: and he sees this
society falling to utter ruin before the Roman state, a polity of
peasant proprietors with a popular army. From that spectacle he draws
certain conclusions. He sees the Roman Empire and the way in which it
governed Europe, and from that huge organization and its mighty remains
he also draws certain lessons of wonder and reverence. From the decline
of the Empire, the growth of a slave, and economically enslaved, class,
the growth of a wealthy class, he again deduces something. All these
conclusions he applies constantly and unrelentingly to our own problems
and institutions: he cannot forbear from mentioning imperial Rome when
he comes to discuss our war in the Transvaal. He cannot forbear from
seeing the counterpart of the Peabody Yid in imperial Rome. All history
is to him a living and organic whole. And as individuals can judge in
present problems what they shall do only by reference to their own
experience and what they know of that of others, so also societies and
races. _There is no guide for them but recorded history._ This
accumulated experience, however, requires to be set out and interpreted.

Mr. Belloc's view and conception of the history of Europe begins with
Rome. All the roads of his speculation start from that nodal point in
the story of man. Let us take a grotesque example:

Do you not notice how the intimate mind of Europe is reflected in
cheese? For in the centre of Europe, and where Europe is most
active, I mean in Britain and in Gaul and in Northern Italy, and in
the valley of the Rhine--nay, to some extent in Spain (in her
Pyrenean valleys at least)--there flourishes a vast burgeoning of
cheese, infinite in variety, one in goodness. But as Europe fades
away under the African wound which Spain suffered or the Eastern
barbarism of the Elbe, what happens to cheese? It becomes very flat
and similar. You can quote six cheeses perhaps which the public
power of Christendom has founded outside the limits of its ancient
Empire--but not more than six. I will quote you 253 between the
Ebro and the Grampians, between Brindisi and the Irish channel.

I do not write vainly. It is a profound thing.

That passage illustrates admirably how Mr. Belloc's mind, playing on all
manner of subjects, remains true to certain fixed points. In two phrases
there he gives us our starting-point: "the public power of Christendom"
and "the limits