the political creed
represented by G.B.S. might have been carried a trifle farther. Instead
of which it was not carried anything like so far. Chesterton jeered at
Mr. Shaw's vegetarianism, denied his democracy, but decided that on the
whole he was a good republican, "in the literal and Latin sense; he
cares more for the Public Thing than for any private thing." He ends the
chapter entitled "The Progressive" by saying the kindest things he ever
said about any body of Socialists.

I have in my time had my fling at the Fabian
Society, at the pedantry of schemes, the arrogance
of experts; nor do I regret it now. But when I
remember that other world against which it reared
its bourgeois banner of cleanliness and common
sense, I will not end this chapter without doing
it decent honour. Give me the drain pipes of the
Fabians rather than the panpipes of the later
poets; the drain pipes have a nicer smell.

The reader may have grasped by this time the fact that Chesterton's
objections to Socialism were based rather on his dislike of what the
working man calls "mucking people about" than on any economic grounds.
He made himself the sworn enemy of any Bill before Parliament which
contained any proposals to appoint inspectors. He took the line that the
sacredness of the home diminishes visibly with the entrance of the gas
collector, and disappears down the kitchen sink with the arrival of the
school attendance officer. In those of his writings which I have not
seen I have no doubt there are pleadings for the retention of the
cesspool, because it is the last moat left to the Englishman's house,
which is his castle. It is difficult to believe in the complete
sincerity of such an attitude. The inspector is the chief enemy of the
bad landlord and employer, he is a fruit of democracy. In the early days
of the factory system, when mercilessly long hours were worked by
children and women, when legislation had failed to ameliorate the
conditions of employment, because the employers were also the
magistrates, and would not enforce laws against themselves, the great
Reform Bill agitation, which so nearly caused a revolution in this
country, came to an end, having in 1832 achieved a partial success. But
the new House of Commons did not at once realize how partial it was, and
at first it regarded the interests of working men with something of the
inte