Produced by Irma Spehar, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA BY G. K. CHESTERTON HODDER AND STOUGHTON LIMITED LONDON MCMXXII Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. CONSTABLE LTD. at the Edinburgh University Press _Contents_ PAGE WHAT IS AMERICA? 1 A MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 19 A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 33 IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 47 SOME AMERICAN CITIES 63 IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 80 THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 97 PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 121 PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 145 FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 163 THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 182 THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 195 IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 208 LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 222 WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 235 A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 253 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 267 THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 281 THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 295 _What is America?_ I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw dangerously near the outside. So long as he thought of men in the abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them. By going to look at their unfamiliar manners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves in fantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as if men of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understand each other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger--the moment when they meet. We might shiver, as at the old euphemism by which a meeting meant a duel.