l experiences of the
Humanists, for whom the Greek grammar was like the song of a bird in
spring. The more the matter is considered the clearer it will seem that
these old experiences are now only alive, where they have found a
lodgment in the Catholic tradition of Christendom, and made themselves
friends for ever. St. Francis is the only surviving troubadour. St.
Thomas More is the only surviving Humanist. St. Louis is the only
surviving knight.

It would be the worst sort of insincerity, therefore, to conclude even
so hazy an outline of so great and majestic a matter as the American
democratic experiment, without testifying my belief that to this also
the same ultimate test will come. So far as that democracy becomes or
remains Catholic and Christian, that democracy will remain democratic.
In so far as it does not, it will become wildly and wickedly
undemocratic. Its rich will riot with a brutal indifference far beyond
the feeble feudalism which retains some shadow of responsibility or at
least of patronage. Its wage-slaves will either sink into heathen
slavery, or seek relief in theories that are destructive not merely in
method but in aim; since they are but the negations of the human
appetites of property and personality. Eighteenth-century ideals,
formulated in eighteenth-century language, have no longer in themselves
the power to hold all those pagan passions back. Even those documents
depended upon Deism; their real strength will survive in men who are
still Deists; and the men who are still Deists are more than Deists. Men
will more and more realise that there is no meaning in democracy if
there is no meaning in anything; and that there is no meaning in
anything if the universe has not a centre of significance and an
authority that is the author of our rights. There is truth in every
ancient fable, and there is here even something of it in the fancy that
finds the symbol of the Republic in the bird that bore the bolts of
Jove. Owls and bats may wander where they will in darkness, and for them
as for the sceptics the universe may have no centre; kites and vultures
may linger as they like over carrion, and for them as for the plutocrats
existence may have no origin and no end; but it was far back in the land
of legends, where instincts find their true images, that the cry went
forth that freedom is an eagle, whose glory is gazing at the sun.

End of Project Gutenberg's What I Saw in America, by G. K. Che