Let us state the case briefly and simply. Nobody who knows anything of the facts of the case regards the citizen of the United States as a sort of transplanted Britisher; but with the exception of certain coloured millions and certain Red Indian survivals they are manifestly transplanted Europeans, whose political institutions were originally built up in reaction to the Hanoverian monarchy and as a development of and in close sympathy with European liberalism and British nonconformity. This community of transplanted Europeans had the good fortune to have no strong military neighbour, and it had an almost virgin continent into which to expand. This good fortune enabled the States to realise very swiftly the full social and political possibilities of steamboat, railway, and electric communication. They have developed a great State on the modern scale, with an unprecedented unity and uniformity of general ideas. A little too favoured by their immunities, they have not perhaps made so good a pace as they might have done with their general elementary education, but altogether their progress has been marvellous. The congested and entangled States of Western Europe--I leave out the Russian and British systems, which are neither of them truly European--are destined to achieve an ultimate unity under the same irresistible forces of transport that have expanded and held together the American United States. Their unification may be complicated or arrested by the unavoidable interweaving of the Slav and British systems with their destinies, and it is surely impossible for anyone outside the Belloc type of mentality to imagine either English-speaking or Latin-speaking America having neither voice nor share in the European part of this recrystallisation of the world’s affairs. In this new order of life into which our kind is passing, Roman Christendom will become a local tradition and a province, just as Sumeria was swallowed up in Babylonia and just as the Empires of Babylon and Egypt became memories and provinces in the Empire of Rome. We are not developing new races, but merely mingling those we have, and our cultures do not so much differentiate as fuse, so we may reasonably hope to have at last one creative culture, with many aspects, replacing the partial civilisations of the past. Fate has imposed it upon Mr. Belloc that he should see these things and deny them. His lot, I think, might have been happier had he been born and settled in some rich little town in the South of France, and there sat in the café, drinking his good red wine and orating and denying, without the irritation of having seen and known. But it was decreed that he should go to America and come back to report a strange and terrible land where the mountains are not really mountains nor the rivers rivers, and where a strange race grows outside the pale.