more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing
really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the
clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the
same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their
souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours
than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because
they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness
of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell.
A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a
society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the
purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all
experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the
most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of
Christian knowledge.

We can see this change, for instance, in the modern transformation of
the thing called a club. When London was smaller, and the parts of
London more self-contained and parochial, the club was what it still is
in villages, the opposite of what it is now in great cities. Then the
club was valued as a place where a man could be sociable. Now the club
is valued as a place where a man can be unsociable. The more the
enlargement and elaboration of our civilization goes on the more the
club ceases to be a place where a man can have a noisy argument, and
becomes more and more a place where a man can have what is somewhat
fantastically called a quiet chop. Its aim is to make a man
comfortable, and to make a man comfortable is to make him the opposite
of sociable. Sociability, like all good things, is full of
discomforts, dangers, and renunciations. The club tends to produce the
most degraded of all combinations--the luxurious anchorite, the man who
combines the self-indulgence of Lucullus with the insane loneliness of
St. Simeon Stylites.

If we were to-morrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live,
we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than
we have ever known. And it is the whole effort of the typically modern
person to escape from the street in which he lives. First he invents
modern hygiene and goes to Margate. Then he invents modern culture and
goes to Florence. Then he invents modern imperialism and goes to
Timbuctoo. He goes to the fantastic borders of the earth. He pretends
to shoot