g you have done. You have
justified the vulgar slander of the suburban
Conservatives that men from below are men who
merely want to rise. It is a lie. No one knows so
well as you that it was a lie: you who drove out
Grayson and deserted Lansbury. Before you went
into Parliament to represent the working classes,
the working classes were feared. Since you have
represented the working classes, they are not even
respected. Just when there was a hope of
Democracy, you have revived the notion that the
demagogue was only the sycophant. Just when there
had begun to be an English people to represent,
you have been paid to misrepresent them. Get out
of our path. Take your money; go.

Regarding which passage there is only to be said that it is grossly
unjust both to the Labour Party and to the working classes. It was
followed up in subsequent numbers by violent attacks on woman suffrage
and the economic independence of women; a proceeding quite commendably
amusing in a paper with a patron saint surnamed Pankhurst. A promise to
say no more about Votes for Women was followed by several more spirited
references to it, from the same point of view. After which Chesterton
cooled off and wrote about detective stories, telephones, and worked
himself down into an all-round fizzle of disgust at things as they are,
to illustrate which "I will not run into a paroxysm of citations again,"
as Milton said in the course of his Epistle in two books on Reformation
in England.

The most unpleasant feature of The Daily Herald articles is the
assumption of superiority over the British working man, expressing
itself in the patronizing tone. The British working man, as Chesterton
sees him, is a very different person from what he is. If the Middle Ages
had been the peculiar period Chesterton appears to believe it was, then
his working man would be merely a trifling anachronism of five
centuries or so. But he is not even that. Five centuries would be but a
trifle compared with the difference between him and his real self.
Chesterton's attitude towards the working man must resemble that of a
certain chivalrous knight towards the distressed damsel he thought he
had rescued. He observed, "Well, little one, aren't you going to show me
any gratitude?" And the lady replied, "I wasn't playing Andromeda,
fathead, I was lo