What Chesterton discovered in America was “the good republic.” It was and is tiresomely and nauseatingly full of nonsense, foolishness, ostentatious vanity, a degrading, lascivious commercial culture, and injustice, like all historical states; but it has not wholly lost its noble initiating vision and the criteria for justice which that vision perennially provides, which Lincoln saw and bore witness to so clearly. [1]
