 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 1, Chapter 1, Part 1. What is America? I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed, there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourists who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinaman, and clasping Patagonias to his heart in Hampstead or Serbeten, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense. Still less is it meant for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw dangerously near the outside. So long as he thought of men in the abstract like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as those who labor and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them. But going to look at their unfamiliar manners and customs, he is inviting them to disguise themselves in fantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as if men of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understand each other. In reality this is the moment of supreme danger, the moment when they meet. We might shiver as at the old euphism by which a meeting meant a duel. Travel ought to combine amusement with But most travelers are so much amused that they refuse to be instructed. I do not blame them for being amused. It is perfectly natural to be amused at a Dutchman for being Dutch or a Chinaman for being Chinese. Where they are wrong is that they take their own amusement seriously. They base on yet their serious ideas of international instruction. It was sad that the Englishman takes his pleasures sadly and the pleasure of despising foreigners is one which he takes most sadly of all. He comes to scoff and does not remain to pray, but rather to excommunicate. Hence in international relations there is far too little laughing and far too much sneering. But I believe there is a better way which largely consists of laughter, a form of friendship between nations which is actually founded on differences. To hint at some such better way is the only excuse of this book. Let me begin my American impressions with two impressions I had before I went to America. One was an incident and the other an idea, and when taken together they illustrate the attitude I mean. The first principle is that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is foreign. The second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong because it is funny. The reaction of his senses and superficial habits of mind against something new and to him abnormal is a perfectly healthy reaction, but the mind which imagines that mere unfamiliarity can possibly prove anything about inferiority is a very inadequate mind. It is inadequate even in criticizing things that may really be inferior to the things involved here. It is far better to laugh at a negro for having a black face than to sneer at him for having a sloping skull. It is proportionally even more preferable to laugh rather than judge in dealing with highly civilized peoples. Therefore I put at the beginning two working examples of what I felt about America before I saw it. The sort of thing that a man has a right to enjoy is a joke, and the sort of thing he has a duty to understand and respect because it is the explanation of the joke. When I went to the American consulate to regularize my passports I was capable of expecting the American consulate to be American. Ambassies and consulates are by tradition like islands of the soil for which they stand, and I have often found the tradition corresponding to a truth. I have seen the unmistakable French official living on omelets and a little wine and serving his sacred abstractions under the last palm trees fringing a desert. In the heat and noise of quarreling Turks and Egyptians I have come suddenly as with the cool shock of his own shower-bath on the listless amiability of the English gentleman. The officials I interviewed were very American, especially in being very polite. For whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin Chuzzlewit I have always found Americans by far the politest people in the world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up to all appearance like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices. But in reality it was very different from any form I had ever filled up in my life. At least it was a little like a freer form of the game called Confessions, which my friends and I invented in our youth. An examination paper containing questions like, if you saw a rhinoceros in the front garden what would you do? One of my friends I remember wrote, take the pledge. But that is another story, and might bring Mr. Pussyfoot Johnson on the scene before his time. One of the questions of paper was, are you an anarchist, to which a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, what the devil has that to do with you? Are you an atheist? Along with some playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what constitutes a Greek arch. Then there was the question, are you in favor of subverting the government of the United States by force? Against this I should write, I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour and not the beginning. The inquisitor in his more than morbid curiosity had then written down, are you a polygamist? The answer to this is, no such luck, or not such a fool, according to our experience of the other sex. But perhaps a better answer would be that given by W. T. Stead when he circulated the rhetorical question, shall I slay my brother Boer? The answer that ran never interfere in family matters, but among many things that amuse me most to the point of treating the form thus disrespectfully. The most amusing was the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado seeking to slip into America with official papers under official protection, and sitting down to write with a beautiful gravity, I am an anarchist, I hate you all and wish to destroy you. Or I intend to subvert by force the government of the United States as soon as possible, sticking the long sheath knife in my left trouser pocket into Mr. Harding at the earliest opportunity. Or again, yes I am a polygamist all right, and my forty-seven wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as secretaries. There seems to be a certain simplicity of mind about these answers, and it is reassuring to know that anarchists and polymers are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions, and they are certain to tell no lies. Now that is a model of the sort of foreign practice, foundered on foreign problems, at which a man's first impulse is naturally to laugh. Nor have I any intention of apologizing for my laughter. A man is perfectly entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is laugh at it as incomprehensible and then criticize it as if he comprehended it. The very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself. Superficially this is rather a queer business. It would be easy enough to suggest that in this America has introduced a quite abnormal spirit of inquisition and interference with liberty unknown among all the ancient despotisms and aristocracies. About that there will be something to be said later, but superficially it is true that this degree of officialism is comparatively unique. In a journey which I took only the year before, I had occasion to have my papers passed by governments which many worthy people in the West would vaguely identify with Corsayers and Assassins. I have stood on the other side of Jordan and in the land ruled by the rude Arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that one wondered what the brigands looked like. But they did not ask me whether I had come to subvert the powers of Sharif. They did not exhibit the faintest curiosity about my personal views on the ethical basis of civil authority. These ministers of ancient Muslim despotism did not care about whether I was an anarchist and naturally would not have minded if I had been a polygamist. The Arab chief was probably a polygamist himself. These slaves of Asiatic autocracy were content in the old liberal fashion to judge me by my actions. They did not inquire into my thoughts. They held their power as limited to the limitation of practice. They did not forbid me to hold the theory. It would be easy to argue here that Western democracy persecutes where even Eastern despotism tolerates or emancipates. It would be easy to develop the fancy that, as compared with the sultans of Turkey or Egypt, the American constitution is a thing like the Spanish Inquisition. Only the traveler who stops at that point is totally wrong, and the traveler only too often does stop at that point. He has found something to make him laugh and he will not suffer it to make him think. And the remedy is not to unsay what he has said, not even so to speak, to un-laugh what he has laughed, not to deny that there is something unique and curious about this American Inquisition into our abstract opinions, but rather to continue the train of thought and follow the admirable advice of Mr. H. G. Wells, who said, It is not much good thinking of a thing unless you think it out. It is not the deny that American officialism is rather peculiar in this point, but to inquire what it really is which makes America peculiar, or which is peculiar to America. In short, it is to get some ultimate idea of what America is, and the answer to that question will reveal something much deeper and grander and more worthy of our intelligent interest. It may have seemed something less than a compliment to compare the American Constitution to the Spanish Inquisition, but oddly enough it does involve a truth, and still more oddly perhaps it does involve a compliment. The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this, that it is founded on a creed. America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature denunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism since it clearly names the creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about the divine, at least about human things. Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in the world. In its nature it is as broad as its scheme for brotherhood of all men. In its nature it is limited by its definition of the nature of all men. This was true of the Christian Church, which was truly said to exclude neither Jew nor Greek, but which did definitely substitute something else for Jewish religion or Greek philosophy. It was truly said to be a net drawing in all of kinds, but a net of a certain pattern, the pattern of Peter the fisherman. And this is true even of the most disastrous distortions or degradations of that creed, and true among others of the Spanish Inquisition. It may have been narrow touching theology, it could not confess to being narrow about nationality or ethnology. The Spanish Inquisition might be admittedly inquisitorial, but the Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish. Such a Spaniard even when he was narrower than his own creed had to be broader than his own empire. He might burn a philosopher because he was a heterodox, but he must accept the barbarian because he was orthodox. And we see even in modern times that the same church which is blamed for making sages, heretics, is also blamed for making savages, priests. Now in a much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion there is something of the same idea at the back of the great American experiment, the experiment of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a melting pot. But even that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and a certain substance, a pretty solid substance. The melting pot must not melt. The original shape was traced on the lines of Jeffersonian democracy and it will remain in that shape until it becomes shapeless. America invites all men to become citizens, but it implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship. Only so far as its primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religious because it is not racial. The missionary can condemn a cannibal precisely because he cannot condemn a sandwich islander. And in something of the same spirit the American may exclude a polygamist precisely because he cannot exclude a Turk. Now for America, this is no idle theory. It may have been theoretical, though it was thoroughly sincere when that great Virginia gentleman declared in the surroundings that had still something of the character of an English countryside. It is not merely theoretical now. There is nothing to prevent America being literally invaded by Turks as she is invaded by Jews or Bulgers. In the most exquisitely inconsequent of the Bab ballads we are told concerning Pasha Bailey-Ben. One morning knock at half-past eight, a tall red Indian at his gate, and Turkey as perhaps aware red Indians are extremely rare. But the converse, need by no means be true. There is nothing in the nature of things to prevent an immigration of Turks increasing and multiplying on the plains where the red Indians wandered. There is nothing to necessitate the Turks being extremely rare. The red Indians alas are likely to be rarer. And as I much prefer red Indians to Turks, to mention Jews, I speak without prejudice. But the point here is that America, partly by original theory, and partly by historical accident, does lie open to racial admixtures which most countries would think incongruous or comic. That is why it is only fair to read any American definitions or rules in a certain light, and relative to a rather unique position. It is not fair to compare the position of those who may meet Turks in the back street with that of those who have never met Turks except in the bad ballads. It is not fair simply to compare America with England in its regulations about the Turk. In short, it is not fair to do what almost every Englishman probably does, to look at the American International Examination Paper, and laugh and be satisfied with saying, We don't have any of that nonsense in England. We do not have any of that nonsense in England, because we have never attempted to have any of that philosophy in England. And above all, because we have the enormous advantage of feeling it natural to be national, because there is nothing else to be. England in these days is not well governed. England is not well educated. England suffers from wealth and poverty that are not well distributed. But England is English. England is English as France is French, or Ireland Irish. The great mass of men taking certain national traditions for granted. Now this gives us a totally different and a very much easier task. We have not got an inquisition, because we have not got a creed. But it is arguable that we do not need a creed, because we have got a character. In any of the old nations, the national unity is preserved by the national type. Because we have a type, we do not need to have a test. What I Saw in America by G.K. Chesterton. Section 2. Chapter 1. Part 2. What is America? Take that innocent question. Are you an anarchist, which is intrinsically quite as impudent as are you an optimist, or are you a philanthropist? I'm not discussing here whether these things are right, but whether most of us are in a position to know them rightly. Now it is quite true that most Englishmen do not find it necessary to go about all day asking each other whether they are anarchists. It is quite true that the phrase occurs in no British forms that I have seen. But this is not only because most of the Englishmen are not anarchists. It is even more because even the anarchists are Englishmen. For instance, it would be easy to make fun of the American formula by noting that the cap would fit all sorts of bald academic heads. It might well be maintained that Herbert Spencer was an anarchist. It is practically certain that Auburn Herbert was an anarchist. But Herbert Spencer was an extraordinarily typical Englishman of the nonconformist middle class. And Auburn Herbert was an extraordinarily typical English aristocrat of the old and genuine aristocracy. Everyone knew in his heart that the squire would not throw a bomb at the queen and the nonconformist would not throw a bomb at anybody. Everyone knew that there was something subconscious in a man like Auburn Herbert which would have come out only in throwing bombs at the enemies of England, as it did come out in his son and namesake, the generous and unforgotten, who fell flinging bombs from the sky far beyond the German line. Everyone knows that normally in the last resort the English gentleman is patriotic. Everyone knows that the English nonconformist is national, even when he denies that he is patriotic. Nothing is more notable indeed than the fact that nobody is more stamped with the mark of his own nation than the man who says that there ought to be no nations. Somebody called Cobdon the International Man, but no man could be more English than Cobdon. Everyone recognizes Tolstoy as the iconoclast of all patriotism, but nobody could be more Russian than Tolstoy. In the old countries where there are these national types, the types may be allowed to hold any theories. Even if they hold certain theories, they are unlikely to do certain things. So the conscientious objector, in the English sense, may be and is one of the peculiar byproducts of England. But the conscientious objector will probably have a conscientious objection to throwing bombs. Now I am very far from intending to imply that these American tests are good tests, or that there is no danger of tyranny becoming the temptation of America. I shall have something to say later on about that temptation nor tendency. Nor do I say that they apply consistently this conception of a nation with the soul of a church, protected by religious and not racial selection. If they did apply that principle consistently, they would have to exclude pessimists and rich cynics who deny the democratic ideal. An excellent thing, but a rather improbable one. What I say is that when we realize that this principle exists at all, we see the whole position in a totally different perspective. We say that the Americans are doing something heroic or doing something insane or doing it in an unworkable or unworthy fashion, instead of simply wondering what the devil they are doing. When we realize the democratic design of such a cosmopolitan commonwealth, and compare it with our insular reliance or instincts, we see at once why such a thing has to be not only democratic but dogmatic. We see why in some points it tends to be inquisitive or intolerant. Anyone can see the practical point by merely transferring into private life a problem, like that of the two academic anarchists who might, by a coincidence, be called the two Herbert's. Suppose a man said, Buffalo, my old Oxford tutor wants to meet you. I wish you'd ask him down for a day or two. He has the oddest opinions, but he's very stimulating. It would not occur to us that the oddity of the Oxford Don's opinions would lead him to blow up the house. Because the Oxford Don is an English type. Suppose somebody said, do let me bring old Colonel Robinson down for the weekend. He's a bit of a crank, but quite interesting. We should not anticipate the Colonel running amok with a carving knife and offering up human sacrifice in the garden. For these are not among the daily habits of an old English Colonel. And because we know his habits we do not care about his opinions. But suppose somebody offered to bring a person from the interior of Khamskatka to stay with us for a week or two, and added that his religion was very extraordinary religion. We should feel a little more inquisitive about what kind of religion it was. If somebody wished to add Harry Anu to the family party at Christmas, explaining that his point of view was so individual and interesting we should want to know a little more about it in him, we should be tempted to draw up as a fantastic and examination paper as presented to the immigrant going to America. We should ask what a Harry Anu was, and how Harry he was, and above all what sort of Anu he was. Would etiquette require us to ask him to bring his wife, and if we did ask him to bring his wife, how many wives would he bring? In short, as in the American formula, is he a polygamist? Merely as a point of housekeeping and accommodation, the question is not irrelevant. Is Harry Anu content with hair, or does he wear any clothes? If the police insist on his wearing clothes, will he recognize the authority of the police? In short, as in American formula, is he an anarchist? Of course, this generalization about America, like other historical things, is subject to all sorts of cross divisions and exceptions, to be considered in their place. The Negroes are a special problem because of what white men in the past did to them. The Japanese are a special problem because of what men fear that they in the future may do to white men. The Jews are a special problem because of what they and the Gentiles in the past, present and future, seem to have the habit of doing to each other. But the point is not that nothing exists in America except this idea. It is that nothing like this idea exists anywhere except in America. This idea is not internationalism. On the contrary, it is decidedly nationalism. The Americans are very patriotic and wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of making a new nation, literally out of any old nation, that comes along. In a word, what is unique is not America, but what is called Americanization. If we understand nothing, till we understand the amazing ambition to Americanize the Comsketkin and Harry Anou, we are not trying to anglicize thousands of French cooks or Italian organ grinders. France is not trying to galecize thousands of English trippers or German prisoners of war. America is the one place in the world where this process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on. And the process, as I have pointed out, is not internationalization. It would be truer to say it is the nationalization of the internationalized. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles. This is what at once illuminates and softens the moral regulations which we may really think fattest or fanatical. They are abnormal, but in one sense this experiment of a home for the homeless is abnormal. In short, it has long been recognized that America was an asylum. It is only since prohibition that it has looked a little like a lunatic asylum. It was before sailing for America, as I have said, that I stood with the official paper in my hand and these thoughts in my head. It was while I stood on English soil that I passed through the two stages of smiling and then sympathizing, of realizing that my momentary amusement at being asked if I were not an anarchist was partly due to the fact that I was not an American. And in truth, I think there are some things a man ought to know about America before he sees it. What we know of a country beforehand may not affect what we see that it is, but it will vitally affect what we appreciate it for being, because it will vitally affect what we expect it to be. I can honestly say that I had never expected America to be what, nine-tenths of the newspaper critics invariably assumed it to be. I never thought it was a sort of Anglo-Saxon colony, knowing that it was more and more strong with crowds of very different colonists. During the war I felt that the very worst propaganda for the Allies was the propaganda for the Anglo-Saxons. I tried to point out that in one way America is nearer to Europe than England is. If she is not nearer to Bulgaria, she is nearer to Bulgars. If she is not nearer to Bohemia, she is nearer to Bohemians. In my New York hotel the head waiter in the dining room was a Bohemian. The lead waiter in the grill room was a Bulgar. Americans have nationalities at the end of the street, which for us are at the ends of the earth. I did my best to persuade my countrymen not to appeal to the American as if he were a rather dowdy Englishman, who had been rusticating in the provinces and had not heard the latest news about the town. I shall record later some of those arresting realities which the traveler does not expect and which, in some cases, I fear, he actually does not see because he does not expect. I shall try to do justice to the psychology of what Mr. Belak has called the eye-openers in travel. But there are some things about America that a man ought to see even with his eyes shut. One is that a state that came into existence solely through its repudiation and abhorrence of the British Crown is not likely to be a respectful copy of the British Constitution. Another hurt is that the chief mark of the Declaration of Independence is something that is not only absent from the British Constitution, but something which all our Constitutionalists have invariably thanked God with the jolliest boasting and bragging that they had kept out of the British Constitution. It is the thing called abstraction or academic logic. It is the thing which such jolly people call theory and which those who can practice it call thought. And the theory or thought is the very last to which English people are accustomed, either by their social structure or their traditional teaching. It is the theory of equality. It is the pure, classic conception that no man must aspire to be anything more than a citizen, and that no man should endure to be anything less. It is by no means especially intelligible to an Englishman who tends at his best to the virtues of the gentleman and at his worst to the vices of the snob. The idealism of England, or if you will, the romance of England, has not been primarily the romance of the citizen. But the idealism of America, we may safely say, still revolves entirely around the citizen and his romance. The realities are quite another matter, and we shall consider in his place the question of whether the ideal will be able to shape the realities or will merely be beaten shapeless by them. The ideal is besieged by inequalities of the most towering and insane description in the industrial and economic fields. It may be devoured by modern capitalism, perhaps the worst inequality that ever existed among men. Of all that we shall speak later, but citizenship is still the American ideal. There is an army of actualities opposed to that ideal, but there is no ideal opposed to that ideal. American plutocracy has never got itself respected like English aristocracy. Citizenship is the American ideal, and it has never been the English ideal. But it is surely an ideal that may stir some imaginative generosity and respect in an Englishman, if he will condescend to be also a man. In this vision of molding many peoples into the visible image of the citizen, he may see a spiritual adventure which he can admire from the outside, at least as much as he admires the valor of the Muslims, and much more than he admires the virtues of the Middle Ages. He need not set himself to develop equality, but he need not set himself to misunderstand it. He may at least understand what Jefferson and Lincoln meant, and he may possibly find some assistance in this task by reading what they said. He may realize that equality is not some crude fairytale about all men being equally tall or equally tricky, which we not only cannot believe, but cannot believe in anybody believing. It is an absolute of morals by which all men have a value in variable and indestructible, and a dignity as intangible as death. He may at least be a philosopher and see that equality is an idea, and not merely one of these soft-headed skeptics who, having risen by low tricks to high places, drink bad champagne in Tadre hotel lounges, and tell each other twenty times over with unwearyed iteration that equality is an illusion. In truth it is inequality that is the illusion. The extreme disproportion between men that we seem to see in life is a thing of changing lights and lengthening shadows, a twilight full of fancies and distortions. We find a man famous and cannot live long enough to find him forgotten. We see a race dominant and cannot linger to see a decay. It is the experience of men that always returns to the equality of men. It is the average that ultimately justifies the average man. It is when men have seen and suffered much and come at the end of more elaborate experiments, that they see men as men under an equal light of death and daily laughter, and none the less mysterious for being many. Nor is it in vain that these Western Democrats have sought the blazonry of their flag in that great multitude of immoral lights that endure behind the fires we see, and gather them into the corner of all glory, whose ground is like the glittering night, for veritably in the spirit, as well as in the symbol, suns and moons and meteors pass and fill our skies with a fleeting and almost theatrical conflagration, and wherever the old shadow stoops upon the earth the stars return, the end of section two, end of chapter one. 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 three, chapter two, part one, a meditation in a New York hotel. All this must begin with an apology, and not an apology. When I went wandering about the United States disguised as a lecturer, I was well aware that I was not sufficiently well disguised to be a spy. I was even in the worst possible position to be a sightseer. A lecturer to American audiences can hardly be in the holiday mood of a sightseer. It is rather the audience that is sightseeing, even if it is seeing a rather melancholy sight. Some say that people come to see the lecturer and not to hear him, in which case it seems rather a pity that he should disturb and distress their minds with a lecture. He might merely display himself on a stand or platform for a stipulated sum, or be exhibited like a monster in a menagerie. The circus elephant is not expected to make a speech, but it is equally true that the circus elephant is not allowed to write a book. His impressions of travel would be somewhat sketchy and perhaps a little over-specialized. In merely traveling from circus to circus he would, so to speak, move in rather narrow circles. Jumbo, the great elephant, with whom I am hardly so ambitious as to compare myself, before he eventually went to the Barnum show, passed a considerable and I trust happy part of his life in Regent's Park. But if he had written a book on England, founded on his impressions of the zoo, it might have been a little disproportionate and even misleading in its version of the flora and fauna of that country. He might imagine that lions and leopards were commoner than they are in our hedgerows and country lanes, or the head of the neck of the giraffe was as native to our landscapes as a village spire. And that is why I apologize in anticipation for a probable lack of proportion in this work. Like the elephant, I may have seen too much of a specialized enclosure, where a special sort of lions are gathered together. I may exaggerate the territorial as distinct from the vertical space occupied by the spiritual giraffe, for the giraffe may surely be regarded as an example of uplift, and is even in a manner of speaking a highbrow. Above all, I shall probably make generalizations that are much too general and are insufficient through being exaggerative. To this sort of doubt, all my impressions are subject, and among them the negative generalization with which I shall begin this rambling meditation on American hotels. In all my American wanderings I never saw such a thing as an inn. They may exist, but they do not arrest the traveler upon every road as they do in England and in Europe. The saloons no longer existed when I was there, owing to the recent reform which restricted intoxicants to the wealthier classes. But we feel that the saloons have been there, and if one may so express it, their absence is still present. They remain in the structure of the street, or the idiom of the language, but the saloons were not ins. If they had been ins, it would have been far harder, even for the power of modern plutocracy to root them out. There will be a very different chase when the white heart is hunted to the forests or when the red lion turns to bay. But people could not feel about the American saloon as they will feel about the English ins. They could not feel that the prohibitionist, that vulgar chucker out, was chucking chosser out of the tabard and Shakespeare out of the mermaid. In justice to the American prohibitionist it must be realized that they were not doing quite such desecration, and that many of them felt the saloon especially poisonous sort of place. They did feel that drinking places were used only as drug shops, so they have affected the great reconstruction by which it will be necessary to use only drug shops as drinking places. But I am not dealing here with the problem of prohibition, except in so far as it is involved in the statement that the saloons were in no sense ins. Secondly, of course, there are the hotels. There are indeed. There are hotels toppling to the stars, hotels covering the acreage of villages, hotels in multitudinous number like a mob of Babylonian or Assyrian monuments. But the hotels also are not ins. Broadly speaking there is only one hotel in America. The pattern of it, which is very rational pattern, is repeated in cities as remote from each other as the capitals of European empires. You may find that hotel rising among the red blooms of the warm spring woods of Nebraska, or whitened with Canadian snows near the eternal noise of Niagara. And before touching on this solid and simple pattern itself, I may remark that the same system of symmetry runs through all the details of the interior. As one hotel is like another hotel, so one hotel floor is like another hotel floor. If the passage outside your bedroom door or hallway, as it is called, contains, let us say, a small table with a green vase and a stuffed flamingo or some trifle of the sort, you may be perfectly certain that there is exactly the same table, vase, and flamingo on every one of the 32 landings of that towering habitation. This is where it differs most perhaps from the crooked landings and unexpected levels of the old English inns, even when they call themselves hotels. To me there was something weird, like a magic multiplication in the exquisite sameness of these suites. It seemed to suggest the still atmosphere of some eerie psychological story. I once myself entertained the notion of a story in which a man was to be prevented from entering his house, the scene of some crime or calamity, by people who painted and furnished the next house to look exactly like it. The assimilation going to the most fantastic lane such as altering the numbering of houses in the street. I came to America and found an hotel fitted and upholstered throughout for the enactment of my phantasmal fraud. I offer the skeleton of my story with all humility to some of the admirable Lady Writers of Detective Stories in America, to Miss Carolyn Wells or Miss Mary Roberts Reinhardt or Mrs. A. K. Green of the Unforgotten Leavenworth case. Surely it might be possible for the unsophisticated Nimrod K. Moose of Yellow Dog Flat to come to New York and be entangled somehow in this net of repetitions or recurrences. Surely something tells me that his beautiful daughter, the Rose of Red Murder Gulch, might seek for him in vain amid the apparently unmistakable surroundings of the 32nd floor, while he was being quietly butchered by the floor clerk on the 33rd floor, an agent of the Green Claw, that formidable organization, and all because the two floors looked exactly alike to the Virginal Western Eye. The original point of my own story was that the man to be entrapped walked into his own house after all, in spite of it being differently painted and numbered, simply because he was absentminded and used to taking a certain number of mechanical steps. This would not work in the hotel, because a lift has no habits. It is typical of the real tameness of machinery that even when we talk of a man turning mechanically, we only talk metaphorically, for it is something that a mechanism cannot do. But I think there is only one real objection to my story of Mr. Moose in the New York Hotel, and that is, unfortunately, a rather fatal one. It is that far away in the remote desolation of Yellow Dog, among those outlying and outlandish rocks that almost seem to rise beyond the sunset. There is undoubtedly a hotel of exactly the same sort, with all its floors exactly the same. Anyhow, the general plan of the American Hotel is commonly the same, and as I have said, it is a very sound one so far as it goes. When I first went into the big New York hotels, the first impression was certainly its bigness. It was called the Biltmore, and I wondered how many national humorists had made the obvious comment of wishing they had built less. But it was not merely the Babylonian size and scale of such things, it was the way in which they are used. They are used almost as public streets, or rather, as public squares. My first impression was that I was in some sort of high street or marketplace during a carnival or revolution. True, the people looked rather rich for a revolution and rather grave for a carnival, but they were congested in great crowds that moved slowly, like people passing through an overcrowded railway station. Even in the dizzying heights of such a skyscraper, there could not possibly be room for all those people to sleep in the hotel, or even to dine in it. And as a matter of fact, they did nothing whatever except drift into it and drift out again. Most of them had no more to do with the hotel than I have with Buckingham Palace. I have never been in Buckingham Palace, and I have very seldom thank God been in the big hotels of this type that exist in London or Paris. But I cannot believe that mobs are perpetually pouring through the hotel's Cecil or the Savoy in this fashion, calmly coming in at one door and going out of the other. But this fact is part of the fundamental structure of the American hotel. It is built upon a compromise that makes it possible. The whole of the lower floor is thrown open to the public streets and treated as a public square. But above it, and all around it, runs another floor in the form of a sort of deep gallery, furnished more luxuriously and looking down on the moving mobs beneath. No one is allowed on this floor except the guests or clients of the hotel. As I have been one of them myself, I trust it is not unsympathetic to compare them to active anthropoids who can climb trees and so look down in safety on the herds or packs of wilder animals wandering and prowling below. Of course, there are modifications to this architectural plan, but they are generally approximations to it. It is the plan that seems to suit the social life of the American cities. There is generally something like a ground floor that is more public, a half floor or gallery above that is more private, and above that the bulk of the block of bedrooms, a huge hive with its innumerable and identical cells. The latter of a sense in this tower is, of course, the lift or, as it is called in America, the elevator. With all that we hear of American hustle and hurry, it is rather strange that Americans seem to like more than we do to linger upon very long words, and indeed there is an element of delay in their diction and spirit very little understood, which I may discuss elsewhere. Anyhow, they say elevator when we say lift, just as they say automobile when we say motor, hence theographer when we say typist, or sometimes by a slight confusion typewriter. Which reminds me of another story that never existed about a man who was accused of having murdered and dismembered his secretary when he had only taken his typing machine to pieces. But we must not dwell on these digressions. The Americans may have another reason for giving long and ceremonious titles to the lift. When I first came among them, I had a suspicion that they possessed and practiced the new and secret religion, which was the cult of the elevator. I fancied they worshiped the lift, or at any rate worshiped in the lift. The details or data of this suspicion it were now vain to collect as I have regretfully abandoned it, except in so far as they illustrate the social principles underlying the structural plan of the building. Now an American gentleman invariably takes off his hat in the lift. He does not take off his hat in the hotel, even if it is crowded with ladies. But he always so salutes the lady in the elevator, and this marks the difference of atmosphere. The lift is a room, but the hotel is a street. But during my delusion, of course, I assume that he uncovered in this tiny temple merely because he was in church. There is something about the very word elevator that expresses a great deal of this vague but idealistic religion. Perhaps that flying chapel will eventually be ritualistically decorated like a chapel, possibly with a symbolic scheme of wings. Perhaps a brief religious service will be held in the elevator as it ascends in a few well chosen words touching the utmost for the highest. Possibly he would consent even to call the elevator a lift, if he could call it an uplift. There would be no difficulty except what I cannot but regard as the chief moral problem of all optimistic modernism. I mean the difficulty of imagining a lift, which is free to go up, if it is not also free, to go down. The end of Section 3, Chapter 2, Part 1. What I Saw in America by G. K. Chesterton. Section 4, Chapter 2, A Meditation in a New York Hotel, Part 2. I think I know my American friends and acquaintances too well to apologize for any levity in these illustrations. Americans make fun of their own institutions and their own journalism is full of such fanciful conjectures. The tall building is itself artistically akin to the tall story. The very word skyscraper is an admirable example of an American lie. But I can testify quite as eagerly to the solid and sensible advantages of the symmetrical hotel. It is not only a pattern of vases and stuffed flamingos. It is also an equally accurate pattern of cupboards and baths. It is a dignified and humane custom to have a bathroom attached to every bedroom. And my impulse to sing the praises of it brought me once, at least, into a rather quaint complication. I think it was in the city of Dayton. Anyhow I remember there was a laundry convention going on in the same hotel, in a room very patriotically and properly festooned with the stars and stripes, and doubtless full of promise for the future of laundering. I was interviewed on the roof within earshot of this debate, and may have been the victim of some association or confusion. Anyhow, after answering the usual questions about labor, the League of Nations, the length of ladies' dresses, and other great matters, I took refuge in a rhapsody of warm and well-deserved praise of American bathrooms. The editor, I understand, running a gloomy eye down the column in his contributor's story, and seeing nothing but metaphysical terms such as justice, freedom, the abstract disapproval of sweating, swindling, and the like, paused at last upon the evolutionary illusion, and his eye brightened. That's the only copy in the whole thing, he said, a bathtub in every home. So these words appeared in enormous letters above my portrait in the paper. It will be noted that, like many things, that practical men make a great point of, they miss the point. What I had commended as new and national was a bathroom in every bedroom. Even feudal and moss-grown England is not entirely ignorant of an occasional bathtub in the home. But what gave me great joy was what followed. I discovered with the light that many people, glancing rapidly at my portrait with its prodigious legend, imagined that it was a commercial advertisement, and that I was a very self-advertising commercial traveler. When I walked about the streets I was supposed to be traveling in bathtubs. Consider the caption of the portrait and you will see how similar it is to true commercial slogan. We offer a bathtub in every home. And this charming error was doubtless clinched by the fact that I had been found haunting the outer courts of the temple of the ancient guild of lavenders. I never knew how many shared the impression. I regret to say that I only traced it with certainty into individuals. But I understand that it included the idea that I had come to the town to attend the laundry convention and had made an eloquent speech to that senate, no doubt exhibiting my tubs. Such was the penalty of too passionate and unrestrained in admiration for American bathrooms. Yet the connection of ideas, however inconsequent, does cover the part of social practice for which these American institutions can really be praised. About everything like laundry or hot or cold water, there is not only organization, but what does not always or perhaps often go with it, efficiency. Americans are particular about these things of dress and decorum, and it is a virtue which I very seriously recognize, though I find it very hard to emulate. But with them it is a virtue. It is not a mere convention, still less a mere fashion. It is really related to human dignity rather than to social superiority. The really glorious thing about the American is that he does not dress like a gentleman. He dresses like a citizen or a civilized man. His puritanic particularity, on certain points, is really detachable from any definite social ambitions. These things are not a part of getting into society, but merely of keeping out of savagery. Those millions and millions of middling people, that huge middle class, especially of the Middle West, are not near enough to any aristocracy, even to be sham aristocrats, or to be real snobs. But their standards are secure, and though I do not really travel in a bathtub or believe in the bathtub of philosophy and religion, I will not on this matter recoil misanthropically from them. I prefer the tub of Dayton to the tub of Diogenes. On these points there is really something a million times better than efficiency, and that is something like equality. In short the American hotel is not America, but it is American. In some respects it is as American as the English in is English, and it is symbolic of that society and this among other things, that it does tend too much to uniformity, but that, that very uniformity disguises not a little natural dignity. The old Romans boasted that their republic was a nation of kings. If we really walked abroad in such a kingdom, we might very well grow tired of the sight of a crowd of kings, of every man with a gold crown on his head, or an ivory scepter in his hand. But it is arguable that we ought not to grow tired of the repetition of crowns and scepters any more than of the repetition of flowers and stars. The whole imaginative effort of Walt Whitman was really an effort to absorb and animate these multitudinous modern repetitions, and Walt Whitman would be quite capable of including in his lyric litany of optimism a list of the 999 identical bathrooms. I do not sneer at the generous effort of the giant, though I think when all is said that it is a criticism of modern machinery that the effort should be gigantic as well as generous. While there is so much repetition there is little repose. It is the pattern of a kaleidoscope rather than a wallpaper, a pattern of figures running and even leaping like the figures in a zeotrope. But even in the groups where there was no hustle there was often something of homelessness. I do not mean merely that they were not dining at home, but rather that they were not at home, even when dining, and dining at their favorite hotel. They would frequently start up and dart from the room at a summons from the telephone. It may have been fanciful, but I could not help feeling a breath of home, as from a flap or flutter of St. George's Cross, when I first sat down in a Canadian hotelory and read the announcement that no such telephonic or other summonses were allowed in the dining room. It may have been a coincidence, and there may be American hotels with this merciful proviso and Canadian hotels without it. But the thing was symbolic, even if it was not evidential. I felt as if I stood indeed upon English soil in a place where people liked to have their meals in peace. The process of the summons is called paging, and consists of sending a little boy with a large voice through all the halls and corridors of the building, making them resound with a name. The custom is common, of course, in clubs and hotels even in England, but in England it is a mere whisper compared with the whale with which the American Page repeats the formula of calling Mr. So-and-So. I remember a particularly crowded partier in the somewhat smoky and oppressive atmosphere of Pittsburgh, through which wanted a youth with a voice, the like of which I have never heard in the land of the living, a voice like the cry of a lost spirit saying again and again forever, Carling Mr. Anderson! One felt that he never would find Mr. Anderson. Perhaps he never had been any Mr. Anderson to be found. Perhaps he and everyone else wandered in abyss of bottomless skepticism, and he was but the victim of one out of numberless nightmares of eternity, as he wandered a shadow with shadows, and wailed by impassable streams. This is not exactly my philosophy, but I feel sure it was his, and it is a mood that may frequently visit the mind in the centers of highly active and successful industrial civilization. Such are the first idle impressions of the great American hotel, gained by sitting for the first time in its gallery and gazing on its drifting crowds with thoughts equally drifting. The first impression is of something enormous, and rather unnatural, an impression that is gradually tempered by experience of the kindness and even the tameness of so much of that social order. But I should not be recording the sensations with sincerity if I did not touch in passing the note of something unearthly about that vast system to an insular traveler who sees it for the first time. It is as if he were wandering in another world among the fixed stars, or were still in an ideal utopia of the future. Yet I am not certain, and perhaps the best of all news is that nothing is really new. I sometimes really have a fancy that many of these new things, in new countries, are but the resurrections of all things which have been wickedly killed or stupidly stunted in old countries. I have looked over the sea of little tables in some light and airy open-air café, and my thoughts have gone back to the plain wooden bench and wooden table that stands solitary and weather-stained outside so many neglected English ins. We talk of experimenting in the French café as of some fresh and almost impudent innovation, but our fathers had the French café in the sense of the free and easy table in the sun and air. The only difference was that the French democracy was allowed to develop its café or multiply its tables while English plutocracy prevented any such popular growth. Perhaps there are other examples of old types and patterns lost in the old oligarchy and saved in the new democracies. I am haunted with a hint that the new structures are not so very new, and that they remind me of something very old. As I look from the balcony floor, the crowd seems to float away and the colors to soften and grow pale, and I know I am in one of the simplest and most ancestral of human habitations. I am looking down from the old wooden gallery upon the courtyard of an inn. This new architectural model which I have described is, after all, one of the oldest European models, now neglected in Europe and especially in England. It was the theatre in which were enacted innumerable pick-a-res comedies and romantic plays with figures ranging from Sancho Ponsa to Sam Weller. It served as the apparatus, like some gigantic toys set up in bricks and timber, for the ancient and perhaps eternal game of tennis. The very terms of the original game were taken from the inn courtyard, and the players scored accordingly as they hit the buttery hatch or the roof. Singular speculations, however, in my mind as the scene darkens and the quadrangle below begins to empty in the last hours of night. Some day perhaps this huge structure will be found standing in solitude like a skeleton, and it will be the skeleton of the spotted dog or the blue boar. It will wither and decay until it is worthy at last to be a tavern. I do not know whether men will play tennis on his ground floor with various scores and prizes for hitting the electric fan or the lift or the head waiter. Perhaps the very words will only remain as part of some such rustic game. Perhaps the electric fan will no longer be electric and the elevator will no longer elevate. Now the waiter will only wait to be hit. But at least it is only by the decay of modern plutocracy which seems already to have begun that the secret of the structure, even of this plutocratic place, can stand revealed. And after long years when his lights are extinguished and only the long shadows inhabit its halls and vestibules, there may come a new noise-like thunder of D'Artagnan knocking at the door, the end of Section 4, the end of Chapter 2. This is the 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 5, Chapter 3, Part 1, A Meditation in Broadway When I had looked at the lights of Broadway by night, I made to my American friends an innocent remark that seemed for some reason to amuse them. I had looked not without joy at that long kaleidoscope of colored lights arranged in large letters and sprawling trademarks, advertising everything from pork to pianos, through the agency of the two most vivid and most mystical of the gifts of God. Color and Fire I said to them in my simplicity, what a glorious garden of wonders this would be to anyone who was lucky enough to be unable to read. Here it is but a text for a further suggestion. Let us suppose that there does walk down this flaming avenue a peasant of the sort called scornfully an illiterate peasant. By those who think that insisting on people reading and writing is the best way to keep out the spies who read in all languages and the forgers who write in all hands. On this principle indeed, a peasant merely acquainted with things of little practical use to mankind, such as plowing, cutting wood, or growing vegetables, would very probably be excluded. And it's not for us to criticize from the outside the philosophy of those who would keep out the farmer and let in the forger. But let us suppose, if only for the sake of argument, that the peasant is walking under the artificial suns and stars of this tremendous thoroughfare, that he has escaped to the land of liberty upon some general rumor and romance of the story of its liberation, but without being yet able to understand the arbitrary signs of its alphabet. The soul of such a man would surely soar higher than the skyscrapers, and embrace a brotherhood broader than Broadway. Realizing that he had arrived on an evening of exceptional festivity worthy to be blazoned with all this burning heraldry, he would please himself by guessing what great proclamation or principle of the Republic hung in the sky like a constellation, or rippled across the street like a comet. He would be sure enough to guess that the three festoons fringed with fiery words of somewhat similar pattern stood for government of the people, for the people, by the people. For it must obviously be that, unless it were liberty, equality, fraternity. His sureness would perhaps be a little shaken, if he knew that the triads stood for Tangtonic today, Tangtonic tomorrow, Tangtonic all the time. He will soon identify a restless ribbon of red lettering, red hot and rebellious, as the saying, Give me liberty, or Give me death. He will fail to identify it as the equally famous saying, Skyo-line has gout beaten to a frazzle. Therefore, it was that I desired the peasant to walk down that grove of fiery trees under all-red golden foliage, and fruits, like monstrous jewels, as innocent as Adam before the fall. He would see sights almost as fine as the flaming sword, or the purple and peacock plumage of the Seraphim, so long as he did not go near the Tree of Knowledge. In other words, if once he went to school it would all be up, and indeed I fear in any case he would soon discover his error. If he stood wildly waving his hat for liberty in the middle of the road as Chunk Chutney picked itself out in ruby stars upon the skies, he would impede the excellent but extremely rigid traffic system of New York. If he fell on his knees before a sapphire splendor and began saying an Ave Maria under a mistaken association, he would be conducted kindly but firmly by an Irish policeman to a more authentic shrine. But though the foreign simplicity might not long survive in New York, it is quite a mistake to suppose that such a foreign simplicity cannot enter New York. He may be excluded for being illiterate, but he cannot be excluded for being ignorant, nor for being innocent. Least of all, can he be excluded for being wiser in his innocence than the world in its knowledge? There is here indeed more than one distinction to be made. New York is a cosmopolitan city, but it is not a city of cosmopolitans. Most of the masses in New York have a nation, whether or no it be the nation to which New York belongs. Those who are Americanized are American, and very patriotically American. Those who are not thus nationalized are not in the least internationalized. They simply continue to be themselves. The Irish are Irish, the Jews are Jewish, and all sorts of other tribes carry on the traditions of remote European valleys almost untouched. In short, there is a sort of slender bridge between their old country and anew, which they either cross or do not cross, but which they sell them simply occupy. They are exiles, or they are citizens. There is no moment when they are cosmopolitans. But very often the exiles bring with them not only rooted traditions, but rooted truths. Indeed it is to a great extent the thought of the strange souls and crude American garb that gives a meaning to the masquerade of New York. In the hotel where I stayed the head waiter in one room was a Bohemian, and I am glad to say that he called himself a Bohemian. I have already protested sufficiently before American audiences against the pedantry of perpetually talking about Czechoslovakia. But I suggested to my American friends that the abandonment of the word Bohemian, in its historical sense, might well extend to its literary and figurative sense. We might be expected to say, I'm afraid Henry has got into very Czechoslovakian habits lately, or don't bother to dress, it's quite a Czechoslovakian affair. Anyhow, my Bohemian would have nothing to do with such nonsense. He called himself a son of Bohemia and spoke, as such, in his criticisms of America which were both favourable and unfavourable. He was a squat man with a sturdy figure and a steady smile, and his eyes were like dark pools in the depths of a dark forest, but I do not think he had ever been deceived by the lights of Broadway. But I found something like my real innocent abroad, my real peasant among the sky signs, in another part of the same establishment. He was much leaner man, equally dark, with a hook-nose, hungry face, and fierce black moustaches. He also was a waiter and was in the costume of a waiter, which is a smarter addition of the costume of a lecturer. As he was serving me with a clam chowder or some such thing, I fell into speech with him, and he told me he was Bulgar. I said something like, I'm afraid I don't know as much as I ought to about Bulgaria. I suppose most of your people are agricultural, aren't they? He did not stir an inch from his regular attitude, but he slightly lowered his low voice and said yes, from the earth we come and to the earth we return. When people get away from that, they are lost. To hear such a thing said by a waiter was alone an epic in the life of an unfortunate writer of fantastic novels. To see him clear away the clam chowder like an automaton, and bring me more ice water like an automaton, or like anything else on earth except an American waiter, for piling up ice is the cold passion of their lives, and all this after having uttered something so dark and deep, so starkly incongruous and so startlingly true, was an indescribable thing, but very like the picture of the peasant admiring Broadway. So he passed with his artificial clothes and manners, lit up with all the ghastly artificial light of the hotel and all the ghastly artificial life of the city, and his heart was like his own remote and rocky valley, where those unchanging words were carved as on a rock. I do not profess to discuss here at all adequately the question this raises about the Americanization of the Bulgar. It has many aspects of some which most Englishmen and even some Americans are rather unconscious. For one thing, a man with so rugged a loyalty to a land could not be Americanized in New York, but it is not so certain that he could not be Americanized in America. We might almost say that a peasantry is hidden in the heart of America. So far as our impressions go, it is a secret. It is rather like an open secret covering only some thousand square miles of open prairie, but for most of our countrymen it is something invisible, unimagined and unvisited. The simple truth that where all those acres are, there is agriculture, and where all that agriculture is, there is considerable tendency towards distributive or decently equalized property, as in a peasantry. On the other hand, there are those who say that the Bulgar will never be Americanized, that he only comes to be a waiter in America, that he may afford to return to be a peasant in Bulgaria. I cannot decide this issue, and indeed I did not introduce it to this end. I was led to it by a certain line of reflection that runs along the great white way, and I'll continue to follow it. The criticism, if we could put rightly, not only discovers more than New York, but more than the whole new world. An argument against it is quite as valid against the largest and richest cities of the old world, against London or Liverpool or Frankfurt or Belfast. But it is in New York that we see the argument most clearly because we see the thing thus towering into its own turrets and breaking into its own fireworks. I disagree with the aesthetic condemnation of modern city with its skyscrapers and sky signs. I mean that which laments the loss of beauty and its sacrifice to utility. It seems to me the very reverse of the truth. Years ago when people used to say the Salvation Army doubtless had good intentions, but we must all deplore its methods. I pointed out that the very contrary is the case. Its method, the method of drums and democratic appeal, is that of the Franciscans or any other march of the church militant. It was precisely its aims that were dubious, with their dissenting morality and despotic finance. It is somewhat the same with things like the sky signs in Broadway. The esthete must not ask me to mingle my tears with his because these things are merely useful and ugly, for I am not especially inclined to think them ugly, but I am strongly inclined to think them useless. As a matter of art for art's sake they seem to me rather artistic. As a form of practical social work they seem to me stark stupid waste. But Mr. Bilge is rich enough to build a tower four hundred feet high and give it a crown of golden crescents and crimson stars in order to draw attention to his manufacture of the Paradise toothpaste or the Seventh Heaven cigar. I do not feel the least disposition to thank him for any serious form of social service. I have never tried the Seventh Heaven cigar. Indeed a premonition moves me towards the belief that I shall go down to the dust without trying it. I have every reason to doubt whether it does any particular good to those who smoke it, or any good to anybody except those who sell it. In short Mr. Bilge's usefulness consists in being useful to Mr. Bilge, and all the rest is illusion and sentimentalism. But because I know that Bilge is only Bilge, shall I stoop to the profanity of saying that fire is only fire? Shall I blaspheme crimson stars any more than crimson sunsets? Or deny that those moons are golden any more than this grass is green? If a child saw these colored lights he would dance with as much delight as any other colored toys, and it is the duty of every poet and even of every critic, to dance in respectful imitation of the child. Indeed I am in a mood of so much sympathy with the fairy lights of this pantomime city that I should be almost sorry to see social sanity and a sense of proportion returned to extinguish them. I fear the day is breaking and the broad daylight of tradition and ancient truth is coming to end all this delightful nightmare of New York at night. Peasants and priests and all sorts of practical and sensible people are coming back into power, and their stern realism may wither all these beautiful, unsubstantial, useless things. They will not believe in the Seventh Heaven's cigar, even when they see it shining as with stars in the Seventh Heaven. They will not be affected by the advertisements any more than the priests and peasants of the Middle Ages would have been affected by advertisements. Only a very soft-headed, sentimental, and rather servile generation of men could possibly be affected by advertisements at all. People who are a little more hard-headed, humorous, and intellectually independent see the rather simple joke and are not impressed by this or any other form of self-praise. Almost any other man in almost any other age would have seen the joke. If you had said to a man in the Stone Age, Ugg says Ugg makes the best stone hatchets, he would have perceived a lack of detachment and disinterestedness about the testimonial. If you had said to a medieval peasant, Robert the Boyer proclaims with three blasts of a horn that he makes good bows. The peasant would have said, Well, of course he does, and thought about something more important. It is only among the people whose minds have been weakened by a sort of mesmerism that so transparent a trick as that of advertisement could ever have been tried at all. And if ever we have again, as for other reasons I cannot but hope that we shall, a more democratic distribution of property and a more agricultural basis of national life, it would seem at first sight only too likely that all this beautiful superstition will perish, and the fairyland of Broadway, with all its varied rainbows, fade away. For such people the seventh heaven cigar like the nineteenth century city will have ended in smoke, and even the smoke of it will have vanished. CHAPTER III PART II A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY But the next stage of reflection brings us back to the peasant looking at the lights of Broadway. It is not true to say, in the strict sense, that the peasant has never seen such things before. The truth is that he has seen them on a much smaller scale, but for a much larger purpose. Peasants also have their ritual in ornament, but it is to adorn more real things. Apart from our first fancy about the peasant who could not read, there is no doubt about what would be apparent to a peasant who could read and who could understand. For him also fire is sacred, for him also color is symbolic. But where he sets up a candle to light the little shrine of St. Joseph, he finds it takes twelve hundred candles to light the seventh heaven cigar. He is used to the colors in the church windows showing red for martyrs or blue for Madonna's, but here he can only conclude that all the colors of the rainbow belong to Mr. Bilge. Now upon the aesthetic side, he might well be impressed, but it is exactly on the social and even scientific side that he has a right to criticize. If he were a Chinese peasant, for instance, and came from a land of fireworks, he would naturally suppose that he had happened to arrive at a great firework display in celebration of something, perhaps the sacred emperor's birthday or rather birth night. It would gradually dawn on the Chinese philosopher that the emperor could hardly be born every night, and when he learned the truth the philosopher, if he was a philosopher, would be a little disappointed, possibly a little disdainful. Here for instance these everlasting fireworks with the damp squibs and dying bonfires of Guy Fawkes Day. That quaint and even queer national festival has been fading for some time out of English life. Still it was a national festival, in the double sense that it represented some sort of public spirit pursued by some sort of popular impulse. People spent money on the display of fireworks, they did not get money by it, and the people who spent money were often those who had very little money to spend. It had something of the glorious and fanatical character of making the poor poorer. It did not like the advertisements have only the mean and materialistic character of making the rich richer. In short it came from the people and it appealed to the nation. The historical and religious cause in which it originated is not mine, and I think it has perished partly through being tied to a historical theory for which there is no future. I think this is illustrated in the very fact that the ceremonial is merely negative and destructive. Negation and destruction are very noble things as far as they go, and when they go in the right direction, and the popular expression of them has always something hearty and human about it. I shall not therefore bring any fine or fastidious criticism, whether literary or musical, to bear upon the little boys who drag about a bolster and a paper mask calling out, Guy Fawkes Guy, hit him in the eye. But I admit that it is a disadvantage that they have not a saint or hero to crown an effigy, as well as a traitor to burn an effigy. I admit the popular Protestantism has become too purely negative for people to wreath in flowers, the statue of Mr. Kenseth, or even of Dr. Clifford. I do not disguise my preference for popular Catholicism, which still has statues that can be wreathed in flowers. I wish our national feast of fireworks revolved round something positive and popular. I wish the beauty of a Catherine wheel were displayed to the glory of St. Catherine. I should not especially complain if Roman candles were really Roman candles. But this negative character does not destroy the national character, which began at least in disinterested faith, and has ended at least in disinterested fun. There is nothing disinterested at all about the new commercial fireworks. There is nothing so dignified as a dingy guy among the lights of Broadway. In that thoroughfare indeed, the very word guy has another and milder significance. An American friend congratulated me on the impression I produced on a lady interviewer observing. She says you're a regular guy. This puzzled me a little at the time. Her description is no doubt correct, I said, but I confess it would never have struck me as specially complementary. But it appears that it is one of the most graceful of compliments in the original American. A guy in America is a colorless term for a human being. All men are guys being endowed by their creator with certain but I am misled by another association. And a regular guy means, I presume, a reliable or respectable guy. The point here, however, is that the guy in the grotesque English sense does represent the dilapidated remnant of a real human tradition of symbolizing real historic ideals by the sacramental mystery of fire. It is a great fall from the lowest of these lowly bonfires to the highest of the modern sky signs. The new illumination does not stand for any national ideal at all. And what is yet more to the point it does not come from any popular enthusiasm at all. That is where it differs from the narrowest national Protestantism of the English institution. Mobs have risen in support of no popery. No mobs are likely to rise in defense of the new puffery. Many a poor, crazy, orange man has died saying to hell with a pope. It is doubtful whether any man will ever, with his last breath, frame the ecstatic words, try Hugby's chewing-gum. These modern and mercantile legends are imposed upon us by a mercantile minority, and we are merely passive to the suggestion. The hypnotist of high finance or big business merely writes his commands in heaven with a finger of fire. All men really are guys, in the sense of dummies. We are only the victims of this pyrotechnic violence, and it is he who hits us in the eye. This is the real case against that modern society that is symbolized by such art and architecture. It is not that it is toppling, but that it is top heavy. It is not that it is vulgar, but rather that it is not popular. In other words, the democratic ideal of the countries like America, while it is still generally sincere and sometimes intense, is at issue with another tendency, an industrial progress which is of all things on earth the most undemocratic. America is not alone in possessing the industrialism, but she is alone in emphasizing the ideal that strives with industrialism. Industrial capitalism and ideal democracy are everywhere in controversy, but perhaps only here are they in conflict. France has a democratic ideal, but France is not industrial. England and Germany are industrial, but England and Germany are not really democratic. Of course when I speak here of industrialism I speak of great industrial areas. There is as will be noted later on other side to all these countries. There is in America itself not only a great deal of agricultural society, but a great deal of agricultural equality, just as there are still peasants in Germany, and may some day again be peasants in England. But the point is that the ideal, and its enemy, the reality, are here crushed very close to each other in the high narrow city, and that the skyscraper is truly named because its top towering in such insolence is scraping the stars off the American sky, the very heaven of the American spirit. That seems to me the main outline of the whole problem. In the first chapter of this book I have emphasized the fact that equality is still the ideal, though no longer the reality of America. I should like to conclude this one by emphasizing the fact that the reality of modern capitalism is menacing that ideal with terrors and even splendors that might well stagger the wavering and impressionable modern spirit. Upon the issue of that struggle depends the question of whether this new great civilization continues to exist, and even whether anyone cares if it exists or not. I have already used the parable of the American flag and the stars that stand for a multitudinous equality. I might here take the opposite symbol of these artificial interstial stars, flaming on the forehead of the commercial city, and note the peril of the last illusion, which is that the artificial stars may seem to fill the heavens and the real stars to have faded from sight. But I am content for the moment to reaffirm the merely imaginative pleasure of these dizzy turrets of dancing fires. If those nightmare buildings were really all built for nothing, how noble they would be. The fact that they were really built for something need not unduly depress us for a moment, or drag down our soaring fancies. There is something about these vertical lines that suggests a sort of rush upwards as of great cataracts topsy-turvy. I have spoken of fireworks, but here I should rather speak of rockets. There is only something underneath the mind, murmuring that nothing remains at last of a flaming rocket except a falling stick. I have spoken of Babylonian perspectives and of words written with a fiery finger, like that huge, unhuman finger that wrote on Belshazzar's wall. But what did it write on Belshazzar's wall? I am content once more to end on a note of doubt and rather dark sympathy with those many-colored solar systems turning so dizzily far up in the divine vacuum of the night. From the earth we come, and to the earth we return. When people get away from that, they are lost. The end of Section 6 The End of Chapter 3 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 7 Chapter 4 Part 1 Irish and Other Interviewers It is often asked what should be the first thing that a man sees when he lands in a foreign country. But I think it should be the vision of his own country. At least when I came into New York, Harbour, a sort of grey and green cloud came between me and the towers with multitudinous windows, white in the winter sunlight, and I saw an old brown house standing back among the beech trees at home. The house of only one among many friends and neighbors, but one somehow so sunken in the very heart of England as to be unconscious of her imperial or international position, and out of the sound of her perilous seas. But what made most clear the vision that revisited me was something else. Before We Touchland, the men of my own guild, the journalists and reporters, had already boarded the ship like pirates, and one of them spoke to me in an accent that I knew, and thanked me for all I had done for Ireland. And it was at that moment that I knew most vividly what I wanted was to do something for England. Then as a chance I looked across the Statue of Liberty, and saw that great bronze was gleaming green in the morning light. I had made all the obvious jokes about the Statue of Liberty. I found it had a soothing effect on earnest prohibitionists on the boat, to urge, as a point of dignity and delicacy, that it ought to be given back to the French, a vicious race abandoned to the culture of the vine. I proposed that the last liquors on board should be poured out in a pagan libation before it. And then I suddenly remembered that this liberty ship was still in some sense enlightening the world, or one part of the world, was a lamp for one sort of wanderer, a star of one sort of seafarer. To one persecuted people at least this land had really been an asylum, even if recent legislation, as I have said, had made them think it a lunatic asylum. They had made it so much their home that the very color of the country seemed to change with the infusion as the bronze of the Great Statue took on a semblance of the wearing of the green. It is a commonplace that the Englishman has been stupid in his relations with the Irish, but he has been far more stupid in his relations with the Americans on the subject of the Irish. His propaganda has been worse than his practice, and his defense more ill-considered than the most indefensible things that it was intended to defend. There is in this matter a curious tangle of cross-purposes which only parallel example can make it all clear. And I will note the point here because it is some testimony to its vivid importance that it was really the first I had to discuss on American soil with an American citizen. In a double sense I touched Ireland before I came to America. I will take an imaginary instance from another controversy in order to show how the apology can be worse than the action. The best we can say for ourselves is worse than the worst that we can do. There was a time when English poets and other publicists could always be inspired with instantaneous indignation about the persecuted Jews in Russia. We have heard less about them since we heard more about the persecuting Jews in Russia. I fear there are a great many middle-class Englishmen already who wish the Trotsky had been persecuted a little more. But even in those days Englishmen divided their minds in a curious fashion and unconsciously distinguished between the Jews whom they had never seen in Warsaw and the Jews whom they had often seen in Whitechapel. It seemed to be assumed that by a curious coincidence Russia possessed not only the very worst anti-Semites, but the very best Semites. A moneylender in London might be like a Judas Iscariot, but a moneylender in Moscow must be like Judas Maccabeus. Nevertheless, there remained in our common sense an unconscious but fundamental comprehension that the unity of Israel, a sense that some things could be said and some could not be said about the Jews as a whole, suppose that even in those days to say nothing of these, an English protest against Russian anti-Semitism had been answered by the Russian anti-Semites, and suppose the answer had been somewhat as follows. It is all very well for foreigners to complain of our denying civic rights to our Jewish subjects, but we know the Jews better than they do. They are a barbarous people entirely primitive and very like the simple savages who cannot count beyond five on their fingers. It is quite impossible to make them understand ordinary numbers to say nothing of simple economics. They do not realize the meaning or the value of money. No Jew anywhere in the world can get into his stupid head the notion of a bargain or of exchanging one thing for another. Their hopeless incapacity for commerce or finance would retard the progress of our people, would prevent the spread of any sort of economic education, would keep the whole country on a level lower than that of the most prehistoric methods of barter. What Russia needs most is a mercantile middle class, and it is unjust to ask us to swamp its small beginnings in thousands of these rude tridesmen, who cannot do a sum of simple addition or understand the symbolic character of a three-penny bit. We might as well be asked to give civic rights to cows and pigs as to this unhappy, half-witted race, who can no more count than the beasts of the field in every intellectual exercise they are hopelessly incompetent. No Jew can play chess, no Jew can learn languages, no Jew has ever appeared in the smallest part in any theatrical performance. No Jew can give or take any pleasure connected with any musical instrument. These people are our subjects and we understand them. We accept full responsibility for treating such troglodytes on our own terms. It would not be entirely convincing. It would sound a little far-fetched and unreal. But it would sound exactly like our utterances about the Irish, as they sound to all Americans, and rather especially to anti-Irish Americans. That is exactly the impression we produce on the people of the United States when we say, as we do say in substance, something like this. We mean no harm to the poor dear Irish, so dreamy, so irresponsible, so incapable of order or organization. If we were to withdraw from their country, they would only fight among themselves. They have no notion of how to rule themselves. There is something charming about their unpracticability, about their very incapacity for the court's business of politics, but for their own sakes it is impossible to leave these emotional visionaries to ruin themselves in the attempt to rule themselves. They are like children. But they are our own children and we understand them. We accept full responsibility for acting as their parents and guardians. Now the point is not only that this view of the Irish is false, but that it is the particular view that the Americans know to be false. While we are saying that the Irish could not organize, the Americans are complaining, often very bitterly, of the power of Irish organization. While we say that the Irishman could not rule himself, the Americans are saying, more or less humorously, that the Irishman rules them. A highly intelligent professor said to me in Boston, We have solved the Irish problem here. We have an entirely independent Irish government. While we are complaining in an almost passionate manner of the impotence of mere cliques of idealists and dreamers, they are complaining, often in a very indignant manner, of the power of great gangs of bosses and bullies. There are a great many Americans who pity the Irish, very naturally and very rightly, for the historic martyrdom which their patriotism has endured. But there are a great many Americans who do not pity the Irish in the least. They would be much more likely to pity the English. Only this particular way of talking tends rather to make them despise the English. Thus both the friends of Ireland and the foes of Ireland tend to be the foes of England. We make one set of enemies by our action and another by our apology. It is a thing that can from time to time be found in history, a misunderstanding that really has a moral. The English excuse would carry much more weight if it had more sincerity and more humility. There are a considerable number of people in the United States who could sympathize with us if we would say frankly that we fear the Irish. Those who despise our pity might possibly even respect our fear. The argument I have often used in other places comes back with prodigious and redoubled force after hearing anything of American opinion. The argument that the only reasonable or reputable excuse for the English is the excuse of a patriotic sense of peril, and that the Unionist, if he must be a Unionist, should use that and no other. When the Unionist has said that he dare not let loose against himself a captive he has so cruelly wronged, he has said all that he has to say, all that he has ever had to say, all that he will ever have to say. He is like a man who has sent a virile and rather vindictive rival unjustly to penal servitude, and who connives at the continuance of the sentence, not because he himself is particularly vindictive, but because he is afraid of what the convict will do when he comes out of prison. This is not exactly a moral strength, but it is a very human weakness, and that is the most that can be said for it. All other talk about Celtic frenzy or Catholic superstition is Kant, invented to deceive himself or deceive the world. But the vital point to realize is that it is Kant that cannot possibly deceive the American world. In the matter of the Irishman the American is not to be deceived. It is not merely true to say that he knows better. It is equally true to say that he knows worse. He knows vices and evils in the Irishman that are entirely hidden in the hazy vision of the Englishman. He knows that our unreal slanders are inconsistent even with the real sins. To us Ireland is a shadowy isle of sunset, like Atlantis, about which we can make up legends. To him it is a positive ward or parish in the heart of his huge cities, like Whitechapel. About which even we cannot make legends, but only lies. And as I have said there are some lies we do not tell even about Whitechapel. We do not say it is inhabited by Jews too stupid to count or know the value of a coin. The first thing for any honest Englishman to send across the sea is this, that the English have not the shadow of a notion of what they are up against in America. They have never even heard of the batteries of almost brutal energy, of which I had thus touched a live wire, even before I landed. People talk about the hypocrisy of England in dealing with a small nationality. What strikes me is the stupidity of England in supposing that she is dealing with a small nationality, when she is really dealing with a very large nationality. She is dealing with a nationality that often threatens, even numerically, to dominate all the other nationalities of the United States. The Irish are not decaying. They are not unpractical. They are scarcely even scattered. They are not even poor. They are the most powerful and practical world combination with whom we can decide to be friends or foes. That is why I thought first of that still and solid brown house in Buckinghamshire, standing back in the shadows of the trees. Among my impressions of America, I have deliberately put first the figure of the Irish-American interviewer, standing on the shore more symbolic than the Statue of Liberty. The Irish interviewer's importance for the English lay in the fact of his being an Irishman, but there was also considerable interest in the circumstance of his being an interviewer. And as certain wild birds sometimes wing their way far out to sea and are the first signal of the shore, so the first Americans, the traveller-meets, are often American interviewers, and they are generally birds of a feather, and they certainly flock together. In this respect there is a slight difference in the etiquette of the craft in the two countries, which I was delighted to discuss with my fellow craftsmen. If I could at that moment have flown back to Fleet Street, I am happy to reflect that nobody in the world would in the least wish to interview me. I should attract no more attention than the stone griffin opposite the law-cords, both monsters being grotesque but also familiar. But supposing for the sake of argument that anybody did want to interview me, it is fairly certain that the fact of one paper publishing such an interview would rather prevent the other papers from doing so. The repetition of the same views of the same individual in two places would be considered rather bad journalism. It would have an air of stolen thunder, not to say stage thunder. But in America the fact of my landing and lecturing was evidently regarded in the same light as a murder or a great fire or any other terrible but incurable catastrophe, a matter of interest to all pressmen concerned with practical events. One of the first questions I was asked was how I should be disposed to explain the wave of crime in New York. Naturally, I replied that it might possibly be due to the number of English lecturers who had recently landed. In the mood of the moment it seemed possible that if they had all been interviewed, regrettable incidents might possibly have taken place. But this was only the mood of the moment, and even as a mood it did not last more than a moment. And since it has reference to a rather common and rather unjust conception of American journalism, I think it will to take it first as a fallacy to be refuted, though the refutation may require a rather longer approach. The end of Section 7, Chapter 4, Part 1