Under the Redwood Trees

A BRITISH journalist and his wife went in a motorcar from New York to the Coast by way of New Orleans. This book records some few impressions en route, but is mostly an account of life under the redwoods of California. Its tone of jaunty familiarity with the reader is irritating, but one puts up with it for the sake of the uncommon amount of strong common sense which pervades the author’s observations and reflections. The work is frankly journalistic, and sometimes amusingly, even ludicrously, superficial. For example, Mr. Digby gives a list of the federal bureaucracy’s agencies operating in one single state, Pennsylvania; he counts up eighty of them; he adds gravely, ‘And there are forty-eight states in the Union!’ A few pages following this rather impressive exhibit of collectivism, one finds him saying that our people, with the object lesson of Europe before them, have ‘a natural hesitancy to take any steps which might conceivably deliver the individual into the hands of a bureaucratic machine capable of restricting his liberties’!