and revolutionary martyrs have
died, only to build such a wooden house for such a worthy family. Men
have taken the sword and perished by the sword in order that the poor
gentleman might have liberty to look for his screw-driver. For there is
here a fact about America that is almost entirely unknown in England.
The English have not in the least realised the real strength of America.
We in England hear a great deal, we hear far too much, about the
economic energy of industrial America, about the money of Mr. Morgan, or
the machinery of Mr. Edison. We never realise that while we in England
suffer from the same sort of successes in capitalism and clockwork, we
have not got what the Americans have got; something at least to balance
it in the way of a free agriculture, a vast field of free farms dotted
with small freeholders. For the reason I shall mention in a moment, they
are not perhaps in the fullest and finest sense a peasantry. But they
are in the practical and political sense a pure peasantry, in that their
comparative equality is a true counterweight to the toppling injustice
of the towns.

And, even in places like that described as Main Street, that comparative
equality can immediately be felt. The men may be provincials, but they
are certainly citizens; they consult on a common basis. And I repeat
that in this, after all, they do achieve what many prophets and
righteous men have died to achieve. This plain village, fairly
prosperous, fairly equal, untaxed by tyrants and untroubled by wars, is
after all the place which reformers have regarded as their aim; whenever
reformers have used their wits sufficiently to have any aim. The march
to Utopia, the march to the Earthly Paradise, the march to the New
Jerusalem, has been very largely the march to Main Street. And the
latest modern sensation is a book written to show how wretched it is to
live there.

All this is true, and I think the lady might be more contented in her
coffin, which is more comfortably furnished than most of the coffins
where her fellow creatures live. Nevertheless, there is an answer to
this, or at least a modification of it. There is a case for the lady and
a case against the gentleman and the screw-driver. And when we have
noted what it really is, we have noted the real disadvantage in a
situation like that of modern America, and especially the Middle West.
And with that we come back to the truth with which I started this
speculation; the truth