irst important
work was a study of the career of Danton. A study of Danton's career, be
it noted, and not a biography: for this book deals more with so much of
the French Revolution as is reflected in its subject's actions than with
its subject's actions in themselves.

It is, then, as an historian that he begins and mainly as an historian
that he continues. His activities are varied, but all are related to a
conception of the world, its growth and destiny, which is founded on a
conception of universal history. He sees in man a political animal,
whose distinguishing function is not commerce or art, but politics.
History is the record of man exercising this distinguishing function.
Our own politics are based on the results of the exercise of this
function in the past, and cannot be properly understood without a
knowledge of the details of that exercise. To link up the argument: man
is a political animal and finds his expression in the work of politics;
he can only be fitted for that work by the study of history. Mr. Belloc,
then, regards this as the most important of all studies.

A casual glance at his essays will reveal some sentences or other
testifying to the strength with which this opinion is rooted in his
mind. Take this from _First and Last_:

Of those factors in civic action amenable to civic direction,
conscious and positively effective, there is nothing to compare
with the right teaching and the right reading of history.

Or again from _On Anything_, regarding the matter from a somewhat
different point of view:

History may be called the test of true philosophy, or it may be
called in a very modern and not very dignified metaphor the
object-lesson of political science, or it may be called the great
story whose interest is upon another plane from all other stories
because its irony, its tragedy and its moral are real, were acted
by real men, and were the manifestation of God.

Wherever you turn over these pages, you are more likely than not to find
some such earnest and emphatic sentence: this opinion is essential to
Mr. Belloc's life and thought. With the practical and business-like
position of the first of these quotations it is our affair to deal in
this chapter: and the more spiritual and poetic view expressed in the
second will receive consideration in a later place.

In this chapter it is our purpose to outline as briefly and as clearly
as possible Mr.