church.
There is something about the very word elevator that expresses a great
deal of his 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.

I think I know my American friends and acquaintances too well to
apologise 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 sky-scraper 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 flamingoes; 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 Labour, 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 of 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 ablutionary allusion, and his eye
brightened. 'That's the only copy in the whole thing,' he said, 'A
Bath-Tub in Every Home.' So these words appeared