rk existed (he felt) as a new and startling expression of them.
They shrieked in every light and from every sky-scraper. The whole
question of America was: would the older simpler really great
historical tradition win, or would it be defeated by the new and
towering evil? He has an interesting chapter on the countryside,
finding hope in the considerable extension of small ownership among
the farmers and in the houses built from the growing material that
wood is, but he is again depressed at the reflection that the culture
of the countryside is not its own but imported from the
towns--therefore itself largely commercialised.

Roaming over the world in search of his examples Chesterton sees the
ideal of the early republicans as dead in the republics of today, and
nowhere more dead than in America. It would be useless, he feels, to
invoke Jefferson or Lincoln in the modern world against the tyranny
of wage-slavery or in favour of racial justice because "the bridge of
brotherhood had broken down in the modern mind."

Jefferson the Deist "said the sight of slavery in his country made
him tremble, remembering that God is just," but the modern who has
lost these absolute standards has "grown dizzy with degree and
relativity." Hence came the same terrible peril in both England and
America: that in the eyes of the new plutocracy the idea of manhood
has gone. "There were different sorts of apes; but there was no doubt
that we were the superior sort."

Only in one direction did he see real hope. The new dreams of the
18th century had gone, but the ancient dogmas of the Catholic Church
remained. Catholics might forget brotherhood, like their fellows, but
"the Catholic type of Christianity had rivetted itself irrevocably to
the manhood of all men." "The church would always continue to ordain
negroes and canonise beggars and labourers." "Where its faith was
fixed by creeds and councils it could not save itself even by
surrender. . . . THERE IS NO BASIS FOR DEMOCRACY EXCEPT IN A DOGMA
ABOUT THE DIVINE ORIGIN OF MAN."

I have put that final sentence in capitals for it is the climax both
of Gilbert's thinking about America and of one of the most important
trains of thought that brought him to the home of liberty secured for
the human race by dogma--that is to say by revealed truth. He went
home to be received into the Catholic Church as I have earlier
related.

_What I Saw in America_ is of special importance in relation to later