discussions in _G.K.'s Weekly_. While the journalists seemed
convinced on his first visit that he had nothing but roses to throw,
and compared him favorably to Dickens, a collection of quotations
could be made from _G.K.'s Weekly_ of a quite opposite kind, yet I do
not think he ever attacks America as much as he attacks England. He
was himself much amused at finding he was expected to be either "For
America" or "Against America," both of which attitudes appeared to
him absurd. In that sense he was neither for nor against his own
country. He liked Americans, he disliked certain trends in America:
because he loved England he disliked the same trends even more in
England. Certain things in modern civilisation which he hated he did
regard as primarily American. American comfort to him seemed acute
discomfort. He thought every American lives in an "airless furnace in
the middle of which he sits and eats lumps of ice."

He had a great hatred of intelligence tests which he called the
"palpable balderdash of irresponsible Yankee boomsters. . . . It is
really one of the maladies of American democracy to be swept by these
prairie fires of pseudo-scientifc fads, and throw itself into
Eugenics or Anthropometric inquiry with the buoyancy of babies." He
believed that there was more democracy in America than in England.
But he hated what he called the "glare of American Advertisement." He
spoke of a "common thief like the American Millionaire" but he
certainly did not exclude the English Millionaire from the same
indictment. His whole view of advertisement reaches a peak in an
article* entitled "If You Have Smiles."

[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, December 10, 1927.]

We read the other day an absolutely solemn and almost tender piece
of advice, in a leading American magazine, about the preservation of
Beauty and Health. It was intended quite seriously. . . . After
describing in most complicated detail how the young woman of today
(well known to be enamored of all that is natural and free) is to
strap up her head and face every night, as if it had to be bandaged
after an accident, it proceeds to say with the most refined American
accent: "With the face thus fixed in smile formation: . . ." but we
have a difficulty about taking this serious advice of American Beauty
Business even so seriously as to meditate on its social menace. The
prospect of such a world of idiots ought to depress us, but . . . no,
it is