America has not enough peasants. This is an interesting development, or perhaps I had better say an interesting lapse, in the ideas of a woman we had come to regard, perhaps rashly, as a boldly progressive spirit. This is turning back to the earthy romanticism of Belloc and Chesterton, and I think it shows the profoundest misapprehension of the fundamentals of the American situation. America has not developed a peasant population--for it is sheer perversity of Miss West to write as she does of Abraham Lincoln as a peasant’s son, as a traditional plough-driver, instead of an axe-wielder from the East. America, with machines to plough straighter and deeper than any clodhopper can ever do, has no need of peasants for any purpose at all, except perhaps as negro cotton-growers in the South. America is not developing a peasantry and probably never will. At present the drift to the towns is continuous, and rural depopulation is as present a problem in the United States as in Great Britain. That Miss West should associate civil order with a peasantry shows an odd forgetfulness of European conditions. England, which has had practically no peasantry for two centuries, but only wage-earning labourers, displays the greatest social order and security in the world; Russia, which is practically all peasantry, can, and could before the war, show a lawlessness, an indiscipline and social insecurity far exceeding anything of which Miss West complains in America. I would as soon accept Zola’s valuation of the peasant in _La Terre_ as Miss West’s discovery of him as the soil from which all the social virtues spring. It is in quite another quarter that I should look for the forces that will ultimately adjust and bring together into a law-abiding social harmony all the loose and conflicting elements of the American State, and that is in a great development of schools and colleges. It is from the head and centre and not from the base that the modern community must be unified. It is a point that Miss West seems to ignore altogether, that the United States is, in spite of the aggregatory form of its constitution, the first instance of a new type of community altogether, the type that steam railways, electrical communications, and power machinery have made possible. It may have much trouble and darkness in its destiny, but nothing but complete disaster can ever lead to another repetition of that levelling down and earthing up of the human spirit in peasant life that underlies the old-world civilisations. The chief faults and merits of American life are alike the characteristics of a released population that has escaped from that intimate servitude to pedestrian locality, to the dungheap, the patch, the hovel, and the bitter narrow outlook, for ever.