nded, I mean that it is
arrived at by comparing the liberties of the Middle Ages with the
tyrannies of to-day, instead of by comparing the liberties of the Middle
Ages with the liberties of to-day, or the tyrannies of the Middle Ages
with the tyrannies of to-day. It is the result, sometimes, of playing
with history and, sometimes, of playing with words. Is it not playing
with words, for instance, to glorify the charters by which medieval
kings guaranteed the rights and privileges of their subjects, and to
deny the name of charter to such a law as that by which a modern State
guarantees some of the rights and privileges of children--to deny it
simply on the ground that the latter expresses itself largely in
prohibitions? It may be necessary to forbid a child to go into a
gin-palace in order to secure it the privilege of not being driven into
a gin-palace. Prohibitions are as necessary to human liberty as permits
and licences.

At the same time, quarrel as we may with Mr. Chesterton's mediaevalism,
and his application of it to modern problems, we can seldom quarrel with
the motive with which he urges it upon us. His high purpose throughout
is to keep alive the human view of society, as opposed to the mechanical
view to which lazy politicians are naturally inclined. If he has not
been able to give us any very, coherent vision of a Utopia of his own,
he has, at least, done the world a service in dealing some smashing
blows at the Utopia of machinery. None the less, he and Mr. Belloc would
be the most dangerous of writers to follow in a literal obedience. In
regard to political and social improvements, they are too often merely
Devil's Advocates of genius. But that is a necessary function, and they
are something more than that. As I have suggested, above all the
arguments and the rhetoric and the humours of the little political
battles, they do bear aloft a banner with a strange device, reminding us
that organized society was made for man, and not man for organized
society. That, in the last analysis, is the useful thing for which Mr.
Chesterton and Mr. Belloc stand in modern politics. It almost seems at
times, however, as though they were ready to see us bound again with the
fetters of ancient servitudes, in order to compel us to take part once
more in the ancient struggle for freedom.

2. THE COPIOUSNESS OF MR. BELLOC

Mr. Belloc has during the last four or five years become a public man.
Before that he had been a