"Because of the advance of the Catholic Church. Next question please."
"How tall are you and what do you weigh?"
"I am six feet two inches, but my weight has never been accurately calculated."
"Is George Bernard Shaw a coming peril?"
"Heavens, no. He is a disappearing pleasure."
For an apparently haphazard collection of essays Sidelights on New London and Newer York, published on his return to England from the second visit, has a surprising unity. Blitzed in London and out of print in New York it is now hard to obtain, which is a pity as it is full of good things. Discussing the fashions of today Chesterton attempts "to remove these things from the test of time and subject them to the test of truth," and this rule of an eternal test is the one he tried to apply in all his comments. Obviously nothing human is perfect—and this includes the human judgment, even Chesterton's judgment. Talking of the past or of the present, of England or America, he may often have been wrong and he would certainly have been the last man to claim infallibility for his judgments. His weakness as a critic was perhaps a tendency to get his proportions wrong—to make too much of some things he saw or experienced, to little of others. His qualities were intellectual curiosity and personal amiability together with the measuring rod of an eternal standard.
This second visit to America only deepened in Gilbert's mind many of the impressions made by the first. Yet the atmosphere of the book is curiously different from that of What I Saw in America. Living in the country even a few months had so greatly deepened his understanding. He still preferred the Quakers to the Puritans, "The essential of the Puritan mood is the misdirection of moral anger." He still felt that as a whole the United States had started with "a great political idea, but a small spiritual idea": that it needed a "return to the vision" in politics and sociology. It was the fashion today to laugh at the wish for "great open spaces," yet the "real sociological object in going to America was to find those open spaces. It was not to find more engineers and electric batteries and mechanical gadgets in the home. These may have been the result of America: they were not the causes of America." Asked why he admired America yet hated Americanisation, he replied:
I should have thought that I had earned some right to apply this obvious distinction to any foreign country, since I have consistently applied it to my own country. If the egoism is excusable, I am myself an Englishman (which some identify with an egoist) and I have done my best to praise and glorify a number of English things: English inns, English roads, English jokes and jokers; even to the point of praising the roads for being crooked or the humour for being Cockney; but I have invariably written, ever since I have written at all, against the cult of British Imperialism.
And when that perilous power and opportunity, which is given by wealth and worldly success, largely passed from the British Empire to the United States, I have applied exactly the same principle to the United States. I think that Imperialism is none the less Imperialism because it is spread by economic pressure or snobbish fashion rather than by conquest; indeed I have much more respect for the Empire that is spread by fighting than for the Empire that is spread by finance.*
[* Sidelights on New London & Newer York, p. 178.]