Puritan
tradition. But the Puritan tradition was originally a tradition of the
town; and the second truth about the Middle West turns largely on its
moral relation to the town. As I shall suggest presently, there is much
in common between this agricultural society of America and the great
agricultural societies of Europe. It tends, as the agricultural society
nearly always does, to some decent degree of democracy. The agricultural
society tends to the agrarian law. But in Puritan America there is an
additional problem, which I can hardly explain without a periphrasis.

There was a time when the progress of the cities seemed to mock the
decay of the country. It is more and more true, I think, to-day that it
is rather the decay of the cities that seems to poison the progress and
promise of the countryside. The cinema boasts of being a substitute for
the tavern, but I think it a very bad substitute. I think so quite apart
from the question about fermented liquor. Nobody enjoys cinemas more
than I, but to enjoy them a man has only to look and not even to listen,
and in a tavern he has to talk. Occasionally, I admit, he has to fight;
but he need never move at the movies. Thus in the real village inn are
the real village politics, while in the other are only the remote and
unreal metropolitan politics. And those central city politics are not
only cosmopolitan politics but corrupt politics. They corrupt everything
that they reach, and this is the real point about many perplexing
questions.

For instance, so far as I am concerned, it is the whole point about
feminism and the factory. It is very largely the point about feminism
and many other callings, apparently more cultured than the factory, such
as the law court and the political platform. When I see women so wildly
anxious to tie themselves to all this machinery of the modern city my
first feeling is not indignation, but that dark and ominous sort of pity
with which we should see a crowd rushing to embark in a leaking ship
under a lowering storm. When I see wives and mothers going in for
business government I not only regard it as a bad business but as a
bankrupt business. It seems to me very much as if the peasant women,
just before the French Revolution, had insisted on being made duchesses
or (as is quite as logical and likely) on being made dukes.

It is as if those ragged women, instead of crying out for bread, had
cried out for powder and patches. By the time they w