4	RAG-TIME   AND   TANGO
Where would the movies be, if Mr, Chaplin was still one of
Karno's Mumming-birds ?   How could the Continent have
found room for its surplus population or lecture audiences
for its surplus novelists ?   What would be the state of
public morals, if we still enjoyed the company of the Pilgrim
Fathers or if the inspired polygamy of Brigham Young
remained to brighten life in the Mother Country ?   The bare
hypothesis opens wide the flood-gates of speculation ; and
we are left guessing helplessly, faced with the conclusion that
the discovery of America is about the one historical event that
really mattered since Rome won the Punic Wars (and neither
of them, it is worth remembering, owed much to Nordics).
For the voyage of Columbus took the human race clear
through the gateway that stands between modern times and
the vague area inhabited by total strangers whose pro-
ceedings on the narrow stage of the Middle Ages are un-
certainly interpreted to us by historians,   That was its full
significance; and it is impressive to recall that we owe the
whole of it to a single man with an obsession.   There haves
been other adventures in human history, but none with such
stupendous consequences;  and their immensity lends a
wild fascination to its slightest details.   Of almost equal
fascination are the vague hints of something lost and waiting
there beyond the misty ranges of the ocean that drew him on
the long road across the Atlantic, of his shadowy precursors
in western navigation, of that Norse trader who was blown
beyond the sunset and " found a strange people who spoke
Irish/'   One has always to resist the easy fallacy that dis-
coverers find something at their journey's end which is rather
like the country that we know ourselves,    But Gudleif
Gudlangson's encounter with the Irish-speaking aborigines,
combined with one authority's conclusive proof of extensive
Jewish participation in Columbus' voyage, makes it a little
difficult to resist a ribald picture of Manhattan in 1492
bearing a strong resemblance to the familiar hometown of
the Cohens and the Kellys.   So perhaps New York is the
Eternal City after all.