This morning I came across an old press cutting, hidden inside a book I hadn’t opened for years. It is from the Times of April 30, 1931 and reports a speech that G. K. Chesterton gave to a meeting of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England. In the talk GKC waxes eulogistic about the beauty of villages in general and the beauty of the village inn in particular, comparing them favourably to the unhealthy attitude towards drinking in the United States. Here are a few highlights:

 

Chesterton described the English village as a “very ancient, European and Christian thing” that deserved to be defended. “The English village was a relic: it was even a miraculous relic, like the relic of a great saint.” Those who defended the village were not guarding stones, but jewels. Those who had seen an English village “mingle naturally with the fields and the trees … had a feeling that if they ever went to Paradise, or to some ultimate home of the human soul, it would be something like a human village … The naturalness of the inn, of the cross-roads, of the market cross … were a very precious possession.”

 

By contrast, Chesterton described the average American town or village as “an eyesore to anybody of European tradition and instincts”. A European visitor to one of these villages “would first see yellow tin advertisments, then tin buildings, then thin wooden buildings all plastered with advertisements, then frameworks of lead and glass and tin called shops … It was shocking that … European and Christian civilization had spread over the whole of that gigantic continent and had never produced anything like a village that was fit to look at.”

 

Bearing in mind that the United States was still under the oppression of Prohibition at the time, his comments about the unhealthy impact of the ban on fermented and distilled beverages is of particular interest: “There were no inns in America; there was plenty of drink – far too much.There was a vast amount of dangerous drink in America … It was not normal to any society that girls of 16 going out to enjoy themselves at a little dance should expect to drink practically raw alcohol out of a flask”. Referring to the replacement of healthy beverages, such as ale and wine, with unhealthy bootleg liquor, Chesterton observed that “unhappy American citizens occasionally indulged in total abstinence, but mostly in bad whisky”.