service for life,
guaranteeing them employment at what each regarded as his usual
full wage, how many would refuse?

Such a contract would, of course, involve a loss of freedom; a life
contract of the kind is, to be accurate, no contract at all. It is
the negation of contract and the acceptation of status.[22]

Every thinking man knows that the number to reject such a proposal would
be insignificant.

If, then, the great mass of the English people, the majority, that is,
of the voters, is prepared to welcome rather than to reject the
re-introduction of slavery, the possession or non-possession of the
power to reject it appears immaterial.

Let us suppose, however, an extreme case. Let us suppose an attempt to
reduce the wage-earners to slavery without guaranteeing them sufficiency
and security. There are many amiable maniacs who would be willing to
support such an attempt, though we cannot believe that their efforts
would be rewarded with success. They would be rewarded with revolution.

This is a point upon which too great insistence cannot be laid. Such an
attempt, if it were ever made, would produce a revolution: it would not
be quashed in a General Election or by any other form of constitutional
procedure, because, as a fact, the English people have no constitutional
power.

Ultimately, of course, the power of government can only rest with the
majority of the people, but in practice that power is often taken from
them. It has been taken from the English people.

These, then, are the two great simple truths which underlie Mr. Belloc's
whole attitude towards the public affairs of the England of to-day:

First, we are economically unfree.

Second, we are politically unfree.[23]

The causes of the existence of the first condition are analysed, as we
have seen, in _The Servile State_; the causes of the second are analysed
in _The Party System_.

With the prime truths of this book every man possessing but the most
elementary knowledge of political science and constitutional history is
familiar. They were proved by Bagehot many years ago, and no observant
man of average intelligence can fail to realize them for himself to-day.
Briefly, they are these. The representative system existing in England,
which was meant to be an organ of democracy, is actually an engine of
oligarchy. "Instead of the executive being controlled by the
representative assembly, it controls it. Instead of the dema