e most ballot
papers, are marked with a cross.

I have first to say, therefore, that if I have had a bias, it was always
a bias in favour of democracy, and therefore of tradition. Before we
come to any theoretic or logical beginnings I am content to allow for
that personal equation; I have always been more inclined to believe the
ruck of hard-working people than to believe that special and troublesome
literary class to which I belong. I prefer even the fancies and
prejudices of the people who see life from the inside to the clearest
demonstrations of the people who see life from the outside. I would
always trust the old wives' fables against the old maids' facts. As long
as wit is mother wit it can be as wild as it pleases.

Now, I have to put together a general position, and I pretend to no
training in such things. I propose to do it, therefore, by writing down
one after another the three or four fundamental ideas which I have found
for myself, pretty much in the way that I found them. Then I shall
roughly synthesise them, summing up my personal philosophy or natural
religion; then I shall describe my startling discovery that the whole
thing had been discovered before. It had been discovered by
Christianity. But of these profound persuasions which I have to recount
in order, the earliest was concerned with this element of popular
tradition. And without the foregoing explanation touching tradition and
democracy I could hardly make my mental experience clear. As it is, I do
not know whether I can make it clear, but I now propose to try.

My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken
certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it from a nurse;
that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of
democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then, the things I
believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to
be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with
them other things are fantastic. Compared with them religion and
rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and
rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country
of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that
judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised
elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth. I knew the magic
beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Mo