rtment of the Stores to have a portion of our brain removed
by a delicate operation; and then pass on to the advocacy department to
employ one or any of its barristers, when we are in temporary danger of
being hanged. We go to men who own their own tools and are responsible
for the use of their own talents. And the same truth applies to that
other modern method of advertisement, which has also so largely fallen
across us like the gigantic shadow of America. Nations do not arm
themselves for a mortal struggle by remembering which sort of submarine
they have seen most often on the hoardings. They can do it about
something like soap, precisely because a nation will not perish by
having a second-rate sort of soap, as it might by having a second-rate
sort of submarine. A nation may indeed perish slowly by having a
second-rate sort of food or drink or medicine; but that is another and
much longer story, and the story is not ended yet. But nobody wins a
great battle at a great crisis because somebody has told him that
Cadgerboy's Cavalry Is the Best. It may be that commercial enterprise
will eventually cover these fields also, and advertisement-agents will
provide the instruments of the surgeon and the weapons of the soldier.
When that happens, the armies will be defeated and the patients will
die. But though we modern people are indeed patients, in the sense of
being merely receptive and accepting things with astonishing patience,
we are not dead yet; and we have lingering gleams of sanity.

For the best things do not travel. As I appear here as a traveller, I
may say with all modesty that the best people do not travel either. Both
in England and America the normal people are the national people; and I
repeat that I think they are growing more and more national. I do not
think the abyss is being bridged by cosmopolitan theories; and I am sure
I do not want it bridged by all this slang journalism and blatant
advertisement. I have called all that commercial publicity the gigantic
shadow of America. It may be the shadow of America, but it is not the
light of America. The light lies far beyond, a level light upon the
lands of sunset, where it shines upon wide places full of a very simple
and a very happy people; and those who would see it must seek for it.

_Lincoln and Lost Causes_

It has already been remarked here that the English know a great deal
about past American literature, but nothing about past American histor