of
something in his character which was nearly allied to the stock of
the race, something which made him save and invest in land as does
the French peasant, and love, as the French peasant loves, good
government, order, security, and well-being. There is to be
discovered in all the fragments which remain to us of his
conversation before the bursting of the storm, and still more
clearly in his demand for a _centre_ when the invasion and the
rebellion threatened the Republic, a certain conviction that the
revolutionary thing rather than the revolutionary idea should be
produced: not an inspiring creed, but a goal to be reached,
sustained him. Like all active minds, his mission was rather to
realize than to plan, and his energies were determined upon seeing
the result of theories which he unconsciously admitted, but which
he was too impatient to analyse. His voice was loud even when his
expressions were subdued. He talked no man down, but he made many
opponents sound weak and piping after his utterance. It was of the
kind that fills great halls, and whose deep note suggests hard
phrases. There was with all this a carelessness as to what his
words might be made to mean when partially repeated by others, and
such carelessness has caused historians still more careless to lend
a false aspect of Bohemianism to his character. A Bohemian he was
not; he was a successful and an orderly man; but energy he had, and
if there are writers who cannot conceive of energy without chaos,
it is probably because in the studious leisure of vast endowments
they have never felt the former in themselves, nor have been
compelled to control the latter in their surroundings.... His
friends also he loved, and above all, from the bottom of his soul,
he loved France. His faults--and they were many--his vices (and a
severe critic would have discovered these also) flowed from two
sources: first, he was too little of an idealist, too much absorbed
in the immediate thing; secondly, he suffered from all the evil
effects that abundant energy may produce--the habit of oaths, the
rhetoric of sudden diatribes, violent and overstrained action, with
its subsequent demand for repose.

This is neither the place nor the time to enter into details of Mr.
Belloc's life. Nevertheless, it is necessary t