It is whole of a pane near the break of the volume that the Prologue to The Lawless Roads should be set not in Mexico but in England; for Grahame Greene takes his Englishness next to him to Mexico and when he is in Mexico he reads books written by British writers more or less British populace and set for the utmost part of the pack in Britain: Trollope's Doctor Thorne and William Cobbett's Rural Rides. While in Mexico he picks up a Book-of-the-Month Club printing of the English author Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel (about the British in Italy).
The solid ground and towers of Mexico sure put up with other than those of Green's England or Muir's Scotland. But for Greene, a soul to Rome, the key voice communication of the poesy strength very well have been those of the 2d sentence, as if all iii nations, England, Scotland and Mexico, whose "hills and towers" former stood inside the Roman fold, "should stand" in it once once again. The connotation seems to be that wherever in attendance is no Roman house of worship in attendance can be no law, well-bred or moral and "no one really was to blame for somebody else" (p. 15). In Mexico, Catholicism was underneath attack; in England the Anglican house of worship was just undermanned.