He had a great hatred of intelligence tests which he called the "palpable balderdash of irresponsible Yankee boomsters. . . . It is really one of the maladies of American democracy to be swept by these prairie fires of pseudo-scientifc fads, and throw itself into Eugenics or Anthropometric inquiry with the buoyancy of babies." He believed that there was more democracy in America than in England. But he hated what he called the "glare of American Advertisement." He spoke of a "common thief like the American Millionaire" but he certainly did not exclude the English Millionaire from the same indictment. His whole view of advertisement reaches a peak in an article* entitled "If You Have Smiles."
[* G.K.'s Weekly, December 10, 1927.]
We read the other day an absolutely solemn and almost tender piece of advice, in a leading American magazine, about the preservation of Beauty and Health. It was intended quite seriously. . . . After describing in most complicated detail how the young woman of today (well known to be enamored of all that is natural and free) is to strap up her head and face every night, as if it had to be bandaged after an accident, it proceeds to say with the most refined American accent: "With the face thus fixed in smile formation: . . ." but we have a difficulty about taking this serious advice of American Beauty Business even so seriously as to meditate on its social menace. The prospect of such a world of idiots ought to depress us, but . . . no, it is no good. Our faces are fixed in smile formation when we think of that American.
He repeated often how much he liked the inhabitants of Main Street (grievously wronged by Sinclair Lewis).
American ideals are not nearly so nice as American realities. We lament not so much what Babbitt is as what he is trying to be. What he is is a simple and kindly man . . . what he's trying to be is the abomination of desolation; the Man who made Salesmanship an Art; the Man Who Would Not Stay Down; the Man Who Got the Million Dollar Post After Taking Our Correspondence Course; the Man Who Learned Social Charm in Six Lessons.*
[* Jan. 14, 1928.]
At the time of the depreciation of the franc Belloc's articles in G.K.'s Weekly, echoed in the Leaders, pointed to finance, especially American finance, as the criminal that was forcing down the French currency. An American correspondent in the paper attacked these attacks on the ground that they were inspired by British Imperialism! Chesterton felt it a little hard to be at this date confused with Kipling. He replied that his correspondent committed "the blunder of an extravagant and excessive admiration for England." He speaks of
that tremendous procession that passed through Paris, literally an army of cripples. It was a march of all those walking units, those living fragments of humanity that had been left by the long stand of five years upon the French frontiers; a devastated area that passed endlessly like a river . . . they illustrate the main fact that France was in the center of that far-flung fighting line of civilization; that it was upon her that the barbarian quarrel concentrated; and that is an historical fact which the foolish vanity of many Englishmen, as well as of many Americans, is perpetually tempted to deny. Our critic is therefore quite beside the mark if he imagines that I am trying to score off his country out of a cheap jealousy on behalf of my own. My jealousy is for justice and for a large historical understanding of this great passage in history. My own country won glory enough in that and other fields to make it quite unnecessary for any sane Englishman to shut his eyes to Europe in order to brag about England. . . . I have not the faintest doubt what Thomas Jefferson would have said, if he had been told that a few financial oligarchs who happen to live in New York, were beating down the French wealth; and had then seen pass before him that awful panorama of the wrecks of the French Republican Army; heart-shaking, like a resurrection of the dead. . . . I do not admit, therefore, that in supporting the French peasants and soldiers against the money dealers and wire-pullers of the town, I am attacking America or even merely defending France.*
[* G.K.'s Weekly, Sept. 1, 1926.]
On November 6 and 13, 1926 he writes two articles on "The Yankee and the Chinaman," in which he contrasts the philosophic spirit with the so-called scientific. Like Bishop Barnes in England wanting to analyse the Consecrated Host, Edison was reported in America as having said that he would find out if there was a soul by some scientific test: