Now, all these characters are allied to, or rather spring from, that quality which I noted in my author at the beginning of this long examination, and which I have called “Provincialism.” It is an essential insufficiency for his task. He does not know his Europe; he does not know the world. He writes in the few terms and with the few conceptions of a man going by the labels he finds in the newspapers and textbooks of his native place: certain printed generalizations which he read in his youth and never questioned. He is, therefore, when he talks of the great world of Man, out of touch with the stuff of his subject. It is this, no doubt, coupled with an excellent economy of words and lucidity of style, which has given him his wide public for this book; it is also this which makes the book read second-rate to minds of a higher culture, or of a deeper and more varied experience; and it is this which confines its existence as a book to a very brief period of time. We are reading in this _Outline of History_ the work of a mind closely confined to a particular place and moment—the late Victorian London suburbs. Such a mind has an apparatus quite inferior to the task of historical writing. And that is why I said in my first review of this book, what I here repeat: “It will have a vast circulation, especially in the New World—and an early grave.” I must end upon a much graver note. What are we to say of that world in which a book like this has a sale which, however ephemeral, is at any rate enormous? The question is one that my contemporaries do not seem to have put to themselves sufficiently. I mean, my Catholic contemporaries (for outside the Catholic Church very few people nowadays put any questions to themselves ultimately: they are content to drift and feel). There has not, in my judgment, been nearly enough astonishment, alarm, or even aroused and curious interest in the vast social transformation of which we are the spectators. Some of my contemporaries have criticized me with indignation when I have said that, outside the Catholic body, the last fragments of Catholic doctrine were rapidly dissolving before our eyes: yet surely the huge sales of such a book as this are proof enough that what I have said in this matter was true.