rt of den, like outlaws or broken men. It occurred to the
wiser sociologists that, after all, it would be easy to proceed more
promptly to the main business of bullying men, without having gone
through the laborious preliminary business of supporting them. After
all, it was easy to inspect the house without having helped to build
it; it was even possible, with luck, to inspect the house in time to
prevent it being built. All that is described in the documents of the
Housing Problem; for the people of this age loved problems and hated
solutions. It was easy to restrict the diet without providing the
dinner. All that can be found in the documents of what is called
Temperance Reform.

In short, people decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the
good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the
bad. All that official discipline, about which the Socialists
themselves were in doubt or at least on the defensive, was taken over
bodily by the Capitalists. They have now added all the bureaucratic
tyrannies of a Socialist state to the old plutocratic tyrannies of a
Capitalist State. For the vital point is that it did not in the
smallest degree diminish the inequalities of a Capitalist State. It
simply destroyed such individual liberties as remained among its
victims. It did not enable any man to build a better house; it only
limited the houses he might live in--or how he might manage to live
there; forbidding him to keep pigs or poultry or to sell beer or
cider. It did not even add anything to a man's wages; it only took
away something from a man's wages and locked it up, whether he liked
it or not, in a sort of money-box which was regarded as a
medicine-chest. It does not send food into the house to feed the
children; it only sends an inspector into the house to punish the
parents for having no food to feed them. It does not see that they
have got a fire; it only punishes them for not having a fireguard. It
does not even occur to it to provide the fireguard.

Now this anomalous situation will probably ultimately evolve into the
Servile State of Mr. Belloc's thesis. The poor will sink into slavery;
it might as correctly be said that the poor will rise into slavery.
That is to say, sooner or later, it is very probable that the rich
will take over the philanthropic as well as the tyrannic side of the
bargain; and will feed men like slaves as well as hunting them like
outlaws. But for the purpose of my