NOTE TO EDITORS: This article must not be published before
SATURDAY, July 14, 1928.

UNI TED PRESS ASSOCIATIONS.

ARTICLE No. 1.

MAIN STREETS AND BABBITS OF BRITAIN

By Sinclair Lewis.

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

This is England, this flat field.

I am writing in a pasture in the county of Berkshire, some
ten miles from Oxford, sitting at a collapsible table in
front of a green tent. It is pitched beside a motor-drawn
caravan in which I hope to cruise through the untouristized parts
of Britain, to inquire, for this series of articles, what the
British are doing and what they are thinking now, ten years after
the war.

The pasture is a pleasant place: a stretch of long grass
and daisies, surrounded with stone walls and magnificent English
trees, oaks and elms and chestnuts and twisted pines. Rocks
and chickens stalk past, their heads bobbing, in search of
apparently non-existent crickets; an old stone cottage is to
be seen in a locust grove at one side; and a cuckoo is calling,
now that the bitter morning fog has crept away and the sunshine
come out, caressing and not too harsh. It is pleasant, yes, but
not at all distinguished. There are incomparably more sensation-
al things to be seen -- the Derbyshire peak, Cornish cliffs above
a wash of breakers, castles and cathedrals, and race meetings
with the gentry in those gray top hats which they so kindly wear
to amuse the commoners.

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 1.

whom one would be sure, if they were only a little more covered
with cobwebs, that they had sat there unmoving since the sixteenth
century. And the stone walls of the inn have seen Elizabeth and
King Charles pass by, and are not too much impressed now by a
shoe-blacking king sliding down the road in a limousine.

Yes, quite! It is the traditional inn, except for its
efficient landlord. One might have cribbed it out of fiction
or out of pictures in *Punch* without having seen it. That is, to
an American, its incredibility. The mining camps, the held-up
stage coaches, the cowpunchers' dances which, after seeing many
cinemas, the European would expect to find as the most character-
istic sights of America are nearly gone. Most of them have been
replaced by the offices of realtors in natty gents' suits. But
the Dickens of England remains -- yes, remains far more than is
known to those Englishmen who frequent only Ascot and West End
night clubs. And this inn of Dickens gives to the inquiring
American a clue to the peace of the pasture.

Permeating the inn is a feeling that centuries have gone
before, that centuries will come after; that there is no need to
fret; and that though it is excellent to work well, to play
skilfully yet the workman or the player must not believe that
he and his busyness are so important that the rest of the world
must be sacrificed to him.

No wonder the American saloon -- in contrast to this inn --
was abolished! Except for an amiable Bierstube here and there,
our saloons were feverish. A sound drinker was expected to stand
at the bar, throw in a raw whisky, and bellow for another. But
this dim taproom, where the farmers take half an hour for a pint
of beer, is a refuge from worry, while the American saloon was
an incitement to the most hysterical worry.

Like the inn are the people who trudge the road beyond that
bush-grown wall. There are motors, of course, but English

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 1

people have not forgotten the use of their legs. Old women
plod by -- they have walked three miles with market baskets, and
they do not feel ill-used not to have a brisk son-in-law with a
flivver to elevate them to the bored gentility of old women in
Los Angeles bungalows. There are more carts, with shiny burgherish
horses, than there are trucks and motor delivery wagons. And
on the bicycle -- despised in America by every one save small
boys -- still come all sorts and conditions: the schoolma'am and
the barmaid, the stone-mason and the curate who is a cousin of
the squire.

And three miles down the road is a village so ancient in its
half-timbered facades and square-towered stone church that all
modern life and hustle seem but the illusion of a nightmare.

Probably to a High-powered Sales Executive from Detroit,
prodding his salesmen after a night of synthetic gin and dancing
to delirious jazz, these people would seem lazy, aimless, incom-
petent. Yet Britain created the greatest empire ever seen; she
still rules a quarter of the world; and it was these leisurely
people who did it. That farmerish passer-by in rusty tweeds, who
has apparently never left Berkshire, is just back from twenty
years in equatorial Africa.

It is doubtless that sense of solid and continuing life
which, reaching the senses in a hundred ways, tangible and intan-
gible, gives this strange peace to a commonplace pasture, and to
the American caravanners camped within it. It is the feeling,
in old walls and quiet people and ancient villages so secret that
no tourist has ever found them, that life is something more than
a moment's galloping. There have been great souls long before
us -- let us revere their wisdom, say these English walls; there
will be great souls long after us -- let us not for our own
vanity too much tamper with the tradition which has borne and bred
us, and will bear and breed them in future days.

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 1.

tight discipline of nursery and public school and university,
taught to lead men, is somewhat more likely to give an example of
honor, honesty, courage, and agreeable manners than a boy brought
up in a carter's stall."

"Humph!" said I. "But why not have both boys given the
same chance? Why must one be brought up in a stall?"

"Do all your boys have the same chance in America, after a
hundred and fifty years of theoretical democracy? Do the sons of
J. Pierpont Morgan and Mike Ugalawski the navvy have the same
chance?"

"No, but ----"

"And they never will, in any country, under any system! And
we recognize the fact and base our tradition on it. Englishmen
are sometimes slow, often arbitrary, but beyond all peoples they
are realistic. They live in the world they live in, not in a
colored photograph of it."

Is it possible that he was right?

Is it possible that realism of thought is the foundation of
the peace which I find in front of a green tent, beside a caravan,
in a pasture of Berkshire?

SATURDAY, JULY 21, 1928.

UNITED PRESS ASSOCIATIONS.

ARTICLE No. 2.

MAIN STREETS AND BABBITTS OF BRITAIN,

By Sinclair Lewis.

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

But there were Babbitts, too, good hearty bumbling British Babbitts, in that traditional English inn.

I quoted, in the article before, a British business man who philosophized before the fire. In the same inn, down in the coffee room, I heard two other Englishmen who weren't quite so philosophical. They did not look Babbitt-like -- they lacked horn-rimmed spectacles; they did not sound Babbitt-like -- their voices were modulated and, to an innocent American ear, half Etonian. But their conversation ----- If any luncheon club in Nebraska, any Elks' picnic in Milwaukee, can produce meatier Babbitt talk than this, from two worthy residents of Oxford, then I resign:

"Go well today?"

"Oh, rather. What's yours?"

"Gin and It. I played with old Tompkins."

"Really? Not a bad sort, old Tompkins. Sort of quiet. Jolly new wireless set he has."

"Oh! You know he made a hole in one, last month."

"Really? Good sort. I hear he's likely to be managing director at the Sankaset Works."

"That's right. But I don't mind telling you I beat him, this afternoon. I say, I did have a bit of luck. I mean to say, on the fifth green -----"

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 2

He didn't give to history and posterity any adequate
chronicle of what he did up to that crucial fifth green, that
Armageddon among fifth greens, but he left out nothing that
happened from there to the eighteenth. I discreetly listened to
them for twenty minutes in the coffee room, and through an hour of
dinner, and they talked golf without one break, except for the
post mortem of a bridge game, and a rather lyric description of
four-wheel brakes.

They were prosperous citizens, they were amiable, and they
were Babbitts complete.

For there is a new type of British business man, who will
conceivably have more power than either the aristocracy or the
conservative industrialists of the old order. Incredible changes
have happened to him in the twenty-five years since I first saw
England. And this modern business man, though he look more like
an army officer than like a Chicago sales manager, though he live
in a secluded cottage with a tennis lawn instead of in a Park
Avenue apartment, though he may not grind cigars in the corner of
his mouth, is increasingly like the American business man in his
every ideal and method. Personally, I am glad of it. I have a
sneaking notion that closer alliances between British and American
business men will do more to keep that peace without which our
civilization will blow up than any pious aspirations of churches,
pacifists, and radicals.

I have been accused (even by the magnificent, the archducal
International President of the organization) of saying nasty things
about the Rotarians, but I assert that the growth of Rotary in
Great Britain, where it already has hundreds of chapters, is more
important for world tranquility than all the campaigns of the
reformers put together.

But the two Babbitts whom I have just quoted both wore Rotary
buttons!

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 2

In irritating traits and amiability both, I believe, the new
sort of British business man is like his American colleague.

He has the same droning conversation devoted to sports and
filing-cabinets, but he has the same warm hospitality; he has the
same uneasy prejudice against anything foreign, Jewish, artistic,
or otherwise beautiful, but he has the same longing to change
business from shame-faced pettiness to a world-adventure, the same
belief that it is quite as honorable for a gentleman to become a
merchant, supplying such excellent things as bath-tubs and beans,
as it is for him to become an army officer -- a professional
killer, or a diplomat -- a professional hypnotizer.

Not many years ago, retail business in London attracted only
those who were not daring enough to stow away and escape to Canada.

It was at this period when one day, just before six o'clock,
I found myself in need of a dress shirt for the evening. I dashed
to a small shop in the West End, that portion of London invented
by Michael Arlen. The clerk -- shop assistant, the English would
call him -- was distressed at having to break off his meditations
on Hermes Trismegistus or the Derby or whatever it was he was so
daily meditating upon, to deal with a person who was not only an
American but also, from the fact of his needing a shirt at once,
did not have his shirts tailored ahead by a reputable shirtmaker
in such quantities that he could never be in need of one off-
hand.

He owned that they did keep a few shirts made up, and he
dragged out something which would have done very nicely indeed
on a wax figure at Madame Tussaud's.

Now I am tall and thin. The shirt was thin but it wasn't
tall. The neck would have fitted, but the cuffs would have come
just below my elbows. The clerk admitted it, patiently put the
shirt away, and ignored me, and a good, brisk, earnest job of
ignoring it was, too.

It took me several moments of listening to his bored