This second visit to America only deepened in Gilbert's mind many of
the impressions made by the first. Yet the atmosphere of the book is
curiously different from that of _What I Saw in America_. Living in
the country even a few months had so greatly deepened his
understanding. He still preferred the Quakers to the Puritans, "The
essential of the Puritan mood is the misdirection of moral anger." He
still felt that as a whole the United States had started with "a
great political idea, but a small spiritual idea": that it needed a
"return to the vision" in politics and sociology. It was the fashion
today to laugh at the wish for "great open spaces," yet the "real
sociological object in going to America was to find those open
spaces. It was not to find more engineers and electric batteries and
mechanical gadgets in the home. These may have been the result of
America: they were not the causes of America." Asked why he admired
America yet hated Americanisation, he replied:

I should have thought that I had earned some right to apply this
obvious distinction to any foreign country, since I have consistently
applied it to my own country. If the egoism is excusable, I am myself
an Englishman (which some identify with an egoist) and I have done my
best to praise and glorify a number of English things: English inns,
English roads, English jokes and jokers; even to the point of
praising the roads for being crooked or the humour for being Cockney;
but I have invariably written, ever since I have written at all,
against the cult of British Imperialism.

And when that perilous power and opportunity, which is given by
wealth and worldly success, largely passed from the British Empire to
the United States, I have applied exactly the same principle to the
United States. I think that Imperialism is none the less Imperialism
because it is spread by economic pressure or snobbish fashion rather
than by conquest; indeed I have much more respect for the Empire that
is spread by fighting than for the Empire that is spread by finance.*

[* _Sidelights on New London & Newer York_, p. 178.]

He felt that the real causes for admiration, the real greatness of
America, could be found partly through facing its incompleteness and
defects, partly through contemplating the character of the greatest
and most typical of Americans, Abraham Lincoln.

Whilst I was in America, I often lingered in small