in France, and wherever the powers
of evil had been at work?

Lastly, is it decent that women should share the awful responsibility
which is attached to the ultimate control of the State, when the State
is compelled to use the gallows? If women vote, they are responsible for
whatever blood is shed by the State. Yes, but, Mr. Chesterton, aren't
they just as responsible for it in any case? Don't women help to pay the
hangman's wages with every ounce of tea or of sweets they buy? If
capital punishment is obscene, then we can do without it, and a woman's
vote will not make her a sharer in the evil. If capital punishment is
morally stimulating to the nation at large, there is no reason why women
should not be allowed to share in the stimulation. Now what has become
of Chesterton's decencies? It is indeed saddening that a man who never
misses an opportunity to proclaim himself a democrat should take his
stand on this matter beside Lord Curzon, and in opposition to the
instinctively and essentially democratic views proclaimed by such men as
Messrs. H. W. Nevinson and Philip Snowden.

In an article in The Illustrated London News on June 1st, 1912,
Chesterton showed whose side he was on with unusual distinctness. The
subject of the article was Earnestness; the moral, that it was a bad
quality, the property of Socialists and Anti-Socialists, and
Suffragists, and that apathy was best of all. It concluded:

Neither Socialists nor Suffragists will smash our
politics, I fear. The worst they can do is to put
a little more of the poison of earnestness into
the strong, unconscious sanity of our race, and
disturb that deep and just indifference on which
all things rest; the quiet of the mother or the
carelessness of the child.

In remarkably similar words, the late Procurator of the Holy Synod of
the Russian Church, C. P. Pobedonostsev, condemned democracy in his
book, The Reflexions of a Russian Statesman, and praised _vis inertiae_
for its preservative effects. But the Russian had more consistency; he
did not merely condemn votes for women, but also votes for men; and not
only votes, but education, the jury system, the freedom of the Press,
religious freedom, and many other things.

Putting aside the question of woman suffrage, Chesterton's views on
democracy may be further illustrated by reference to the proceedings of
the Joint Select Committee of the House o