NOTE TO EDITORS: This article must not be published before SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6th, 1928.

UNITED PRESS ASSOCIATIONS, Inc.

ARTICLE No. 11.

MAIN STREETS AND BABBITS OF BRITAIN,

By Sinclair Lewis.

(World copyright by United Press Associations. All rights reserved.)

Is Britain, correspondents ask me, a "good country for foreigners to motor in?" And, "How would it be for an American family who do not want to caravan but who prefer to motor and take a chance on inns?"

I have driven nearly four thousand miles since May, nearly two-thirds of it with the caravan comfortably pitched in a field and the car free, and this is my fifth motor tour in Britain. I have driven perhaps seventy-five thousand miles in the United States. I have driven or been driven in Canada, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, Jugo-Slavia, France, Switzerland, Venezuela, Barbados, Trinidad, the Virgin Islands, and a few other places. And of them all, it seems to me, there is no land with more abiding delights and less trouble for the intelligent motorist than Great Britain. (The adjective "intelligent" is put in to bar out the man who is restless with less than a three-hundred-mile run a day, and the unfortunate rich who travel with large families and larger piles of luggage in closed limousines which have about as intimate a relation to the country as has a sleeping car.)

Britain is becoming motorized, but sensibly. Few roads are over-crowded, while in America there is no road within fifty miles of any large town which is not constantly overcrowded, from

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April to October. Yet there has been so much increase in British motorization since the War that although even five years ago there was quite insufficient accommodation for motorists in the way of storage garages, repairmen, gasoline stations, and so on, to-day they are adequate. Gasoline -- or petrol, if you must have it that way -- can be purchased every few miles, and from respectable pumps. Gone, thank Heaven, are those dear quaint picturesque days when the only way for a motorist to get fuel was to stand and scratch his chin and view the scenery while he awaited the sweet will of a small boy, distantly related to the garage keeper, who poured gasoline out of small cans in a manner which indicated an intense dislike for motorists, cans, work, and petroleum in all its varieties. Now one can find fast -- and accurate -- gasoline pumps everywhere. I read in the papers that ardent lovers of the countryside -- largely resident in London -- protest against the blotting of the rural views by these "excrescences," but it seems to me that a really hardy intellect ought to be able to endure the sight of three or four gasoline pumps every five miles.

And everywhere there are springing up larger and better garages -- no longer is it necessary to try to drive a car into non-existent space for the night or to plead for emergency repairs with an irate mechanic who has had a waiting list of customers all day long.

The British roads are admirable. True, many of them -- in Devon, for example -- are too narrow, too curving for the fast motorist, but if for some incomprehensible reason one must be that strange person, a fast motorist, then he will find on such vast, broad, inhuman gashes as the Brighton Road and parts of the Great North Road plenty of scope for his awful arts. Almost universally, British road surfaces are excellent. In the whole summer, I have found only one twenty-mile stretch of broken and bumpy road -- and that was already being repaired.

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And the courtesy of fellow-drivers. I have found scarce
one road-hog all summer. Generally a man whom you wish to pass
will not only draw over to his side of the road but even signal
you that he is going to do so, and that your road is clear ahead.

And the efficiency of the two great organizations of motorists,
the Automobile Association and the Royal Automobile Club, with
their hundreds of patrolmen on roads all through Britain to give
every conceivable aid to motorists -- to give road directions, to
help with repairs, to furnish fire-extinguishers and telephone
service and, where there are not enough policemen, to direct the
traffic. They are charming and courteous fellows. I wish I
could say the same of their superiors at the magnificent A.A.
headquarters in London. I have just this moment been calling
them up, trying to get some detailed information about the A.A.
for this article, and I have just been put in my place with that
cold, uninterested and rasping thoroughness which is known only
to the small official. But, as happens in other armies also,
the General Staff is made up for by the privates, and I shall not
forget the A.A. man who cheerfully pumped up a tire for me after
a puncture in Northumberland.

And the policemen!

The policemen, the cops, the bobbies, the British Police,
beloved of fiction and of motorists! Not once, all summer, have
I known them to be anything but courteous. The traffic officers
seem to have the quaint notion that they are the servants of the
public, paid only to make driving easier and safer -- for both the
drivers and the pedestrains -- whereas too many American policemen
are convinced that all motorists are their servants, and very
naughty servants, too. I don't mean that all American traffic
cops are thus, but I do mean vigorously that a great many are.
What American driver has not encountered -- in Cotuit or Kankakee,
in New York or Cecolalla -- a policeman who indicates his royal
desires by a neat yet complicated gesture consisting in choking,

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getting red in the face, and making a corkscrew motion apparently indicating that you are to stop and simultaneously to drive off in all four directions, and who, when you have tried it, bellows, "Say, what the hell d'yuh think you're trying to do? I gotta half a mind to give yuh a ticket!"

A British traffic policeman would first of all have given a perfectly clear signal, and if you were too insane, blind, or in love to have noticed, have said quietly, "I gave you a signal to turn right." And that agreeableness of policemen, that freedom from homicidal rage which affects the motorist in America once every half hour, is one of the soldest delights of motoring in England -- as well as one of the most significant indications of the British mentality.

But with all this modernization and motorization, the British roads remain almost free of the billboards without which any American road would feel chill and lonely. Apparently they like their scenery plain, and not sauced with cigarette advertisements.

There are only four disadvantages to British motoring. The hotels are mostly bad -- but as the British themselves are complaining of this more vigorously than any foreigner, they may improve -- some genius of hotel-keeping may see the millions to be made out of small hotels with edible food. The cars cost too much -- that too will improve, with the really astonishing increase in British small-car manufacturing. One has to keep to the left hand, which means the need of a car with right-hand drive, useless outside of Britain. But the real sorrow of the motorist in Britain is the pedestrian and his unsteady and wobbling brother, the cyclist.

Probably to a philosopher the British independence and the incredible heroism displayed by the pedestrians in their placid ignoring of motor cars just behind them are altogether admirable. Or do they indicate a widespread secret desire among about forty

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per cent. of the British Public to commit suicide? All summer long I have been frenziedly struggling to keep from killing some one. I have succeeded -- but there are two people still alive in the United Kingdom who do not know, because they never so much as took the trouble to look around, how nearly they came to being slain, and with what hysterical jarring on of brakes I avoided hitting them -- though on both occasions I was driving as slowly as possible. There is a red-headed boy somewhere in Edinburgh (unless, as is probable, he has succeeded in his longing for suicide during the week since I so fondly gazed upon him) who with the utmost gaiety in his boyish heart, without looking around, ran his bicycle from the pavement into the roadway exactly in front of my car. And his name -- his name is Legion, and though he manages to get himself killed to the number of a dozen or so every nice bright week-end, it continues to be Legion.

With the half-hearted way in which all nations always go at adapting themselves to new conditions, Britain -- like America, Germany, France and all the rest -- talks a great deal and does nothing in particular about providing different roads for different classes of traffic -- a road for lorries and slow motors, one for fast motors, one for pedestrians, cyclists and horses, which in saved lives and saved time would not be extravagance but sheer economy. The whole world says "Oh yes, this is the motor age and perhaps there ought to be four times as many highways through the country, and ten times as many broad motor avenues in the cities." And having said it, that ends it.

America is as bad as Britain. The traffic conditions of New York City are as bad as London -- though no worse. New York is being strangled. Indeed if there happened to come along some Napoleon who would persuade Norfolk or Baltimore or Savannah to make itself the first really modern and motorized city in the world, I believe that city would oust both New York and London

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era the "Americanized" era is rather less reasonable than to
call it the "Germanized" or the "Gallicized" era.

And the use of the vapid word "Americanized" has, like the
use of all other passionate and religious and emotional expres-
sions, dangerous results. It clouds the immensely significant
issue, one more important than any mere national rivalry -- the
question as to whether we are going to yield to industrialism,
and consciously modify our society to fit it, or whether we are
going to recognize, fight, and oust it. (We'll do the former,
of course, no matter whether we like it or not!) But by calling
the whole industrial complex "Americanization," on the one hand
we have it hated and confusedly opposed by Europe; on the other
hand, we assume in America that we are already (and blessedly)
"Americanized." The joke of it is that the American coalfields
and depressing coal miners' villages of Pennsylvania and Colorado
need "Americanization" exactly as much as do the like fields
and villages of the Newcastle and Durham and South Wales
districts!

When a French or German or English engineering firm takes
a contract for building a bridge or a New York City river tunnel
away from all American competitors, then who is it that is
"Americanized"?

It seems to me that American men of affairs are facing
the existence and domination (pleasant or abominable or both)
of the industrial era rather more consciously and clearly than
the British. Certainly they do not feel quite so guilty about
using telephones, having warm houses, and enjoying a motor ride.
But on neither side of the Atlantic, nor in any country on earth,
do the sentimentalists -- the authors, the editorial writers,
the teachers -- recognize that unless we have an utterly
destructive world war, the age symbolized by the motor car and
the wireless has come to stay, and that there is no more use in
sighing over the loss of old-fashioned villages in Sussex and

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Vermont, in the Tyrol and the Dordogne, than there is of trying
to return to togas and chariots.

That is the one moral I have seen most clearly in viewing
the motorized Britain, the new Britain of the new roads, this
summer.

For the future - - -

I picture both America and Britain getting rid of their
incredibly awkward and confusing systems of inches, feet, yards,
rods, furlongs, of ounces, pounds, tons. There is a much needed
bit of "Americanization" which happens to come from France. I
picture Britain getting rid of her equally confusing coinage,
which is neither decimal, dodecimal nor anything else and which,
to judge by watching sales-people make change in shops, bothers
the British themselves almost as much as it does the timorous
foreigner.

I picture aeroplane traffic between New York and Chicago,
between London and Edinburgh, on at least half so efficient a
basis as that to be found everywhere in Germany.

And I do not see any of these changes eventually destroying
country peace or urban suavity.

I quote from a letter from Mr. L.W. Comer in the London
*Times* of August 7, 1928:

"Till security of property became the normal thing and invention provided better means of cultivation and industry produced capital, half the area of England was moor, forest and fen. We are always blaming the last two centuries for the ugliness which accompanied the Industrial Revolution. It is well to remember that we owe to the same centuries much of the beauty which we may, unless we amend our ways, now destroy."

But perhaps the best manner of "amending our ways" is to
cultivate a new aesthetic, and not to go on assuming that a
Devonshire lane, crooked, stifling, with high hedges concealing
the view completely, is necessarily so much lovelier than a

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broad road swooping across the downlands; not to go on assuming
that a cottage three hundred years old is _ipso facto_ three
hundred times more beautiful than a cottage one year old.

Those assumptions most certainly are made by the British --
and more vocally and hysterically made by the enthusiastic chara-
banc-fulls of American tourists.

I hope that one of the National Monuments that will be
zealously preserved in England, along with the cathedrals and
castles, will be the same stout ability to progress which once
built those very cathedrals and castles -- in the days when
their glaring newness offended all the good old-fashioned folk.

I do believe that this British-German-American-Scandinavian-
French-Italian process so quaintly called "Americanization" is
progressing rapidly in Britain. I do not believe that the mil-
lions of motorists and the millions of stenographers using
American typewriters are going back to the chaise and the quill
pen -- though naturally I myself, as a writer of novels, use a
quill -- a nice mauve one. And it all seems to me just about
as much of a tragedy as was the building of York Minster to
replace the squat and ugly Saxon structure that stood there
before it!

It has been agreeable, this summer, to discover these
celebrated "quaint old cottages." It is more exhilarating to
discover a living spirit that can build new ones -- if it isn't
too cramped by too much awe of quaintness and oldness. There is
the Britain of the post cards. Lovely! But there is also
the Britain of the aeroplane. Lovelier, perhaps? Through the
monoliths of Stonehenge I watched a military plane circling in
the high blue. Was that mechanical, that gross, that "Americaniz-
ed" object -- a swifter and greater gull -- any less inspiring of
reverence than the unwieldy lumps of stone?

I'm glad that I have seen both, this summer in Britain!

And so, finishing this last article, in the friendly city of

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London, I look out on the Thames, and feel reluctant to leave
the old wisdoms of England. And yet I am glad that I am going
to Paris to-morrow, glad that I shall run back to eager Berlin
before I sail, if I can squeeze in the time, and gladdest of all
that I am going to the dynamo of America and to the radiance of
the American autumn. Is a wanderer like myself homeless -- or
does he merely have more homes than most people?