ine did not stop suddenly), highly efficient, bloodless and
painless. But just because it is so humanitarian it offends one a great
deal more than the old-fashioned gallows. The only circumstance which
can justify violence is anger. The only circumstance which can justify
the taking of human life is anger. And anger may be expressed by a rope
or a knife-edge, but not by a roundabout or any other morbid invention
of a cold-blooded philosopher such as the electric chair, or the lethal
chamber. In the same way, if flogging is to continue as a punishment, it
must be inflicted by a man and not by a machine.

Now this distinction (made without prejudice as to Chesterton's views on
capital or corporal punishment) holds good through his whole criticism
of modern legislation. He believes that it is better that a man and his
family should starve in their own slum, than that they should be
moulded, by a cumbersome apparatus of laws and officials and inspectors,
into a tame, mildly prosperous and mildly healthy group of individuals,
whose opinions, occupations and homes should be provided for them. On
these lines he attacks whatever in his opinion will tend to put men into
a position where their souls will be less their own. He believes that
the man who has been costered by the Government into a mediocre state of
life will be less of a man than one who has been left unbothered by
officials, and has had to shift for himself.

Very largely, therefore, Chesterton's political faith is an up-to-date
variety of the tenets of the Self-Help School, which was own brother to
the Manchester School. And here we come to a curious contradiction, the
first of a series. For Chesterton loathes the Manchester School.

The contradiction comes of an inveterate nominalism. To G.K.C. all good
politics are summed up in the words Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. But
nobody, not even a Frenchman, can explain what they mean. Chesterton
used to believe that they mean Liberalism, being led astray by the sound
of the first word, but he soon realized his error. Let a man say "I
believe in Liberty" and only the vagueness of the statement preserves it
from the funniness of a Higher Thinker's affirmation, "I believe in
Beauty." A man has to _feel_ Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, for they are
not in the nature of facts. And one suspects horribly that what
Chesterton really feels is merely the masculine liberty, equality and
fraternity of the public-house, where men m