shall stiffen before something enormous, such as towers in the last words that Job heard out of the whirlwind, and a voice they never knew, shall tell them that his name is Leviathan, and he is Lord over all the children of pride. The End of Section 22, Chapter 11 When I was in America I had the feeling that it was far more foreign than France, or even than Ireland, and by foreign I mean fascinating rather than repulsive. I mean that element of strangeness which marks the frontier of any fairyland, or gives to the traveler himself the almost eerie title of the stranger. And I saw there, more clearly, than in the countries countered as more remote from us in race or religion, a paradox that is one of the great truths of travel. We have never even begun to understand a people, until we have found something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character easy to read, we are reading into it our own character. If when we see an event we can properly provide an explanation, we may be pretty certain that we had our cells prepared the explanation before we saw the event. It follows from this that the best picture of a foreign people can probably be found in a puzzle picture. If we can find an event of which the meaning is really dark to us, it will probably throw some light on the truth. I will therefore take from my American experiences one isolated incident which certainly could not have happened in any other country I ever clapped eyes on. I have really no notion of what it meant. I have heard even from Americans about five different conjectures about its meaning. But though I do not understand it, I do sincerely believe that if I did understand it, I should understand America. It happened in the city of Oklahoma which would require a book to itself, even considered as a background. The state of Oklahoma is a district in the southwest recently reclaimed from the Red Indian Territory. What many quite incorrectly imagine about all America is really true of Oklahoma. It is proud of having no history. It is glowing with the sense of having a great future and nothing else. People are just as likely to boast of an old building in Nashville as in Norwich. People are just as proud of old families in Boston as in Bath. But in Oklahoma the citizens do point out a colossal structure arrogantly affirming that it wasn't there last week. It was against the colors of this crude stage scenery as of a pantomime city of Pasteboard that the fanatic figure appeared which still haunts me like a walking note of interrogation. I was strolling down the main street of the city and looking at a paper stall vivid with the news of crime. When a stranger addressed me and asked me quite politely but with a curious air of having authority to put the question, what I was doing in that city. He was a lean, brown man having rather the look of a shabby, tropical traveler with a gray mustache and a lively and alert eye. But the most singular thing about him was that the front of his coat was covered with a multitude of shining metallic emblems made in the shape of stars and crescents. I was well accustomed by this time to Americans adorning the lapels of their coats with little symbols of various societies. It is a part of the American passion for the ritual of comradeship. There is nothing that an American likes so much as to have a secret society and to make no secret of it. But in this case, if I may put it so, the rash symbolism seemed to have broken out all over the man in a fashion that indicated that the fever was far advanced. Of this minor mystery, however, his first few sentences offered professional explanation. In answer to his question, touching my business in Oklahoma, I replied with restraint that I was lecturing. To which he replied without restraint but rather with an expansive or radiant pride. I also am lecturing. I am lecturing on astronomy. So far a certain wild rationality seemed to light up the affair. I knew it was unusual in my own country for the astronomer royal to walk down the strand with his coat plastered all over with the solar system. Indeed, it was unusual for any English astronomical lecturer to advertise the subject of his lectures in this fashion. But though it would be unusual, it would not necessarily be unreasonable. In fact, I think it might add to the color and variety of life if specialists did adopt this sort of scientific heraldry. I should like to be able to recognize an entomologist at sight by the decorative spiders and cockroaches crawling all over his coat and waistcoat. I should like to see a conchologist in a simple costume of shells. An osteopath, I suppose, would be agreeably painted so as to resemble a skeleton, while a botanist would enliven the street with the appearance of a jack in the green. So while I regarded the astronomical lecturer in the astronomical coat as a figure distinguishable by a high degree of differentiation from the artless astronomers of my island home, enough their simple loveliness for me, I saw in him nothing illogical, but rather an imaginative extreme of logic. And then came another turn of the wheel of topsy-turbutum and all the logic was scattered to the wind. Expanding his starry bosom and standing astral with the air of one who owned the street, the strange being continued. Yes, I am lecturing on astronomy, anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, embryology, eschatology, and so on in a thunderous role of theoretical sciences, apparently beyond the scope of any single university, let alone any single professor. Having thus introduced himself, however, he got to business. He apologized with true American courtesy for having questioned me at all, and excused on the ground of his own exacting responsibilities. I imagined him to mean the responsibility of simultaneously occupying the chairs of all the faculties already mentioned, but these apparently were trifles to him and something far more serious was clouding his brow. I feel it to be my duty, he said, to acquaint myself with any stranger visiting this city, and it is an additional pleasure to welcome here a member of the Upper Ten. I assured him earnestly that I knew nothing about the Upper Ten, except that I did not belong to them. I felt not without alarm that the Upper Ten might be another secret society. He waved my evignation aside and continued, I have a great responsibility in watching over this city. My friend, the mayor, and I have a great responsibility. And then an extraordinary thing happened. Suddenly, diving his hand into his breast pocket, he flashed something before my eyes like a hand mirror, something which disappeared again almost as soon as it appeared. In that flash I could only see that it was some sort of polished metal plate with some letters engraved on it like a monogram. But the reward of a studious and virtuous life, which has been spent chiefly in the reading of American detective stories, shone forth for me in that hour of trial. I received at last the prize of a profound scholarship in the matter of imaginary murders in tenth-rate magazines. I remembered who it was, who in the Yankee detective yarn flashes before the eyes of Slim Jim or the lone hand crook a badge of metal sometimes called the shield. Assuming all the desperate composure of Slim Jim himself, I replied, You mean you are connected with the police authorities here, don't you? Well, if I commit a murder here, I'll let you know. Whereupon that astonished man waved a hand in deprecation, bowed in farewell with the grace of a dancing master, and said, Oh, those are not things we expect from members of the Upper Ten. Then that moving constellation moved away, disappearing in the dark tides of humanity as the vision passed away down the dark tides from Sir Gell ahead and Star-like mingled with the stars. That is the problem I would put to all Americans and to all who claim to understand America. Who and what was that man? Was he an astronomer? Was he a detective? Was he a wandering lunatic? If he was a lunatic who thought he was an astronomer, why did he have a badge to prove he was a detective? If he was a detective, pretending to be an astronomer, why did he tell a total stranger that he was a detective two minutes after saying he was an astronomer? If he wished to watch over the city in a quiet and unobtrusive fashion, why did he blaze on himself all over with the stars of the sky and profess to give public lectures on all the subjects of the world? Every wise and well-conducted student of murder stories is acquainted with the notion of a policeman in plain clothes. But nobody could possibly say that this gentleman was in plain clothes. Why not wear his uniform if he was resolved to show every stranger in the street his badge? Perhaps after all he had no uniform, for these lands were but recently a wild frontier rudely ruled by vigilance committees. Some Americans suggested to me that he was the sheriff, the regular hard-riding, free-shooting sheriff of Bret Hart and my boyhood dreams. Others suggested that he was an agent of the Ku Klux Klan, that great, nameless symbol he exhibited was theirs. But whether he was a sheriff acting for the law, or a conspirator against the law, or a lunatic entirely outside the law, I agree with the former conjectures upon one point. I am perfectly certain he had something else in his pocket besides a badge, and I am perfectly certain that under certain circumstances he would have handled it instantly and shot me dead between the gay-book staff and the crowded trams. And that is the last touch to the complexity. For though in that country it often seems that the law is made by a lunatic, you never know when the lunatic may not shoot you for keeping it. Only in the presence of that citizen of Oklahoma I feel I am confronted with the fullness and depth of the mystery of America. Because I understand nothing, I recognize the thing that we call a nation, and I salute the flag. But even in connection with this mysterious figure there is a moral which affords another reason for mentioning him. Whether he was a sheriff or an outlaw, there was certainly something about him that suggested the adventurous violence of the old border life of America. And whether he was connected with the police or no, there was certainly violence enough in his environment to satisfy the most ardent policemen. The posters in the paper shop were placarded with the verdict in Hammond Trial, a cause celeb, which reached its crisis in Oklahoma while I was there. Senator Hammond had been shot by a girl whom he had wronged, and his widow demanded justice, or what might fairly be called vengeance. There was very great excitement culminating in the girl's acquittal. Nor did the Hammond case appear to be entirely exceptional in that breezy borderland. The moment the town had received the news that Clara Smith was free, newsboys rushed down the street shouting double-stabbing outrage near Oklahoma, or bankers' throat cut on Main Street, or otherwise resuming their regular mode of life. It seemed as much to say as, do not imagine that our local energies are exhausted in shooting a senator. Or, come now, the world is young, even if Clara Smith is acquitted, and the enthusiasm of Oklahoma is not yet cold. But my particular reason for mentioning the matter is this. Despite my friend's mystical remarks about the Upper 10, he lived in an atmosphere of something that was at least the very reverse of a respect for persons. Indeed, there was something in the very crudity of his social compliment that smacked strangely enough of that eglaterian soil. In a vaguely aristocratic country like England, people would never dream of telling a total stranger that he was a member of the Upper 10. For one thing they would be afraid he might be. Real snobbishness is never vulgar, for it is intended to please the refined. Nobody licks the boots of a duke, if only because the duke does not like his boots cleaned in that way. Nobody embraces the knees of a marquee, because it would embarrass that nobleman. And nobody tells him he is a member of the Upper 10, because everybody is expected to know it. But there is a much more subtle kind of snobbishness, pervading the atmosphere at any society trial in England. And the first thing that struck me was the total absence of that atmosphere in the trial at Oklahoma. Mr. Hammond was presumably a member of the Upper 10, if there is such a thing. He was a member of the Senate or Upper House in the American Parliament. He was a millionaire and a pillar of the Republican Party, which might be called a respectable party. He is said to have been mentioned as a possible president. And the speeches of Clara Smith's council, who was known by the delightfully Oklahomaite title of Wild Bill McClain, were wild enough in all conscience. But they left very little of my friend's illusions that members of the Upper 10 could not be accused of crimes. Nero and Borgia were quite presentable people compared with Senator Hammond, when Wild Bill McClain had done with him. But the difference was deeper, and even in a sense more delicate than this. There is a certain tone about English trials which does at least begin with a certain skepticism about people prominent in public life being abominable in private life. People do vaguely doubt the criminality of a man in that position. That is, the position of the Marquis de Brinvilles or the Marquis de Sade. Primafasci, it would be an advantage to the Marquis de Sade that he was a Marquis. But it was certainly against Hammond that he was a millionaire. While Bill did not minimize him as a bankrupt or an adventurer, he insisted on the solidity and size of his fortune. He made mountains out of the Hammond millions as if they made the matter much worse. As indeed I think they do. But that is because I happen to share a certain political philosophy with Wild Bill and other Wild Buffaloes of the Prairies. In other words, there is really present here a democratic instinct against the domination of wealth. It does not prevent wealth from dominating, but it does prevent the domination from being regarded with any affection or loyalty. Despite the man in the starry coat, the Americans have not really any illusions about the upper ten. McLean was appealing to an implicit public opinion when he pelted the senator with his gold. But something more is involved. I became conscious as I had been conscious in reading the crime novels in America that the millionaire was taken as a type and not as an individual. This is the great difference that America recognizes rich crooks as a class. Any Englishman might recognize them as individuals. Any English romance may turn on a crime in high life in which the baronet is found to have poisoned his wife or the elusive burglar turns out to be the bishop. But the English are not always saying, either in romance or reality, what's to be done if our food is being poisoned by all these baronets. They do not murmur in indignation if bishops will go on burgling like this, something must be done. The whole point of the English romance is the exceptional character of a crime in high life. That is not the tone of American novels or American newspapers or American trials like the trial in Oklahoma. Americans may be excited when a millionaire crook is caught as when any other crook is caught. But it is it is being caught, not it is being discovered. To put the matter shortly, England recognizes a criminal class at the bottom of the social scale. America also recognizes a criminal class at the top of the social scale. In both, for various reasons, it may be difficult for the criminals to be convicted. But in America, the upper class of criminals is recognized. In both America and England, of course, it exists. This is an assumption at the back of the American mind, which makes a great difference in many ways. And, in my opinion, a difference for the better. I wrote merely fancifully just now about bishops being burglars. But there is a story in New York illustrating this, which really does, in a sense, attribute a burglary to a bishop. The story was that an Anglican lord spiritual of the pompous and now rather antiquated school was pushing open the door of a poor American tenement with all the placid patronage of the squire and director visiting the cottagers when a gigantic Irish policeman came round the corner and hit him a crack over the head with a truncheon on the assumption that he was a housebreaker. I hope that those who laugh at the story see that the laugh is not altogether against the policeman and that it is not only the policeman but rather the bishop who had failed to recognize some fine logical distinctions. The bishop, being a learned man, might well be called upon when he had sufficiently recovered from the knock on the head to define what is the exact difference between a housebreaker and a home visitor and why the home visitor should not be regarded as a housebreaker when he will not behave as a guest. An impartial intelligence will be much less shocked at the policeman's disrespect for the home visitor than by the home visitor's disrespect for the home. But that story smacks of the western soil precisely because of the element of brutality there is in it. In England, snobbishness and social oppression are much subtler and softer. The manifestations of them at least are more mellow and humane. In comparison there is indeed something which people call ruthlessness about the air of America, especially the American cities. The bishop may push open the door without an apology but he would not break open the door with a truncheon. But the Irish policeman's truncheon hit both ways. It may be brutal to the tenement dweller as well as to the bishop. But the difference and distinction is that it might really be brutal to the bishop. It is because there is, after all, at the back of all that barbarism a sort of negative belief in the brotherhood of men. A dark, democratic sense that men are really men and nothing more. That the course and even corrupt bureaucracy is not resented exactly as oligarchic bureaucracies are resented. There is a sense in which corruption is not so narrow as nepotism. It is upon this queer, cynical charity and even humility that it has been possible to rear so high and uphold so long that tower of brass, Tammany Hall. The modern police system is, in spirit, the most inhumane in history, and its evil belongs to an age and not to a nation. But some American police methods are evil past all parallel and the detective can be more crooked than a hundred crooks. But in the States it is not only possible that the policeman is worse than the convict. It is by no means certain that he thinks that he is any better. In the popular stories of a Henry there are light illusions to tramps being kicked out of hotels which will make any Christians seek relief in strong language. And a trust in heaven. Not to say in hell. And yet books even more popular than O'Henry are those of the sob sisterhood who swim in lacrimose lakes after loved-torn spinsters who pass their lives in reclaiming and consoling such tramps. There are in this people two strains of brutality and sentimentalism which I do not understand. Especially where they mingle. But I am fairly sure they both work back to the dim democratic origin. The Irish policeman does not confine himself fastidiously to bludgeoning bishops. His truncheon finds plenty of poor people's heads to hit. And yet I believe on my soul he has a sort of sympathy with the poor people not to be found in the police of more aristocratic states. I believe he also reads and weeps over the stories of the spinsters and the reclaimed tramps. In fact there is much of such pathos in an American magazine, my soul companion on many happy railway journeys, which is not only devoted to detective stories but apparently edited by detectives. In these stories also there is the honest popular astonishment at the upper ten expressed by the astronomical detective. If indeed he was a detective and not a demon from the dark red Indian forests that faded to the horizon behind him. But I have set him as the head and text of this chapter. Because with these elements of the third degree of devilry and the seventh heaven of sentimentalism, I touch on elements that I do not understand. And when I do not understand, I say so. The end of Chapter 11 This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit Libravox.org What I Saw in America by G. K. Chesterton Section 24 Chapter 12 The Republican in the Ruins The heathen in his blindness vows down to wood and stone, especially to a woodcut or a lithographic stone. Modern people put their trust in pictures, especially scientific pictures, as much as the most superstitious ever put it in religious pictures. They publish a portrait of the missing link as if he were the missing man for whom the police are always advertising. For all the world as if the anthropoid had been photographed before he absconded. The scientific diagram may be a hypothesis, it may be a fancy, it may be a forgery, but it is always an idol in the true sense of an image and an image in the true sense of a thing mastering the imagination and not the reason. The power of these talismatic pictures is almost hypnotic to modern humanity. We can never forget that we have seen a portrait of the missing link, though we should instantly detect the lapse of logic into superstition if we were told that the old Greek agnostics had made a statue of the unknown god. But there is still a stranger fashion in which we fall victims to the same trick of fancy. We accept in a blind and literal spirit not only images of speculation but even figures of speech. The 19th century prided itself on having lost its faith in myths and proceeded to put all its faith in metaphors. It dismissed the old doctrines about the way of life and the light of the world and then it proceeded to talk as if the light of truth were really and literally a light that could be absorbed by merely opening our eyes. Or as if the path of progress were really and truly a path to be found by merely following our noses. Thus the purpose of God is an idea, true or false, but the purpose of nature is merely a metaphor for obviously if there is no God there is no purpose. Yet while men, by an imaginative instinct spoke of the purpose of God with a grand agnosticism as something too large to be seen, something reaching out to worlds and to eternities, they speak of the purpose of nature in particular and practical problems of curing babies or cutting up rabbits. This power of the modern metaphor must be understood by way of an introduction if we are to understand one of the chief errors at once evasive and pervasive which perplexed the problem of America. America is always spoken of as a young nation and whether or not this be a valuable and suggested metaphor, very few people notice that it is a metaphor at all. If somebody said that a certain deserving charity had just gone into trousers, we should recognize that it was a figure of speech, a perhaps a rather surprising figure of speech. If somebody said that a daily paper had recently put its hair up, we should know it could only be a metaphor and possibly a rather strained metaphor. Yet these phrases would mean the only thing that can possibly meant by calling a corporate association of all sorts of people young. That is, that a certain institution has only existed for a certain time. I am not now denying that such a corporate nationality may happen to have a psychology comparatively analogous to the psychology of youth. I'm not even denying that America has it. I'm only pointing out to begin with that we must first free ourselves from the talismatic tyranny of a metaphor which we do not recognize as a metaphor. Men realize that the old mystical doctrines were mystical. They do not realize that the new metaphors are metaphorical. They have some sort of hazy notion that American society must be growing, must be promising, must have the virtues of hope and the fault of ignorance, merely because it has only had a separate existence since the 18th century. And that is exactly like saying that a new chapel must be growing taller or that a limited liability company will soon have its second teeth. Now in truth this particular conception of American hopefulness would be anything but hopeful for America if the argument really were as it still vaguely supposed to be that America must have a long life before it because it only started in the 18th century. We should find a very fatal answer by looking at other political systems that did start in the 18th century. The 18th century was called the age of reason and there is a very real sense in which the other systems were indeed started in a spirit of reason. But starting from reason has not saved them from ruin. If we survey the Europe of today with real clarity and historic comprehension we shall see that it is precisely the most recent and the most rationalistic creations that have been ruined. The two great states which did most definitely and emphatically deserve to be called modern states were Prussia and Russia. There was no real Prussia before Frederick the Great, no real Russian Empire before Peter the Great. Both those innovators recognized themselves as rationalists bringing a new reason and order into an indeterminate barbarism and doing for the barbarians what the barbarians could not do for themselves. They did not, like the kings of England or France or Spain or Scotland, inherit a scepter that was the symbol of a historic and patriotic people. In this sense there was no Russia but only an Emperor of Russia. In this sense Prussia was a kingdom before it was a nation, if ever it was a nation. But anyhow both men were particularly modern in their whole mood and mind. They were modern to the extent of being not only anti-traditional but almost anti-patriotic. Peter forced the science of the West on Russia to the regret of many Russians. Frederick talked the French of Voltaire and not the German of Luther. The two experiments were entirely in the spirit of Voltaire and rationalism. They were built in broad daylight by men who believed in nothing but the light of common day and already their day is done. If then the promise of America were in the fact that she is one of the latest births of progress, we should point out that it is exactly the latest born that we're the first to die. If in this sense she is praised as young, it may be answered that the young have died young and have not lived to be old. And if this be confused with the argument that she came in an age of clarity and skepticism, uncontaminated by old superstitions, it could still be retorted that the works of superstition have survived the works of skepticism. But the truth is, of course, that the real quality of America is much more subtle and complex than this, and is mixed not only of good and bad and rational and mystical, but also of old and new. That is what makes the task of tracing the true proportions of American life so interesting and so impossible. To begin with, such a metaphor is always as distracting as a mixed metaphor. It is a double-edged tool that cuts both ways, and consequently opposite ways. We use the same word young to mean two opposite extremes. We mean something at an early stage of growth, and also something having the latest roots of growth. We might call a Commonwealth young if it conducted all this daily conversation by wireless telegraphy, meaning that it was progressive. But we might also call it young if it conducted all this industry with chipped flints, meaning that it was primitive. These two meanings of youth are hopelessly mixed up when the word is applied to America. But what is more curious, the two elements really are wildly entangled in America. America is in some ways what is called in advance of the times, and in some ways what is called behind the times. But it seems a little confusing to convey both notions by the same word. On the one hand Americans often are successful in the last inventions, and for that very reason they are often neglectful of the last but one. It is true of men in general dealing with things in general, that while they are progressing in one thing, such as science, they are going back in another thing, such as art. What is less fully realized is that this is true even as between different methods of science. The perfection of wireless telegraphy might well be followed by the gross imperfection of wires. The very enthusiasm of American science brings this out very vividly. The telephone in New York works miracles all day long. Replies from remote places come as promptly as in private talk. Nobody cuts anybody off, nobody says sorry you've been troubled. But then the postal service in New York does not work at all. At least I could never discover it working. Letters lingered in it for days and days, as in some wild village of the Pyrenees. When I asked the taxi driver to drive me to a post office, a look of far-off vision and adventure came into his eyes, and he said he had once heard of a post office somewhere near West 97th Street. Man are not efficient in everything, but only in the fashionable thing. This may be a mark of the march of science. It does certainly, in one sense, deserve the description of youth. We could imagine a very young person forgetting the old toy in the excitement of a new one. But on the other hand, American manners contain much that is called young, in the contrary sense, in the sense of an earlier stage of history. There are whole patches and particular aspects that seem to me quite early Victorian. I cannot help having a sensation, for instance, about the arrangement for smoking in the railway carriages. There are no smoking carriages, as a rule, but a corner of each of the great cars is curtained off mysteriously that a man may go behind the curtain and smoke. Nobody thinks of a woman doing so. It is regarded as a dark, bohemian, and almost brutally masculine indulgence, exactly as it was regarded by the Dowagers in Thackeray's novels. Indeed, this is one of the many such cases in which extremes meet. The extremes of stuffy antiquity and cranky modernity. The American Dowager is sorry that tobacco was ever introduced, and the American suffragette and social reformer is considering whether tobacco ought not to be abolished. The tone of American society suggests some sort of compromise by which women will be allowed to smoke, but men, forbidden to do so. In one respect, however, America is very old indeed. In one respect, America is more historic than England. I might almost say more archeological than England. The record of one period of the past, morally remote and probably irrevocable, is there preserved in a more perfect form as a pagan city is preserved at Pompeii. In a more general sense, of course, it's easy to exaggerate the contrast as a mere contrast between the Old World and the New. There is the superficial satire about the millionaire's daughter, who has recently become the wife of an aristocrat. But there is a rather more subtle satire in the question of how long the aristocrat has been aristocratic. There is often much misplaced mockery of a marriage between an upstart's daughter and a decayed relic of feudalism, when it is really a marriage between an upstart's daughter and an upstart's grandson. The sentimental socialist often seems to admit the blue blood of the nobleman, even when he wants to shed it. Just as he seems to admit the marvelous brains of the millionaire, even when he wants to blow them out. Unfortunately, in the interest of social science, of course, the sentimental socialist never does go so far as bloodshed or blowing out brains. Otherwise the color and quality of both blood and brains would probably be a disappointment to him. There are certainly more American families that really came over in the Mayflower than English families that really came over with the conqueror. And an English country family clearly dating from the time of the Mayflower would be considered a very traditional and historic house. Nevertheless, there aren't ancient things in England, though the aristocracy is hardly one of them. There are buildings, there are institutions, there are even ideas in England which do preserve, as in a perfect pattern, some particular epic of the past and even of the remote past. A man could study the Middle Ages in Lincoln as well as in Ruin, in Canterbury as well as in Cologne. Even of the Renaissance the same is true, at least on the literary side. If Shakespeare was later, he was also greater than Ronsard, but the point is that the spirit and philosophy of the periods were present in fullness and in freedom. The guildsmen were as Christian in England as they were anywhere. The poets were as pagan in England as they were anywhere. Personally I do not admit that men who served patrons were freer than those who served patron states. But each fashion had its own kind of freedom, and the point is that the English in each case had the fullness of that kind of freedom. But there was another ideal of freedom which the English never had at all, or anyhow never expressed at all. There was another ideal, the soul of another epic, round which we built no monuments and wrote no masterpieces. You will find no traces of it in England, but you will find them in America. The thing I mean was the real religion of the 18th century. Its religion in the more defined sense was generally deism as in Robespierre or Jefferson. In the more general way of morals and atmosphere it was rather stoicism as in the suicide of Wolf Tone. It had certain very noble and as some would say impossible ideals as that a politician should be poor and should be proud of being poor. It knew Latin and therefore insisted on the strange fancy that the Republic should be a public thing. Its Republic and the simplicity was anything but a silly pose, unless all martyrdom is a silly pose. Even of the prigs and fanatics of the American and French revolutions we can often say, as Stevenson said of an American, that thrift and courage glowed in him. And his virtue and value for us is that it did remember the things we now most tend to forget, from the dignity of liberty to the danger of luxury. It did really believe in self-determination, in the self-determination of the self as well as of the state. And its determination was really determined, in short it believed in self-respect, and it is strictly true, even of its rebels and regicides, that they desired chiefly to be respectable. But there were in it the marks of religion as well as respectability. It had a creed, it had a crusade, men died singing its songs, men starved rather than write against its principles, and its principles were liberty, equality, and fraternity, or the dogmas of the Declaration of Independence. This was the idea that redeemed the dreary negations of the eighteenth century. And there are still corners of Philadelphia, or Boston, or Baltimore, where we can feel so suddenly, in the silence, its plain garb and formal manners, that the walking ghost of Jefferson would hardly surprise us. There is not the ghost of such a thing in England. In England the real religion of the eighteenth century never found freedom or scope. It never cleared a space in which to build that cold and classic building called the capital. It never made elbow room for that free, if sometimes frigid, figure called the citizen. In eighteenth century England he was crowded out. Partly, perhaps by the relics of better things of the past, but largely at least by the presence of much worse things than the present. The worst things kept out the best things of the eighteenth century. The ground was occupied by legal fictions, by a godless, Erastian church, and a powerless Hanoverian king. Its realities were an aristocracy of regency dandies, in costumes made to match bright and pavilion. A paganism, not frigid but florid. It was a touch of this aristocratic waste in Fox that prevented that great man from being a glorious exception. It is therefore well for us to realize that there is something in history which we did not experience, and therefore probably something in Americans that we do not understand. There was this idealism at the very beginning of their individualism. There was a note of heroic publicity and honorable poverty which lingers, in the very name of Cincinnati. But I have another and special reason for noting this historical fact. The fact that we English never made anything upon the model of a capital, while we can match anybody with the model of a cathedral. It is far from improbable that the latter model may again be a working model. For I have myself felt naturally and for a long time a warm sympathy with both those past ideals which seem to some so incompatible. I have felt the attraction of the Red Cap as well as the Red Cross of the Marseille as well as the Magnificent. And even when they were in furious conflict, I have never altogether lost my sympathy for either. But in the conflict between the Republic and the Church, the point often made against the Church seems to me much more of a point against the Republic. It is emphatically the Republic and not the Church that I venerate as something beautiful but belonging to the past. In fact I feel exactly the same sort of sad respect for the Republican ideal that many mid-Victorian free thinkers felt for the religious ideal. The most sincere poets of that period were largely divided between those who insisted, like Arnold and Clow, that Christianity might be a ruin, but after all it must be treated as a picturesque ruin, and those like Swinburne who insisted that it might be a picturesque ruin, but after all it must be treated as a ruin. But surely their own pagan temple of political liberty is now much more of a ruin than the other. And I fancy I am one of the few who will take off their hats in that ruin temple. That is why I went about looking for the fading traces of that lost cause in the old world atmosphere of the New World. But I do not, as a fact, feel that the Cathedral is a ruin. I doubt if I should feel it even if I wish to lay it in ruins. I doubt if Mr. McCabe really thinks that Catholicism is dying, though he might deceive himself into saying so. Nobody could be naturally moved to say that the crowded cathedral of St. Patrick in New York was a ruin, or even that the unfinished Anglo-Catholic cathedral at Washington was a ruin, though it is not yet a church, or that there is anything lost or lingering about the splendid and spirited Gothic churches springing up under the inspiration of Mr. Cram of Austin. As a matter of feeling, as a matter of fact, as a matter quite apart from theory or opinion, it is not in the religious centers that we have now the feeling of something beautiful but receding, of something loved but lost. It is exactly in the spaces cleared and leveled by America for the large and sober religion of the 18th century. It is where an old house in Philadelphia contains an old picture of Franklin, or where the men of Maryland raised above their city the first monument of Washington. It is there that I feel like one who treads alone some banquet hall deserted, whose lights are fled, whose garlands dead, and all save he departed. It is then that I feel as if I were the last Republican. But when I say that the Republic of the Age of Reason is now a ruin, I should rather say that at its best it is a ruin. At its worst it has collapsed into a death trap, or is rotting like a dung hill. What is the real Republic of our day, as distinct from the ideal Republic of our fathers, but a heap of corrupt capitalism crawling with worms, with those parasites, the professional politicians? I was rereading Swinburne's bitter but not ignoble poem before a crucifix in which he bids Christ or the ecclesiastical image of Christ stand out of the way of the onward march of a political idealism represented by United Italy or the French Republic. I was struck by the strange and ironic exactitude with which every tawny flings at the degradation of the old divine ideal would now fit the degradation of his own human ideal. The time has already come when we can ask his goddess of liberty as represented by the actual liberals. Have you filled full men's starved-out souls? Have you brought freedom on the earth? For every engine in which these old free thinkers firmly and confidently trusted has itself become an engine of oppression and even of class oppression. Its free parliament has become an oligarchy. Its free press has become a monopoly. If the pure church has been corrupted in the course of two thousand years what about the pure Republic that has rotted into a filthy plutocracy in less than a hundred? O hidden face of man, whereover the years have woven a viewless veil if thou were'd verily man's lover, what did thy love or blood avail? Thy blood the priests make poison of and in gold shekels coin thy love. Which has most to do with shekels today, the priests or the politicians. Can we say that in any special sense nowadays that clergymen as such make a poison out of the blood of the martyrs? Can we say it in anything like the real sense which we do say that yellow journalists make poison out of the blood of the soldiers? But I understand how Swinburne felt when confronted by the image of the Carven Christ and perplexed by the contrast between its claims and its consequences. He said his strange farewell to it hastily indeed but not without regret not even really without respect. I felt the same myself when I looked for the last time on the Statue of Liberty. For no. In the conclusion of this chapter I mean by the Republic not merely the American Republic but the whole modern representative system as in France or even in England. The end of Chapter 12 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org What I Saw in America by G. K. Chesterton Section 25 Chapter 13 Is the Atlantic Narrowing A certain kind of question is asked very earnestly in our time because of a certain logical quality in it. Connected with the premises and data it is very difficult to answer. Thus people will ask what is the hidden weakness in the Celtic race that makes them everywhere fail or fade away or how the Germans contrive to bring all their organization into a state of such perfect efficiency. And what was the significance of the recent victory of Prussia? Or they will ask by what stages the modern world has abandoned all belief in miracles and the modern newspapers cease to print any news of murders. They will ask why English politics are free from corruption or by what mental and moral training certain millionaires were able to succeed by sheer force of character. In short they will ask why plutocrats govern well and how it is that pigs fly. Spending their pink pinions to the breeze or delighting us as they twitter and flutter from tree to tree. The logical difficulty of answering these questions is connected with an old story about Charles II and a bowl of goldfish and with another anecdote about a gentleman who was asked when did you leave off beating your wife? But there is something analogous to it in the present discussions about the forces drawing England and America together. It seems as if the reasoners hardly went far enough back in their argument or took trouble enough to disentangle their assumptions. They are still moving with the momentum of the peculiar 19th century notion of progress of certain very simple tendencies perpetually increasing and needing no special analysis. It is so with the international reproachment I have to consider here. In other places I have ventured to express a doubt about whether nations can be drawn together by an ancient rumor about races by a sort of prehistoric chit-chat or the gossip of the Stone Age. I have ventured further and even expressed the doubt about whether they ought to be drawn together or rather dragged together by the brute violence of the engines of science and speed. But there is yet another horrible doubt haunting my morbid mind which will be better for my constitution to confess frankly and that is the doubt about whether they are being drawn together at all. It has long been a conversational commonplace among the Enlightened that all countries are coming closer and closer to each other. It was a conversational commonplace among the Enlightened somewhere about the year 1913 that all wars were receding farther and farther into a barbaric past. There is something about these sayings that seems simple and familiar and entirely satisfactory when we say them. They are of that consoling sort which we can say without any of the mental pain of thinking what we are saying. But if we turn our attention from the phrases we use to the facts that we talk about we shall realize at least that there are a good many facts on the other side and examples pointing the other way. For instance it does happen occasionally from time to time that people talk about Ireland. He would be a very hilarious humanitarian who should maintain that Ireland and England have been more and more assimilated during the last hundred years. The very name of Sinn Fein is an answer to it and the very language in which that phrase is spoken. Curran and Shiel would no more have dreamed of uttering the watchword of repeal in Gaelic than of uttering it in Zulu. Gratton could hardly have brought himself to believe that the real repeal of the Union would actually be signed in London in the strange script as remote as the snaky ornament of the Celtic crosses. It would have seemed like Washington signing the Declaration of Independence in the picture writing of the Red Indians. Ireland has clearly grown away from England and her language, literature, and type of patriotism are far less English than they were. On the other hand no one will pretend that the masses of modern Englishmen are much newer to talking Gaelic or decorating Celtic crosses. A hundred years ago it was perfectly natural that Byron and Moore should walk down the street arm in arm. Even the sight of Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. W. B. Yates walking down the street arm in arm would now arouse some remark. I could give any number of other examples of the same new estrangement of nations. I could cite the obvious facts that Norway and Sweden parted company not very long ago. That Austria and Hungary have again become separate states. I could point to the mob of new nations that have started up after the war to the fact that the great empires are now nearly all broken up. That the Russian Empire no longer directs Poland. That the Austrian Empire no longer directs Bohemia. That the Turkish Empire no longer directs Palestine. Sinn Fein is the separatism of the Irish. Zionism is the separatism of the Jews. But there is one simple and sufficing example which is here more to my purpose and is at least equally sufficient for it. And that is the deepening national difference between the Americans and the English. Let me test it first by my individual experience in the matter of literature. When I was a boy I read a book like The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table exactly as I read another book like The Book of Snoms. I did not think of it as an American book but simply as a book. Its width and idiom were like those of the English literary tradition which is of local color seemed merely accidental like those of an Englishman who happened to be living in Switzerland or Sweden. My father and my father's friends were rightly enthusiastic for the book so that it seemed to come to me by inheritance like Oliver's Travels or Tristum Shandy. His language was as English as Ruskin and a great deal more English than Carlisle. Well I have seen in later years an almost equally wide well-merited popularity of the stories of O. Henry but never for one moment could I or anyone else reading them forget that they were stories by an American about America. The very first fact about them is that they are told with an American accent that is in the unmistakable tones of a brilliant and fascinating foreigner. And the same is true of every other recent work of which the fame has managed across the Atlantic. We did not say that The Spoon River Anthology was a new book but that it was a new book from America. It was exactly as if a remarkable realistic novel was reported from Russia or Italy. We were in no danger of confusing it with the elegy in a country churchyard. People in England who heard of Main Street were not likely to identify it with High Street with the principal thoroughfare in any little town in Berkshire or Buckinghamshire. But when I was a little boy I practically identified the boarding house of the autocrat with any boarding house I happened to know in Brompton or Brighton. No doubt there were differences but the point is that the differences did not pierce the consciousness or prick the illusion. I said to myself people are like this in boarding houses not people are like this in Boston. This can be seen even in the simple matter of language especially in the sense of slang. Take for instance the delightful sketch in The Causary of Oliver Wendell Holmes. The character of the young man called John. He is the very modern type of every modern country who does specialize in slang. He is the young fellow who is something in the city. The everyday young man of the Gilbertian Song with a stick and a pipe and a half bread, black and tan. In every country he is at once witty and commonplace. In every country therefore he tends both to the vivacity and the vulgarity of slang. But when he appeared in Holmes' book his language was not very different from what it would have been in a Brighton instead of Boston boarding house. Or in short if the young man called John had more commonly been called Erie if he had appeared in a modern American book his language would have been almost literally unintelligible. At the least an Englishman would have had to read some of the best sentences twice as he sometimes has to read the dizzy and involved metaphors of O'Henry. Nor is it an answer that this depended on the personalities of the particular writers. A comparison between the real journalism of the time of Holmes and the real journalism of the time of Henry reveals the same thing. It is the expansion of a slight difference of style into a luxuriant difference of idiom. And the process continued indefinitely would certainly produce a totally different language. After a few centuries the signatures of American ambassadors would look as fantastic as Gaelic and the very name of the Republic be as strange as Sin Pain. It is true that there has been on the surface a certain amount of give and take or at least as far as the English are concerned of take rather than give. But it is true that it was once all the other way and indeed the one thing is something just like a nemesis of the other. Indeed the story of the reversal is somewhat singular when we come to think of it. It began in a certain atmosphere and spirit of certain well-meaning people who talked about the English-speaking race and were apparently indifferent to how the English was spoken, whether in the accent of a Jamaican Negro or a convict from Botany Bay. It was their logical tendency to say that Dante was a dago. It was their logical punishment to say that Disraeli was an Englishman. Now there may have been a period when this Anglo-American amalgamation included more or less equal elements from England and America. It never included the larger elements or the more valuable elements of either. But on the whole I think it is true to say that it was not an allotment but an interchange of parts and that things went all one way and then all the other way. People began by telling the Americans that they owed all their past triumphs to England, which was false. They ended up by telling the English that they would owe all their future triumphs to America, which is if possible still more false. Because we chose to forget that New York had been New Amsterdam, we are now in danger of forgetting that London is not New York. Because we insisted that Chicago was only a pious imitation of Chiswick, we may yet see Chiswick an inferior imitation of Chicago. Our Anglo-Saxon historians attempted that conquest in which Howe and Burgoyne had failed and with infinitely less justification on their side. They attempted the great crime of the Anglicization of America. They have called down the punishment of the Americanization of England. We must not murmur, but it is a heavy punishment. It may lift a little of its load however if we look at it more closely. We shall then find that though it is very much on top of us, it is only on top. In the sense that such Americanization as there is is very superficial. For instance there is a certain amount of American slang picked up at random. It appears in certain pushing types of journalism and drama. But we may easily dwell too much on this tragedy of people who have never spoken English, beginning to speak American. I am far from suggesting that American, like any other foreign language, may not frequently contribute to the common culture of the world phrases for which there is no substitute. There are French phrases so used in England and English phrases in France. The word highbrow for instance is a real discovery and a revelation, a new and necessary name for something that walk nameless but enormous in the modern world. A shaft of light and a stroke of lightning. That comes from America and belongs to the world as much as the raven or the scarlet letter or the novels of Henry James belong to the world. In fact I can imagine Henry James originating it in the throes of self-expression and bringing out a word like highbrow with a sort of gentle jerk at the end of searching sentences which grope sensitively until they found the phrase. But most of the American slang that is borrowed seems to be borrowed for no particular reason. It either has no point or the point is lost by translation into another context and culture. It is either something which does not need any grotesque and exaggerative description or of which there already exists a grotesque and exaggerative description more native to our tongue and soil. For instance I cannot see that the strong and simple expression now it is for you to pull the police magistrates nose in any way strengthened by saying now it is up to you to pull the police magistrates nose. When Tennyson says of the men of the Light Brigade there is but to do and die. The expression seems to be perfectly lucid. Up to them to do and die would alter the meter without especially clarifying the meaning. This is an example of ordinary language being quite adequate. But there is a further difficulty that even while slang comes to sound like ordinary language. Very often the English have already as humorous and fanciful idiom of their own only that through habit it has lost its humor. When Keith wrote the line what pipes and chimbells what wild ecstasy. I am willing to believe that the American humorous would have expressed the same sentiment by beginning the sentence with some pipe. When that was first somewhere in the wilds of Colorado it was really funny involving a powerful understatement and the suggestion of a mere sample. If a spinster has informed us that she keeps a bird and we find it is an ostrich there will be considerable point in the Colorado center is saying inquiringly some bird as if he were offering us a small slice of a small plover. But if we go back to this routine rationale of a joke the English language already contains quite as good a joke. It is not necessary to say some bird. There is a far finer irony in the old expression something like a bird. It suggests that the speaker sees something faintly and strangely bird like about a bird. That is remotely and almost irrationally reminds him of a bird. And that there is about ostrich plumes a yard long something like the faint and delicate traces of a feather. It has every quality of image of irony except that nobody even imagines it to be ironical. All that happens is that people get tired of that turn of phrase. Take up a foreign phrase and get tired of that without realizing the point of either. All that happens is that a number of weary people who used to say something like a bird now say some bird with undiminished weariness. But they might just as well use dull and decent English for in both cases they are only using jocular language without seeing the joke. There is indeed a considerable trade in the transplantation of these American jokes to England just now. They generally pine and die in our climate or they are dead before their arrival. But we cannot be certain that they were never alive. There is a sort of unending freeze or scroll of decorative designs unrolled ceaselessly before the British public about a hand-packed husband which is indistinguishable to the eye from an actual self-repeating pattern like that of the Greek key. But which is imported as if it were precious and irreplaceable as the Elgin marbles. Advertisement and syndication make mountains out of the most funny little molehills but no doubt the molehills are picturesque enough in their own landscape. In any case there is nothing so national as humor and many things like many people can be humorous enough when they are at home. But these American jokes are boomed as solemnly as American religions and their supporters gravely testify that they are funny without seeing the fun of it for a moment. This is partly perhaps the spirit of spontaneous institutionalism in American democracy breaking out in the wrong place. They make humor an institution and a man will be set to tell an anecdote as if to play the violin. But when the story is told in America it really is amusing and when these jokes are reprinted in England they are often not even intelligible. With all the stupidity of the millionaire and the monopolist the enterprising proprietor prints jokes in England which are necessarily unintelligible to nearly every English person. Jokes referring to domestic and local conditions quite peculiar to America. I saw one of these native caricatures the other day in which the whole of the joke what there was of it turned on the astonishment of a housewife at the absurd notion of not having an icebox. It is perfectly true that nearly every ordinary American housewife possesses an icebox. An ordinary English housewife would no more expect to possess an icebox than to possess an iceberg. And it would be about as sensible to tow an iceberg to an English port all the way from the North Pole as to trail that one pale and frigid joke to Fleet Street all the way from the York Papers. It is the same with a hundred other advertisements and adaptations. I have already confessed that I took considerable delight in the dancing illuminations of Broadway while in Broadway. Everything there is suitable to them. The vast interminable thoroughfare, the topping houses, the dizzy and restless spirit of the whole city. It is a city of dissolving views and one may almost say a city in everlasting dissolution. But I do not especially admire a burning fragment of Broadway stuck up opposite the old Georgian curve of Regent Street. I would as soon express sympathy with the Republic of Switzerland by erecting a small elp with imitation snow in the middle of St. James Park. But all this commercial copying is very superficial and above all it never copies anything that is really worth copying. Nations never learn anything from each other in this way. We have many things to learn from America but we only listen to those Americans who have still to learn them. Thus for instance we do not import the small farm but only the big shop. In other words we hear nothing of the democracy of the Middle West but everything of the plutocracy of the middle man who is probably as unpopular in the Middle West as the Miller in the Middle Ages. If Mr. Elihu K. Pike could be transplanted bodily from the neighborhood of his hometown of Marathon, Nebraska, with his farm and his frame house and all his fittings, and they could be set down exactly in the spot now occupied by his selfridges, which could be easily cleared away for the purpose. I think we could really get a great deal of good by watching him, even if the watching were inevitably a little too like watching a wild beast in a cage or an insect under a glass case. Urban crowds could collect every day behind a barrier or railing and gaze at Mr. Pike, pottering about all day in his ancient and out of Cthonia's occupations. We could see him growing Indian corn with all the gravity of an Indian, though it is impossible to imagine Mrs. Pike blessing the cornfield in the matter of Minihana. As I have said there is a certain lack of humane myth and mysticism about this Puritan peasantry, but we could see him transforming the maze into popcorn, which is a very pleasant domestic ritual and pastime, and is the American equivalent of the glory of roasting chestnuts. Above all many of us would learn for the first time that a man can really live and walk about upon something more productive than a pavement, and that when he does so he can really be a free man and have no lord but the law. Instead of that American can give nothing to London, but those multiple modern shops of which it has too many already. I know that many people entertain the innocent illusion that big shops are more efficient than small ones, but that is only because the big combinations have the monopoly of advertisement as well as of trade. The big shop is not in the least remarkable for efficiency. It is only too big to be blamed for its inefficiency. It is secured in its reputation for always sacking the wrong man. A big shop considered as a place to shop is simply a village of small shops roofed in to keep out the light and air, and one in which none of the shopkeepers is really responsible for his shop. If anyone has any doubts on this matter, since I have mentioned it, let them consider this fact. That in practice we never do apply this method of commercial combination to anything that matters very much. We do not go to the surgical department of the stores to have a portion of our brain removed by a delicate operation, and then pass on to the advocacy department to employ one or any of its barristers when we are in temporary danger of being hanged. We go to men who own their own tools and are responsible for the use of their own talents. And the same truth applies to that other modern method of advertisement, which has also so largely fallen across us like the gigantic shadow of America. Nations do not earn themselves for a mortal struggle by remembering which sort of submarine they have seen most often on the hoardings. They can do it about something like soap, precisely because a nation will not perish by having a second-rate sort of soap, as it might by having a second-rate sort of submarine. A nation may indeed perish slowly by having a second-rate sort of food or drink or medicine, but that is another and much longer story, and the story is not ended yet. But nobody wins a great battle at a great crisis, because somebody has told him that Kedger Boy's cavalry is the best. It may be that commercial enterprise will eventually cover these fields also, and advertisement agents will provide the instruments of the surgeon and the weapons of the soldier. When that happens, the armies will be defeated, and the patients will die. But though we modern people are indeed patients, in the sense of being merely receptive and accepting things with astonishing patients, we are not dead yet, and we have lingering gleams of sanity. For the best things do not travel. As I appear here as a traveler, I may say with all modesty that the best people do not travel either. Both in England and America the normal people are the national people, and I repeat that I think they are growing more and more national. I do not think the abyss is being bridged by cosmopolitan theories, and I am sure I do not want it bridged by all this slang journalism and blatant advertisement. I have called all that commercial publicity the gigantic shadow of America. It may be the shadow of America, but it is not the light of America. The light lies far beyond, a level light upon the lands of sunset, where it shines upon wide places full of a very simple and a very happy people, and those who would see it must seek for it. The end of Chapter 13 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. What I Saw in America by G. K. Chesterton Section 26 Chapter 14 Lincoln and Lost Causes It has already been remarked here that the English know a great deal about past American literature, but nothing about past American history. They do not know, either, of course, as well as they know the present American advertising, which is the least important of the three. But it is worth noting once more how little they know of the history, and how illogically that little is chosen. They have heard no doubt of the fame of the greatness of Henry Clay. He is a cigar. It would be unwise to cross-examine any Englishman who may be consuming that luxury at the moment, about the Missouri Compromise, or the controversies with Andrew Jackson. And just as the statesman of Kentucky is a cigar, so the state of Virginia is a cigarette. But there is perhaps one exception, or half exception, to this simple plan. It would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that Plymouth Rock is a chicken. Any English person keeping chickens, and chiefly interested in Plymouth Rocks, considered as chickens, would nevertheless have a hazy sensation of having seen the word somewhere before. He would feel subconsciously that the Plymouth Rock had not always been a chicken. Indeed, the name connotes something not only solid, but antiquated, and is not, therefore, a very tactful name for a chicken. There would rise up before him something memorial in the haze that he calls his history, and he would see the history books of his boyhood and old engravings of men in steeple-crowned hats, struggling with sea waves, or red Indians. The whole thing would suddenly become clear to him if, by a simple reform, the chickens were called pilgrim fathers. Then he would remember all about it. The pilgrim fathers were champions of religious liberty, and they discovered America. It is true that he has also heard of a man called Christopher Columbus, but that was in connection with an egg. He has also heard of somebody known as Sir Walter Raleigh, and, though his principal possession was a cloak, it is also true that he had a potato, not to mention a pipe of tobacco. Can it be possible that he brought it from Virginia, where the cigarettes come from? Gradually the memories will come back and fit themselves together for the average henwife who learned history at the English elementary schools, and who has now something better to do. Even when the narrative becomes consecutive it will not necessarily become correct. It is not strictly true to say that the pilgrim fathers discovered America, but it is quite as true as saying that they were champions of religious liberty. If we said that they were martyrs who would have died heroically in torments rather than tolerate any religious liberty, we should be talking something like sense about them, and telling the real truth that is their due. The whole Puritan movement from the solemn league and covenant to the last stand of the last stewards was a struggle against religious toleration, or what they would have called religious indifference. The first religious equality on earth was established by a Catholic cavalier in Maryland. Now there is nothing in this to diminish any dignity that belongs to any real virtues and virilities in the pilgrim fathers. On the contrary it is rather to the credit of their consistency and conviction. But there is no doubt that the note of their whole experiment in New England was intolerance and even inquisition, and there is no doubt that New England was then only the newest and not the oldest of these colonial experiments. At least two cavaliers had been in the field before any Puritans, and they had carried with them much more of the atmosphere and nature of the normal Englishman than any Puritan could possibly carry. They had established it especially in Virginia, which had been founded by a great Elizabethan and named after the great Elizabeth. Before there was any New England in the north there was something like very old England in the south. Relatively speaking there still is. Whenever the anniversary of the Mayflower comes round there is a chorus of Anglo-American congratulations and comradeship, as if this at least were a matter on which all can agree. But I knew enough about America, even before I went there, to know that there are a good many people there at any rate who do not agree with it. Long ago I wrote a protest in which I asked why Englishmen had forgotten the great state of Virginia, the first in foundation and long the first in leadership, and why a few crab nonconformists should have the right to erase a record that begins with Raleigh and ends with Lee, and incidentally includes Washington. The great state of Virginia was the backbone of America until it was broken in the Civil War. From Virginia came the first great presidents and most of the Fathers of the Republic. Its adherence to the southern side in the war made it a great war, and for a long time a doubtful war. And in the leader of the southern armies it produced what is perhaps the one modern figure that may come to shine like St. Louis in the Lost Battle, or Hector dying before Holy Troy. Again it is characteristic that while the modern English know nothing about Lee, they do know something about Lincoln, and nearly all that they know is wrong. They know nothing of his southern connections, nothing of his considerable southern sympathy, nothing of the meaning of his moderation in face of the problem of slavery, now lightly treated as self-evident. Above all they know nothing about the respect in which Lincoln was quite un-English, was indeed the very reverse of English, and can be understood better if we think of him as a Frenchman, since it seems so hard for some of us to believe that he was an American. I mean his lust for logic for its own sake, and the way he kept mathematical truths in his mind like the fixed stars. He was so far from being a merely practical man, impatient of academic abstractions, that he reviewed and reveled in academic abstractions even when he could not apply them to practical life. He loved to repeat that slavery was intolerable while he tolerated it, and to prove that something ought to be done while it was impossible to do it. This was probably very bewildering to his brother politicians, for politicians always whitewash what they do not destroy. But for all that, this inconsistent consistency beat the politicians at their own game, and this abstracted logic proved the most practical of all. For when the chance did come to do something there was no doubt about the thing to be done. The thunderbolt fell from the clear heights of heaven. It had not been tossed about and lost like a common missile in the marketplace. The matter is worth mentioning, because it has a moral for a much larger modern question. A wise man's attitudes towards industrial capitalism will be very like Lincoln's attitude towards slavery. That is, he will manage to endure capitalism, but he will not endure a defense of capitalism. He will recognize the value, not only of knowing what he is doing, but of knowing what he would like to do. He will recognize the importance of having a thing clearly labeled in his own mind as bad, long before the opportunity comes to abolish it. He may recognize the risk of even worse things than immediate abolition, as Lincoln did in abolitionism. He will not call all businessmen brutes any more than Lincoln would call all planters demons, because he knows they are not. He will regard many alternatives to capitalism as crude and inhuman, as Lincoln regarded John Brown's raid, because they are. But he will clear his mind from Kant about capitalism. He will have no doubt of what is the truth about trusts and trade combines and the concentration of capital. And it is the truth that they endure under one of the ironic silences of heaven, over the pageants and the passing triumphs of hell. But the name of Lincoln has a more immediate reference to the international matters I am considering here. His name has been much invoked by English politicians and journalists in connection with the quarrel with Ireland. And if we study the matter, we shall hardly admire the tact and sagacity of those journalists and politicians. History is an eternal tangle of cross purposes, and we could not take a clearer case or rather a more complicated case of such a tangle than the facts lying behind a political parallel recently mentioned by many politicians. I mean the parallel between the movement for Irish independence and the attempted secession of the Southern Confederacy in America. Superficially, anyone might say that the comparison is natural enough, and that there is much in common between the quarrel of the North and South in Ireland and the quarrel of the North and South in America. In both cases, the South was on the whole agricultural, the North on the whole industrial. True, the parallel exaggerates the position of Belfast to complete it, we must suppose, the whole federal system to have consisted of Pittsburgh. In both, the side that was more successful was felt by many to be less attractive. In both, the same political terms were used, such as the term union and unionism. An ordinary Englishman comes to America knowing these main lines of American history, and knowing that the American knows the similar main lines of Irish history. He knows that there are strong champions of Ireland in America. Possibly he also knows that there are very genuine champions of England in America. By every possible historical analogy, he would naturally expect to find the pro-Irish in the South and the pro-English in the North. As a matter of fact, he finds almost exactly the opposite. He finds Boston governed by Irishmen and Nashville containing the people more pro-English than Englishmen. He finds Virginians not only of British blood like George Washington, but of British opinions almost worthy of George III. But I do not say this, as we'll be seen in a moment, as a criticism of the comparative Toryism of the South. I say it as a criticism of the superlative stupidity of English propaganda. On another page, I remark on the need for a new sort of English propaganda. A propaganda that should be really English and have some remote reference to England. Now, if it were a matter of making foreigners feel the real humours and humanities of England, there are no Americans so able or willing to do it as the Americans of the southern states. As I have already hinted, some of them are so loyal to the English humanities that they think it is their duty to defend even the English in humanities. New England is turning into New Ireland, but Old England can still be faintly traced in Old Dixie. It contains some of the best that England herself has had, and therefore, of course, the things that England herself has lost, or is trying to lose. But above all, as I have said, there are people in these places whose historic memories and family traditions really hold them to us, not by alliance, but by affection. Indeed, they have the affection in spite of the alliance. They love us in spite of our compliments and courtesies and hands across the sea. All our ambassadorial salutations and speeches can I kill their love. They manage even to respect us in spite of the shady Jew stockbrokers we send them as English envoys, or the efficient men who are sent out to be tactful with foreigners because they have been too tactless with trade unionists. The type of traditional Americans, North or South, really has some traditions connecting him with England, and though he is now in a very small minority, I cannot imagine why England should wish to make it smaller. England once sympathized with the South. The South still sympathizes with England. It would seem that the South, or some elements in the South, had rather the advantage of us in political firmness and fidelity. But it does not follow that the fidelity will stand every shock, and at this moment and in this manner, of all things in the world, our political propagandists must try to bolster British imperialism up by kicking Southern succession when it is down. The English politician eagerly points out that we shall be justified in crushing Ireland exactly as Sumner and Stevens crushed the most English part of America. It does not seem to occur to them that this comparison between the Unionist triumph in America and the Unionist triumph in Britain is rather hard upon our particular sympathizers who did not triumph. When England exalts in Lincoln's victory over his foes, she is exalting in his victory over her own friends. Or if her diplomacy continues as delicate and chivalrous as it is at present, they may soon be her only friends. But however this may be, it is as well to bear witness to some of the elements of my own experience, and I can answer for at least that there are some people in the South who will not be pleased at being swept into the rubbish heap of history as rebels and ruffians, and who will not, I regret to say, by any means enjoy even being classed with Fenians and Sin-Phaners. Now touching the actual comparison between the conquest of the Confederacy and the conquest of Ireland, there are of course a good many things to be said which politicians cannot be expected to understand. Strange to say it is not certain that a lost cause was never worth winning, and it would be easy to argue that the world lost very much indeed when that particular cause was lost. These are not days in which it is exactly obvious that an agricultural society was more dangerous than an industrial one, and even Southern slavery has had this one moral merit, that it was decadent. It has this one historic advantage, that it is dead. The Northern slavery, industrial slavery, or what is called wage slavery, is not decaying but increasing, and the end of it is not yet. But in any case it would be well for us to realize that the reproach of resembling the Confederacy does not ring in all ears as an unanswerable condemnation. It is scarcely a self-evident or sufficient argument to some hearers, even to prove that the English are as delicate and philanthropic as Sherman. Still less that the Irish are as criminal and lawless as Lee. Nor will it soothe every single soul on the American continent to say that the English victory in Ireland will be followed by a reconstruction, like the reconstruction exhibited in the film called The Birth of a Nation. And indeed there is a further inference from that fine panorama of the exploits of the Ku Klux Klan. It would be easy, as I say, to turn the argument entirely in favor of the Confederacy. It would be easy to draw the moral, not that the Southern Irish are as wrong as the Southern States, but that the Southern States were as right as the Southern Irish. But upon the whole I do not incline to accept the parallel in that sense any more than in the opposite sense. For reasons I have already given elsewhere I do believe that in the main Abraham Lincoln was right. But right in what? If Lincoln was right he was right in guessing that there was not really a Northern Nation and a Southern Nation, but only one American Nation. And if he has been proved right, he has been proved right by the fact that men in the South, as well as the North, do now feel a patriotism for that American Nation. His wisdom, if it really was wisdom, was justified not by his opponents being conquered, but by their being converted. Now if the English politicians must insist on this parallel, they ought to see that the parallel is fatal to themselves. The very test which proved Lincoln right has proved them wrong. The very judgment which may have justified him quite unquestionably condemns them. We have again and again conquered Ireland and have never come an inch nearer to converting Ireland. We have had not one Gettysburg, but twenty Gettysburgs. But we have had no union. And that is where, as I have remarked, it is relevant to remember that flying fantastic vision on the films that told so many people what no histories have told them. I heard when I was in America, rumors of the local reappearance of the Ku Klux Klan, but the smallness and mildness of the manifestation, as compared with the old Southern or the new Irish case, is alone a sufficient example of the exception that proves the rule. To approximate to any resemblance to recent Irish events, we must imagine the Ku Klux Klan riding again in more than the terrors of that vision, wild as the wind, white as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. If there were really such a revival of the Southern action, there would equally be a revival of the Southern argument. It would be clear that Lee was right and Lincoln was wrong, that the Southern states were national and were as indestructible as nations. If the South were as rebellious as Ireland, the North would be as wrong as England. But I desire a new English diplomacy that will exhibit not the things in which England is wrong, but the things in which England is right, and England is right in England, just as she is wrong in Ireland. And it is exactly that rightness of a real nation in itself, that is at once most difficult and most desirable to explain to foreigners. Now the Irishman and to some extent the American has remained alien to England, largely because he does not truly realize that the Englishman loves England. Still less can he really imagine why the Englishman loves England. That is why I insist on the stupidity of ignoring and insulting the opinions of those few Virginians and other Southerners who really have some inherited notion of why Englishmen love England, and even love it in something of the same fashion themselves. Politicians who do not know the English spirit when they see it at home cannot of course be expected to recognize it abroad. Publicists are eloquently praising Abraham Lincoln for all the wrong reasons, but fundamentally for that worst and vilest of all reasons that he succeeded. None of them seems to have the least notion of how to look for England in England, and they would see something fantastic in the figure of a traveller who found it elsewhere, or anywhere but in New England, and it is well perhaps that they have not yet found England where it is hidden in England, for if they found it they would kill it. All I am concerned to consider here is the inevitable failure of this sort of Anglo-American propaganda to create a friendship. To praise Lincoln as an Englishman is about as appropriate as if we were praising Lincoln as an English town. We are talking about something totally different, and indeed the whole conversation is rather like some such cross purposes about some such word as Lincoln, in which one party should be talking about the president and the other about the cathedral. It is like some wild bewilderment in a farce, with one man wondering how a president could have a church spire, and the other wondering how a church could have a chin beard, and the moral is the moral on which I would insist everywhere in this book that the remedy is to be found in disentangling the two, and not in entangling them further. You could not produce a Democrat of that logical type of Lincoln, merely out of the moral materials that now made up an English cathedral town, like that on which Old Tom of Lincoln looks down. But on the other hand it is quite certain that a hundred Abraham Lincoln's working for a hundred years could not build Lincoln Cathedral, and the farcical allegory of an attempt to make Old Tom and Old Abe embrace to the glory of the illogical Anglo-Saxon language is but a symbol of something that is always being attempted and always attempted in vain. It is not by mutual imitation that the understanding can come. It is not by erecting New York skyscrapers in London that New York can learn the sacred significance of the towers of Lincoln. It is not by English dukes importing the daughters of American millionaires that England can get any glimpse of the democratic dignity of American men. I have the best of all reasons for knowing that a stranger can be welcomed in America, and just as he is courteously treated in the country as a stranger, so he should always be careful to treat it as a strange land. That sort of imaginative respect, as for something different and even distant, is the only beginning of any attachment between patriotic peoples. The English traveler may carry with him at least one word of his own great language and literature, and whenever he is inclined to say of anything, this is passing strange. He may remember that it was no inconsiderable Englishman who appended to it the answer, and therefore as a stranger give it welcome.