have their
parallels even in every daily paper; but they have no parallel in any
other earthly people or period; except in that insane command to make
bricks without straw which brought down all the plagues of Egypt. For
the common historical joke about Henry VIII. hanging a man for being
Catholic and burning him for being Protestant is a symbolic joke only.
The sceptic in the Tudor time could do something: he could always
agree with Henry VIII. The desperate man to-day can do nothing. For
you cannot agree with a maniac who sits on the bench with the straws
sticking out of his hair and says, "Procure threepence from nowhere
and I will give you leave to do without it."

If it be answered that he can go to the workhouse, I reply that such
an answer is founded on confused thinking. It is true that he is free
to go to the workhouse, but only in the same sense in which he is free
to go to jail, only in the same sense in which the serf under the
gibbet was free to find peace in the grave. Many of the poor greatly
prefer the grave to the workhouse, but that is not at all my argument
here. The point is this: that it could not have been the general
policy of a lord towards serfs to kill them all like wasps. It could
not have been his standing "Advice to Serfs" to say, "Get hanged." It
cannot be the standing advice of magistrates to citizens to go to
prison. And, precisely as plainly, it cannot be the standing advice of
rich men to very poor men to go to the workhouses. For that would mean
the rich raising their own poor rates enormously to keep a vast and
expensive establishment of slaves. Now it may come to this, as Mr.
Belloc maintains, but it is not the theory on which what we call the
workhouse does in fact rest. The very shape (and even the very size)
of a workhouse express the fact that it was founded for certain quite
exceptional human failures--like the lunatic asylum. Say to a man, "Go
to the madhouse," and he will say, "Wherein am I mad?" Say to a tramp
under a hedge, "Go to the house of exceptional failures," and he will
say with equal reason, "I travel because I have no house; I walk
because I have no horse; I sleep out because I have no bed. Wherein
have I failed?" And he may have the intelligence to add, "Indeed, your
worship, if somebody has failed, I think it is not I." I concede, with
all due haste, that he might perhaps say "me."

The speciality then of this man's wrong is that it is the only
historic wrong t