ine.
Surely Pershing as well as Peter the Hermit was merely a rather restless
gentleman who found his health improved by frequent change of scene.
The Americans said, and perhaps thought, that they were fighting
for democracy; and the Crusaders said, and perhaps thought,
that they were fighting for Christianity. But as we know what
the Crusaders meant better than they did themselves, I cannot
quite understand why we do not enjoy the same valuable omniscience
about the Americans. Indeed I do not see why we should not enjoy it
(for it would be very enjoyable) about any individual American.
Surely it was this vague vagabond spirit that moved Mr. Pound,
not only to come to England, but in a fashion to come to Fleet Street.
A dim tribal tendency, vast and invisible as the wind, carried him
and his article like an autumn leaf to alight on the _New Age_ doorstep.
Or a blind aboriginal impulse, wholly without rational motive,
led him one day to put on his hat, and go out with his article
in an envelope and put it in a pillar-box. It is vain to correct
by cold logic the power of such primitive appetites; nature herself
was behind the seemingly random thoughtlessness of the deed.
And now that it is irrevocably done, he can look back on it and trace
the large lines of an awful law of averages; wherein it is ruled
by a ruthless necessity that a certain number of such Americans
should write a certain number of such articles, as the leaves fall
or the flowers return.

In plain words, this sort of theory is a blasphemy against
the intellectual dignity of man. It is a blunder as well as
a blasphemy; for it goes miles out of its way to find a bestial
explanation when there is obviously a human explanation.
It is as if a man told me that a dim survival of the instincts of a
quadruped was the reason of my sitting on a chair with four legs.
I answer that I do it because I foresee that there may be grave
disadvantages in sitting on a chair with one leg. Or it is as if I
were told that I liked to swim in the sea, solely because some early
forms of amphibian life came out of the sea on to the shore.
I answer that I know why I swim in the sea; and it is because
the divine gift of reason tells me that it would be unsatisfactory
to swim on the land. In short this sort of vague evolutionary
theorising simply amounts to finding an unconvincing explanation
of something that needs no explanation. And the case is really quite
as simple with