that few have yet realised, but of which I, for
one, am more and more convinced--that industrialism is spreading because
it is decaying; that only the dust and ashes of its dissolution are
choking up the growth of natural things everywhere and turning the green
world grey.

In this relative agricultural equality the Americans of the Middle West
are far in advance of the English of the twentieth century. It is not
their fault if they are still some centuries behind the English of the
twelfth century. But the defect by which they fall short of being a true
peasantry is that they do not produce their own spiritual food, in the
same sense as their own material food. They do not, like some
peasantries, create other kinds of culture besides the kind called
agriculture. Their culture comes from the great cities; and that is
where all the evil comes from.

If a man had gone across England in the Middle Ages, or even across
Europe in more recent times, he would have found a culture which showed
its vitality by its variety. We know the adventures of the three
brothers in the old fairy tales who passed across the endless plain from
city to city, and found one kingdom ruled by a wizard and another wasted
by a dragon, one people living in castles of crystal and another sitting
by fountains of wine. These are but legendary enlargements of the real
adventures of a traveller passing from one patch of peasantry to
another, and finding women wearing strange head-dresses and men singing
new songs.

A traveller in America would be somewhat surprised if he found the
people in the city of St. Louis all wearing crowns and crusading armour
in honour of their patron saint. He might even feel some faint surprise
if he found all the citizens of Philadelphia clad in a composite
costume, combining that of a Quaker with that of a Red Indian, in honour
of the noble treaty of William Penn. Yet these are the sort of local and
traditional things that would really be found giving variety to the
valleys of mediaeval Europe. I myself felt a perfectly genuine and
generous exhilaration of freedom and fresh enterprise in new places like
Oklahoma. But you would hardly find in Oklahoma what was found in
Oberammergau. What goes to Oklahoma is not the peasant play, but the
cinema. And the objection to the cinema is not so much that it goes to
Oklahoma as that it does not come from Oklahoma. In other words, these
people have on the economic side a much closer a