Commercial wage-slaves can never reproduce that wonderful company of
sculptured figures that made Rheims unlike any other place in the world;
and if they are now destroyed, or shortly about to be, it does not
console me that we still have--perhaps for a few days longer only--the
magical stained glass of Chartres and the choir of Beauvais. We tell
ourselves that the poor French people must feel as we should feel if we
had lost Westminster Abbey. Rheims was worth ten Westminster Abbeys; and
where it has gone the others may just as easily go too. Let us not sneer
at the German pretension to culture: let us face the fact that the
Germans are just as cultured as we are (to say the least) and that war
has nevertheless driven them to do these things as irresistibly as it
will drive us to do similar things tomorrow if we find ourselves
attacking a town in which the highest point from which our positions can
be spotted by an observer with a field glass in one hand and a telephone
in the other is the towering roof of the cathedral. Also let us be
careful how we boast of our love of medieval art to people who well
know, from the protests of Ruskin and Morris, that in times of peace we
have done things no less mischievous and irreparable for no better
reason than that the Mayor's brother or the Dean's uncle-in-law was a
builder in search of a "restoration" job. If Rheims cathedral were taken
from the Church to-morrow and given to an English or French joint stock
company, everything transportable in it would presently be sold to
American collectors, and the site cleared and let out in building sites.
That is the way to make it "pay" commercially.


*The Fate of The Glory Drunkard.*

But our problem is how to make Commercialism itself bankrupt. We must