no good. Our faces are fixed in smile formation when we think
of that American.

He repeated often how much he liked the inhabitants of Main Street
(grievously wronged by Sinclair Lewis).

American ideals are not nearly so nice as American realities. We
lament not so much what Babbitt is as what he is trying to be. What
he is is a simple and kindly man . . . what he's trying to be is the
abomination of desolation; the Man who made Salesmanship an Art; the
Man Who Would Not Stay Down; the Man Who Got the Million Dollar Post
After Taking Our Correspondence Course; the Man Who Learned Social
Charm in Six Lessons.*

[* Jan. 14, 1928.]

At the time of the depreciation of the franc Belloc's articles in
_G.K.'s Weekly_, echoed in the Leaders, pointed to finance,
especially American finance, as the criminal that was forcing down
the French currency. An American correspondent in the paper attacked
these attacks on the ground that they were inspired by British
Imperialism! Chesterton felt it a little hard to be at this date
confused with Kipling. He replied that his correspondent committed
"the blunder of an extravagant and excessive admiration for England."
He speaks of

that tremendous procession that passed through Paris, literally an
army of cripples. It was a march of all those walking units, those
living fragments of humanity that had been left by the long stand of
five years upon the French frontiers; a devastated area that passed
endlessly like a river . . . they illustrate the main fact that
France was in the center of that far-flung fighting line of
civilization; that it was upon her that the barbarian quarrel
concentrated; and that is an historical fact which the foolish vanity
of many Englishmen, as well as of many Americans, is perpetually
tempted to deny. Our critic is therefore quite beside the mark if he
imagines that I am trying to score off his country out of a cheap
jealousy on behalf of my own. My jealousy is for justice and for a
large historical understanding of this great passage in history. My
own country won glory enough in that and other fields to make it
quite unnecessary for any sane Englishman to shut his eyes to Europe
in order to brag about England. . . . I have not the faintest doubt
what Thomas Jefferson would have said, if he had been told that a few
financial oligarchs who happen to live in New York, were beating