startlingly true, was an indescribable thing, but very like the picture
of the peasant admiring Broadway. So he passed, with his artificial
clothes and manners, lit up with all the ghastly artificial light of the
hotel, and all the ghastly artificial life of the city; and his heart
was like his own remote and rocky valley, where those unchanging words
were carved as on a rock.

I do not profess to discuss here at all adequately the question this
raises about the Americanisation of the Bulgar. It has many aspects, of
some of which most Englishmen and even some Americans are rather
unconscious. For one thing, a man with so rugged a loyalty to land could
not be Americanised in New York; but it is not so certain that he could
not be Americanised in America. We might almost say that a peasantry is
hidden in the heart of America. So far as our impressions go, it is a
secret. It is rather an open secret; covering only some thousand square
miles of open prairie. But for most of our countrymen it is something
invisible, unimagined, and unvisited; the simple truth that where all
those acres are there is agriculture, and where all that agriculture is
there is considerable tendency towards distributive or decently
equalised property, as in a peasantry. On the other hand, there are
those who say that the Bulgar will never be Americanised, that he only
comes to be a waiter in America that he may afford to return to be a
peasant in Bulgaria. I cannot decide this issue, and indeed I did not
introduce it to this end. I was led to it by a certain line of
reflection that runs along the Great White Way, and I will continue to
follow it. The criticism, if we could put it rightly, not only covers
more than New York but more than the whole New World. Any argument
against it is quite as valid against the largest and richest cities of
the Old World, against London or Liverpool or Frankfort or Belfast. But
it is in New York that we see the argument most clearly, because we see
the thing thus towering into its own turrets and breaking into its own
fireworks.

I disagree with the aesthetic condemnation of the modern city with its
sky-scrapers and sky-signs. I mean that which laments the loss of beauty
and its sacrifice to utility. It seems to me the very reverse of the
truth. Years ago, when people used to say the Salvation Army doubtless
had good intentions, but we must all deplore its methods, I pointed out
that the very contrary is the case.