"Seeing and hearing a man like Gilbert Keith Chesterton," said a Detroit newspaper, "makes a meal for the imagination that no reading of books by him or about him can accomplish."
He spoke Sunday in Orchestra Hall on the Ignorance of the Educated; it grows more difficult as his tour progresses, he admits, and the Lecture, he insists, grows worse. His thesis is that "the besetting evil of all educated people is that they tend to substitute theories for things." The uneducated man never makes this mistake. He states the simple fact that he sees a German drinking beer: he does not say "there is a Teuton consuming alcohol."
At Toronto the Chairman—a professor of English—thought that there
must have been an error in the title as printed, and announced that
Mr. Chesterton would speak on The Ignorance of the _Un_educated.
Another Detroit newspaper quotes from the lecture:
There is a deeper side to such fallacies. The whole catastrophe of the Great War may be traced to the racial theory. If people had looked at peoples as nations in place of races the intolerable ambition of Prussia might have been stopped before it attained the captaincy of the South German States.
The only other lecture subjects mentioned are "Shall We Abolish the Inevitable" and "The Perils of Health." There are innumerable caricatures. One by Cosmo Hamilton is accompanied with a story of how he once debated with Chesterton. The subject was: "There is no law in England." G.K. made so overwhelming a case that Hamilton decided the only way of making reply possible was to twist the subject making it "there are no laws in England" and "go off at 1000 tangents like a worried terrier."
To hear Chesterton's howl of joy when he twigged how I had slipped out, to see him double himself up in an agony of laughter at my personal insults, to watch the effect of his sportsmanship on a shocked audience who were won to mirth by his intense and pea-hen-like quarks of joy was a sight and a sound for the gods.
Probably Chesterton has forgotten this incident but I haven't and never will, and I carried away from that room a respect and admiration for this tomboy among dictionaries, this philosophical Peter Pan, this humorous Dr. Johnson, this kindly and gallant cherub, this profound student and wise master which has grown steadily ever since.
In the Daily Sketch, Hamilton later described G.K. speaking in this debate:
During the whole inspired course of his brilliant reasoning, he caught the little rivulets which ran down his face, and just as they were about to drop from the first of his several chins flicked them generously among the disconcerted people who sat actually at his feet. From time to time, too, unaware of this, he grasped deep into his pockets and rattled coins and keys, going from point to point, from proof to proof, until the Constitution of England was quite devoid of Law and out from under his waistcoat bulged a line of shirt.
It was monstrous, gigantic, amazing, deadly, delicious. Nothing like it has ever been done before or will ever be seen, heard and felt like it again.