would all live in houses of their own, on lands
belonging to them. Their faith would be one. They would speak Latin as a
sort of Esperanto, and drink enormous quantities of good beer. The
Church--but I have found the passage relating to the Church:

Religion, the immortal maiden, has been a
maid-of-all-work as well as a servant of mankind.
She provided men at once with the theoretic laws
of an unalterable cosmos; and also with the
practical rules of the rapid and thrilling game of
morality. She taught logic to the student and
taught fairy tales to the children; it was her
business to confront the nameless gods whose fear
is on all flesh, and also to see that the streets
were spotted with silver and scarlet, that there
was a day for wearing ribbons or an hour for
ringing bells.

The inhabitants of this happy realm would be instinctively democratic,
and no woman would demand a vote there. They would have that exalted
notion of patriotism that works outwards from the village pump to the
universe at large. They would understand all humanity because they
understood themselves. They would understand themselves because they
would have no newspapers to widen their interests and so make them
shallower.

In _Magic_, as we have seen, Chesterton's mouthpiece, the Conjuror, gave
us to understand that it was better to believe in Apollo than merely to
disbelieve in God. The Chestertonian Middle Ages are like Apollo; they
did not exist, but they make an admirable myth. For Chesterton, in
common with the rest of us, flourishes on myths like the green bay; we,
however, happen not to know, in most cases, when our myths have a
foundation. Mankind demands myths--and it has them. Some day a History
of the World's Myths will be compiled. It will show humanity climbing
perilous peaks in pursuit of somebody's misinterpretations of somebody
else's books, or fighting bloodily because somebody asserted or denied
that a nation was the chosen one, or invading new continents, physical
or metaphysical, because of legendary gold to be found therein, or in
fact committing all its follies under the inspiration of myths--as in
fact it has done. The Middle Ages are to Chesterton what King Alfred was
to the Chartists and early Radicals. They believed that in his days
England was actually governed on Chartist principles. So it happens t