ept in America. This idea is not internationalism; on the contrary it
is decidedly nationalism. The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to
make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of
making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In
a word, what is unique is not America but what is called
Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing
ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are not
trying to Anglicise thousands of French cooks or Italian organ-grinders.
France is not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or
German prisoners of war. America is the one place in the world where
this process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on.
And the process, as I have pointed out, is _not_ internationalisation.
It would be truer to say it is the nationalisation of the
internationalised. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out
of exiles. This is what at once illuminates and softens the moral
regulations which we may really think faddist or fanatical. They are
abnormal; but in one sense this experiment of a home for the homeless is
abnormal. In short, it has long been recognised that America was an
asylum. It is only since Prohibition that it has looked a little like a
lunatic asylum.

It was before sailing for America, as I have said, that I stood with the
official paper in my hand and these thoughts in my head. It was while I
stood on English soil that I passed through the two stages of smiling
and then sympathising; of realising that my momentary amusement, at
being asked if I were not an Anarchist, was partly due to the fact that
I was not an American. And in truth I think there are some things a man
ought to know about America before he sees it. What we know of a country
beforehand may not affect what we see that it is; but it will vitally
affect what we appreciate it for being, because it will vitally affect
what we expect it to be. I can honestly say that I had never expected
America to be what nine-tenths of the newspaper critics invariably
assume it to be. I never thought it was a sort of Anglo-Saxon colony,
knowing that it was more and more thronged with crowds of very different
colonists. During the war I felt that the very worst propaganda for the
Allies was the propaganda for the Anglo-Saxons. I tried to point out
that in one way America is nearer to Europe than England is. If she is
no