CITIES 29

our civilization to get done, and for the next
generation or so there would be no unemployed
in Amerka or anywhere else.

This must not be taken to mean that America
is deficient in rural beauty; she has it in super-
abundance and of every conceivable variety; but
very unevenly distributed, some regions having
more than they know what do to with, others,
apparently, none at all, save that of the level earth
and the over-arching sky. But of villages I have
seen not one, in the strict but indefinable sense
conveyed by the word to the mind of an English-
man, whose love of his country is so oftenr a
village-born emotion. I think, therefore, that Mr,
Chesterton was right; though he might have been
half disposed to make an exception (as I am) had
he visited the mountain districts of Tennessee,
where the poor whites (the purest Anglo-Saxon
stock in America) live their simple but rather
miserable life. On the whole it would seem that
rural America, attractive as it may be to the
tourist, the camper, the landscape painter or the
fortunate owner of a country estate is little
attractive to those whose life is tied to the soil.
The drift towards the cities is so much the more
intelligible,

I conclude, then, that the Americans are not a
village-minded people. Their gregarious in-
stincts, otherwise not different from those of other
nations, are less averse to crowding and tend rather
to the large, noisy, restless groups that inhabit