and ethical enthusiasm; an
enthusiasm for the Catholic creed which made mediaeval civilisation.
Even on the huge Puritan plains of the Middle West the influence strays
in the strangest fashion. And it is notable that among the pessimistic
epitaphs of the Spoon River Anthology, in that churchyard compared with
which most churchyards are cheery, among the suicides and secret
drinkers and monomaniacs and hideous hypocrites of that happy village,
almost the only record of respect and a recognition of wider hopes is
dedicated to the Catholic priest.

But Main Street is Main Street in the main. Main Street is Modern Street
in its multiplicity of mildly half-educated people; and all these
historic things are a thousand miles from them. They have not heard the
ancient noise either of arts or arms; the building of the cathedral or
the marching of the crusade. But at least they have not deliberately
slandered the crusade and defaced the cathedral. And if they have not
produced the peasant arts, they can still produce the peasant crafts.
They can sow and plough and reap and live by these everlasting things;
nor shall the foundations of their state be moved. And the memory of
those colossal fields, of those fruitful deserts, came back the more
readily into my mind because I finished these reflections in the very
heart of a modern industrial city, if it can be said to have a heart. It
was in fact an English industrial city, but it struck me that it might
very well be an American one. And it also struck me that we yield rather
too easily to America the dusty palm of industrial enterprise, and feel
far too little apprehension about greener and fresher vegetables. There
is a story of an American who carefully studied all the sights of London
or Rome or Paris, and came to the conclusion that 'it had nothing on
Minneapolis.' It seems to me that Minneapolis has nothing on Manchester.
There were the same grey vistas of shops full of rubber tyres and
metallic appliances; a man felt that he might walk a day without seeing
a blade of grass; the whole horizon was so infinite with efficiency. The
factory chimneys might have been Pittsburg; the sky-signs might have
been New York. One looked up in a sort of despair at the sky, not for a
sky-sign but in a sense for a sign, for some sentence of significance
and judgment; by the instinct that makes any man in such a scene seek
for the only thing that has not been made by men. But even that was
illog