if you wish institutions to
remain the same. The more the life of the mind is
unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be
left to itself. The net result of all our
political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism,
Neo-Feudalism, Communism, Anarchy, Scientific
Bureaucracy--the plain fruit of them all is that
Monarchy and the House of Lords will remain. The
net result of all the new religions will be that
the Church of England will not (for heaven knows
how long) be disestablished. It was Karl Marx,
Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Graham, Bernard
Shaw, and Auberon Herbert, who between them, with
bowed, gigantic backs, bore up the throne of the
Archbishop of Canterbury.

It is on these grounds that we must believe that, even as the Church
survives, and prevails, in order to get a hearing when the atheist and
the New Theologian have finished shouting themselves hoarse at each
other, so must political creeds be in conformity with the doctrines of
the Church. Such is the foundation of democracy, according to
Chesterton. Will anybody revise his political views on this basis?
Probably not. Every Christian believes that his political opinions are
thoroughly Christian, and so entire is the disrepute into which atheism
has fallen as a philosophy of life, that a great many atheists likewise
protest the entire Christianity of their politics. We are all democrats
to-day, in one sense or another; each of us more loosely than his
neighbour. It is strange that by the criterion of almost every living
man who springs to the mind as a representative democrat, Chesterton is
the most undemocratic of us all. This, however, needs a separate chapter
of explanation.

VII

THE POLITICIAN WHO COULD NOT TELL THE TIME

SOMEWHERE at the back of all Chesterton's political and religious ideas
lies an ideal country, a Utopia which actually existed. Its name is the
Middle Ages. If some unemployed Higher Critic chose to undertake the
appalling task of reading steadily through all the works of G.K.C.,
copying out those passages in which there was any reference to the
Middle Ages, the result would be a description of a land flowing with
milk and honey. The inhabitants would be large, strong Christian men,
and red-haired, womanly women. Their children would be unschooled, save
by the Church. They