Hilaire Belloc, the man and his work

The second cause, Mr. Belloc's knowledge of the important part played by public opinion in government, he has expressed in the following terms:—

The view, then, which Mr. Belloc holds, and which these two factors combine to form, is one of enormous importance. This view is the key to all Mr. Belloc's writings on the political aspect of the war. He has expressed it over and over again, but never in more solemn terms than in the following passage. After showing the existence of the political effect of the German advance to the borders of Russia, he points out how necessary it is to control, by public authority and through our own private wills, any corresponding political effect in England:

He then goes on to show how the enemy's great offensive through Poland began in April, 1915, and throughout the summer failed and failed and failed. He concludes:

These passages will suffice to show not only that Mr. Belloc works with an object, but also the very important nature of that object. In his own words, he works "for the instruction of public opinion." His whole desire is to elucidate for the general public who have not the advantages of his knowledge and pursuits, events which are both puzzling and urgent. In his commentary in Land and Water he deals with those problems which belong of their nature to the military aspect of the war, and we have seen how extraordinarily qualified he is to undertake that task as well as with what marked success he has accomplished it. His writings on the political aspect of the war are to be found chiefly in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, while many articles which he has contributed at various times to other journals and newspapers are of a similar character.

In so far as he is writing, as he is in these articles, on general topics of the day for the public of the day, Mr. Belloc is a journalist. In its former restricted meaning the word "journalist" expressed this. To-day, however, we include under the designation of journalist all those workers in the editorial departments of newspaper offices who, though skilled in various ways, are not necessarily writers at all. In referring, then, to Mr. Belloc as a journalist we are using the term in its older and more restricted sense: in the sense in which the term was employed when journalism was a profession and not a trade, when the newspaper was not merely an instrument to further the ends of a capitalist or syndicate, but a means of communicating to the public the views of an individual or group of individuals, each of whom was prepared to accept personal responsibility for the views he expressed.

The journalist in this sense is a rare figure to-day: so rare, indeed, that we have forgotten he is a journalist and invented a new name for him. In the field of journalism as it is at the present time it is possible to count on the fingers of one hand the number of men who write constantly on general topics of the day and sign what they write, thus accepting personal responsibility for the views they express and not leaving that responsibility with the newspaper in which their views appear. Every weekly or monthly journal as well as the greater number of daily newspapers contain, it is true, signed articles. The leader-pages of the halfpenny dailies make a feature nearly every day of one or more signed articles. But these articles, in the main, deal only with subjects on which the writer who signs his name is a specialist. They are written by men who happen to possess special knowledge of some subject which is of pronounced interest to the public owing to the course of events at the moment. For instance, when the Germans were on the point of entering Warsaw, articles dealing with various aspects of the city, its history, character and buildings, appeared in nearly every newspaper: and the better articles of this nature were written and signed by men who possessed an intimate knowledge of the subject on which they were writing. In the same way, all signed criticism, literary, dramatic or musical, which appears in the columns of the newspapers of to-day is, or professes to be, the work of specialists. Many of the larger newspapers, indeed, pay retaining fees or salaries and give staff appointments to such specialists. Thus, the Daily Telegraph has as its literary specialist Mr. W. L. Courtney, its musical specialist Mr. Robin H. Legge, its business specialist Mr. H. E. Morgan.

It is the practice, then, of newspapers at the present time to make personally responsible for the opinions they express those who write in their columns on subjects which, though of great interest and importance, can of their nature only concern certain classes of the community. It should be noted, however, as perhaps the most curious anomaly among the mass of anomalies which constitute modern journalism, that the newspapers do not insist upon this personal responsibility of the writer in their treatment of those matters which concern not one class but every class of the community. What the newspaper insists upon, on the ground, presumably, that it is right and natural, in the minor affairs of life, it entirely ignores in the major matters of life. While it insists, for example, that the writer who expresses an opinion in its columns on the ludicrous inadequacy of the Promenade Concerts shall accept personal responsibility for that opinion, it allows views and opinions on such vital matters as the sovereignty of Parliament, the invincibility of Capitalism and the immorality of Trades Unionism to be expressed anonymously.

This practice is now firmly established. These anonymous opinions are the "opinions of the paper." But what does that phrase mean? A newspaper itself, as a mere material object, is incapable of forming or holding an opinion. Some person, or group of persons, must form and hold and be ready to accept the responsibility for the expression of these "opinions of the paper." And since the ultimate responsibility can fall on nobody but the proprietor or proprietors of the papers, these anonymous opinions must properly be regarded as the opinions of the capitalist or syndicate owning the paper in which they appear. In other words, the opinions anonymously expressed in the leading articles of the Daily News can only be the opinions of Messrs. Cadbury: of the Daily Telegraph of Lord Burnham or the Lawson family: in the Manchester Guardian of Mr. C. P. Scott and his fellow-proprietors: in the Morning Post of Lady Bathurst: in the Daily Mail of Lord Northcliffe and the Harmsworth family.

Of this system of purveying to the public opinions which, by an absurd, illogical and pernicious tradition, are supposed to be those of the public, but which, in reality, are those either of a single capitalist or syndicate, Mr. Belloc is not merely the avowed enemy but the most active enemy. It was his persistently inimical attitude, ruthlessly maintained, which evoked the angry personal attack made upon him by Lord Northcliffe; and we have seen how Mr. Belloc explains, justifies and maintains his attitude. In this we see his enmity avowed, but we do not perhaps realize how practical and active is the expression he gives it.

It has been said, indeed, just above, that of this system he is the most active enemy; and, in truth, we can find no other to equal him in this respect except such as are working in co-operation with, if not under the leadership of, Mr. Belloc. We have seen how, in so far as he is writing on general topics of the day for the public of the day (as he is doing, for example, in his articles which are concerned with various phases of the political aspect of the war in the Illustrated Sunday Herald and other journals and newspapers), Mr. Belloc is a journalist in the older and more restricted sense of the term. It has been further shown that the journalist in this sense is a rare figure to-day, it being the practice of modern journalism to deal with general, as distinct from special, topics of the day in the form of leading articles, which, in reality, contain what can only logically be regarded as the opinions of the proprietors of the newspapers in which they appear. The journalist who writes what may be called signed leading articles is so rare among us to-day that we have forgotten he is a journalist and invented a new name for him. We call him a publicist.

Among the writers of the day the number who rank as publicists is very small. The names that occur to one are those of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. A. G. Gardiner, Mr. E. B. Osborn and, possibly, Mr. Arnold Bennett. In addition there are a few publicists who speak through organs which they personally control, such as Mr. A. R. Orage, Mr. Sidney Webb, and Mr. Cecil Chesterton. Mr. Arnold Bennett, indeed, has only occupied the position of publicist since he has been a regular contributor to the Daily News, and we can only say that, high as Mr. Bennett stands in our estimation as a novelist and writer, we fail to see any particular in which his views on political and social matters of the day are of extraordinary importance to the welfare of the community at large. In a word, it seems to us that those articles of his which from time to time occupy so prominent a position on the leader page of the Daily News might appear as fitly in the correspondence column. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has won for himself a high place in contemporary letters, but it is more probable that that place is due rather to the excellence and individuality of his writing than to the originality of the opinions he holds. It may be said, indeed, of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, as an exceedingly competent critic has said of Mr. Shaw, that it is his manner of expressing his philosophy rather than his philosophy itself that will be valued by posterity. And as Mr. Shaw has expressed most of his views in his plays and prefaces rather than in the columns of the newspapers (and this is said in full remembrance of his manifold and copious letters to The Times), so Mr. H. G. Wells has given us his philosophy in his novels and fantasies. His appearances in the newspapers have been rare and invariably regrettable. The two other gentlemen whose names are mentioned, Mr. E. B. Osborn and Mr. A. G. Gardiner, should be classed, perhaps, rather with those other three who are in control, more or less, of the papers in which their writings appear, since both Mr. Osborn and Mr. Gardiner are definitely attached, the one to the Morning Post and the other to the Daily News and Leader, of which, before the amalgamation, he was editor. This being the case, it is to be assumed that these two gentlemen express and sign their views in these papers because their views correspond to a determining extent with those of the proprietors of the papers. This must logically be the case with Mr. Gardiner. So far as Mr. Osborn is concerned, he occupies on the Morning Post the same position as was occupied on that paper by Mr. Belloc and on the Daily News in former times by Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. That is to say, he is an essayist of such standing as to make a regular contribution from him of value to the newspaper so long as the views and opinions he expresses in those essays do not contrast too violently with the opinions expressed in the leading articles.

Of the other three gentlemen we have named, Mr. Orage, Mr. Cecil Chesterton and Mr. Webb, it is difficult to speak as of individuals. They are referred to more properly as the New Age, the New Witness, and the New Statesman, and their respective personalities and attitudes of mind are fitly expressed in the names of the organs through which they speak. All three agree in finding the times out of joint and desiring new and better conditions of life: they differ in the standpoints from which they approach an analysis of present conditions and in the solutions they propound. The New Age is the most valuable because it is the most thorough. Not only is its analysis of present conditions the most acute and the most sound that we have to-day, but the solutions it propounds to the problems it analyses are the most fearless, the most thorough and the most idealistic. The New Witness is equally thorough but more immediate. The scope of its analysis is not so wide. Although its views are based on principles similar to those of the New Age, it is concerned more to influence the actions than the thoughts of men. Its object is to bear testimony to the wrongs that are being done to-day, the crimes that are committed every day against the welfare of the community, and to cry aloud for the immediate righting of those wrongs, the stern punishment of those crimes. Though these two journals are aiming at the same object, the methods they adopt are in almost direct contrast. Mr. Orage looks down from the height, not of philosophic doubt, but of philosophic certainty (where he alone feels happy) upon the petty house of party politics, and seeks, by the magic music of his words and phrases, so to move and draw after him the sand of human nature on which that house is built, that it may no longer stand but fall and be banished utterly. Mr. Cecil Chesterton, on the other hand, only happy in the rôle of the new David, gives fearless battle to the modern Goliath, caring no whit if at times the struggle go against him and he find himself hard pressed at the Old Bailey, but gleefully and dauntlessly springing at his monstrous assailant, in the hope that some day a lucky stone from his sling will find its mark. Somewhere between these two extremes stands (or wavers) the New Statesman, sometimes inclining more to the one, more to the other method. It is concerned neither entirely with the thoughts nor entirely with the actions of men, but with each in part. Its object is so to influence the thoughts of men that they will find natural expression in the clauses of beneficent Bills.

These are the publicists. As individuals they are of value to the community according to the value of the views they hold and express. As a class they are of value to the community because the views they hold and express, whether right or wrong, are sincere. In contrast with the great body of the Capitalist Press that expresses anonymous opinions which, whether sincere or not (and it can be proved that they are often quite insincere), must still necessarily aim at the maintenance and strengthening of present social and economic conditions, these men express their own personal convictions as to what is wrong with the world and how, as they think, the world may be made a better place.

It is this inestimable quality of sincerity which links Mr. Belloc with the too small band of publicists of the day. It has been said of Mr. Belloc that he is a "man of independent mind, and, where necessary, of unpopular attitude ... his estimates, right or wrong, are his own ... he carries a sword to grasp not an axe to grind." In the following chapters a brief exposition of Mr. Belloc's views both of Europe and of England will be given with a short summary of his translation of these views into the language of practical reforms; and we shall then be able to form some estimate of Mr. Belloc's particular value to the community. In his articles both on the military and on the political aspect of the war Mr. Belloc is working, as we have seen, "for the instruction of public opinion." That this is to-day true, moreover, of Mr. Belloc's whole attitude towards the public is not fully realized. Large numbers of people have found in Mr. Belloc's war articles their only hope of sanity in the midst of distressing and unintelligible events. In the general course of modern life events move less rapidly, but are equally important, and there, too, Mr. Belloc has attempted with almost pathetic lucidity to explain. His true earnestness will not be rewarded, his true purpose will not be attained, until the thoughtful public realizes that it can find in Mr. Belloc's historical and political writings at large the guide to the formation of opinion and the help to sanity which it has already found in his explanations of the war.

CHAPTER VIII

A casual glance at his essays will reveal some sentences or other testifying to the strength with which this opinion is rooted in his mind. Take this from First and Last:

Or again from On Anything, regarding the matter from a somewhat different point of view:

Wherever you turn over these pages, you are more likely than not to find some such earnest and emphatic sentence: this opinion is essential to Mr. Belloc's life and thought. With the practical and business-like position of the first of these quotations it is our affair to deal in this chapter: and the more spiritual and poetic view expressed in the second will receive consideration in a later place.

In this chapter it is our purpose to outline as briefly and as clearly as possible Mr. Belloc's conception of the growth of Europe, from the prehistoric men who knew how to make dew-pans which "are older than the language or the religion, and the finding of water with a stick, and the catching of that smooth animal the mole," to the outbreak of the present war. From this we shall omit, to a large extent, the development of England, which, as it is singular in Europe, is singular in Mr. Belloc's scheme of things, and must be considered separately.

We shall endeavour, as far as possible, to piece together from a great number of books and writings on various subjects a continuous view of European history, which we believe to be Mr. Belloc's view, but which he has never, as yet, stated all together in one place. We shall draw our material from such varied sources as Esto Perpetua, The Old Road, Paris, The Historic Thames, and inevitably the essays: inevitably, for all practical purposes, from all the books that Mr. Belloc has ever written. At some future time, it is very seriously to be hoped, Mr. Belloc will do this himself. It should be his magnum opus: "A General Sketch of European Development," let us suppose. In the meanwhile, we conceive that we shall serve a useful purpose if we make a consistent scheme out of the hints, allusions and detached statements which occur up and down in Mr. Belloc's books. For some such scheme, existing but unformulated, is, beyond all doubt, the solid sub-structure of all his thinking.

In the essay On History in Travel, Mr. Belloc says: "It is true that those who write good guide-books do put plenty of history into them, but it is sporadic history, as it were; it is not continuous or organic, and therefore it does not live." It is living, organic history that is necessary, he would consider, to the proper understanding of present problems and the proper furnishing of the human mind. He desires to see and grasp the development of Europe as a symmetrical whole, not as a conglomeration of unco-ordinated parts or a succession of unrelated accidents. He believes that Europe has developed from prehistoric man by way of the Roman Empire, the Christian religion, and the French Revolution, in an orderly, organic manner. He believes, far more than Freeman, in a real unity of history.

And from this observation of continuous history he draws certain morals. He sees, or believes that he sees, in Carthage a wealthy trading plutocracy, ruling a population averse from arms: and he sees this society falling to utter ruin before the Roman state, a polity of peasant proprietors with a popular army. From that spectacle he draws certain conclusions. He sees the Roman Empire and the way in which it governed Europe, and from that huge organization and its mighty remains he also draws certain lessons of wonder and reverence. From the decline of the Empire, the growth of a slave, and economically enslaved, class, the growth of a wealthy class, he again deduces something. All these conclusions he applies constantly and unrelentingly to our own problems and institutions: he cannot forbear from mentioning imperial Rome when he comes to discuss our war in the Transvaal. He cannot forbear from seeing the counterpart of the Peabody Yid in imperial Rome. All history is to him a living and organic whole. And as individuals can judge in present problems what they shall do only by reference to their own experience and what they know of that of others, so also societies and races. There is no guide for them but recorded history. This accumulated experience, however, requires to be set out and interpreted.

Mr. Belloc's view and conception of the history of Europe begins with Rome. All the roads of his speculation start from that nodal point in the story of man. Let us take a grotesque example:

That passage illustrates admirably how Mr. Belloc's mind, playing on all manner of subjects, remains true to certain fixed points. In two phrases there he gives us our starting-point: "the public power of Christendom" and "the limits of its ancient Empire." For Rome is to him the beginning of Europe, and Christianity inherited what Rome had stored up in public power, public order, and public intelligence.

He sees in Rome the power which established a unity among the Western races which lay already dormant in them. We can trace this idea very clearly in Esto Perpetua, where he speaks repeatedly of the Berbers, as having fallen easily under the power of Rome because they are "of our own kind." We can trace it again inversely in The Path to Rome, in such a passage as this:

It is in this order, this power to create, that Mr. Belloc sees the greatness of Rome and the innate gifts of our Western race. And if one objects that a certain power of order would seem to reside also in Prussia, undoubtedly a Northern, exterior and barbaric country, Mr. Belloc would reply that the power to create was lacking, the power to make their order living and to inform it with a spirit.

It is his opinion, we say, or rather one of the articles of his creed, that Rome first beat and welded into unity the kindred peoples that inhabit Western Europe. What name he gives to this Western race, if any, he has not yet explained. Professor Müller and his contemporaries used to talk about the Indo-Germanic race, and Professor Sergi came forward with a more plausible Mediterranean race, and all sorts of people talk with the utmost possible vagueness about the Celtic race, that rubbish-heap of ethnological science or pretence. Whatever name he may give to this race, or however ethnologically he may justify his conception of it, Mr. Belloc believes that it exists and that Rome first discovered it and gave it expression.

Like all large and generalized conceptions, this idea of the Western race is best explained in a contrast, and Mr. Belloc finds a sharp example of such a contrast in the struggle between Rome and Carthage. He sets it out in Esto Perpetua:

It is in the European spirit, the spirit of "our people," that Mr. Belloc finds the mission and the justification of Rome. It is on a belief in the reality of this spirit that he founds his views of all subsequent developments, of our own present and of our future. The work of Rome has been minimized in common estimation by our extraordinary habit of telescoping the centuries and viewing history, as we say, in a perspective. There is no perspective in a right view of history: the centuries do not diminish in length as they recede from our own day. The perception of this very simple fact has not come to many of our historians or to any of our politicians. It should be, indeed, the first sentence in every school history-book, and the don should begin each course of lectures with it.

The reasons for the overlooking of so elementary a maxim are fairly clear. Time simplifies. The later centuries are more full of detail, and that detail is more confused: much of it, moreover, relates more directly to the urgent detail of our own life than the similar events of earlier times. But for a sound conception of the historical development of the world, we must make an effort to overcome these delusive influences: we must realize that from the accession of Augustus to, say, the death of Julian the Apostate was as long a period of time as the period from the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the death of Edward VII. Only a false perspective has so telescoped these years together as to make them seem a short and rapid period of decline, filled up with wars, massacres and human misery. Gibbon has given the greatest weight of authority to these errors and shown the Empire as a period of decay and horror.

Even Mommsen closed his history of the Republic with the gloomy assertion that Cæsar could only secure for the dying ancient world a peaceful twilight.

As a matter of fact, during the first four centuries, the Empire was the most successful, satisfactory and enduring political institution which the world has yet seen, and a recognition of this is essential to the proper understanding of Mr. Belloc's theories. We should, as he says, attempt "to stand in the shoes of the time and to see it as must have seen it the barber of Marcus Aurelius or the stud-groom of Sidonius' palace."

The reader has there a handy conspectus of Mr. Belloc's view on a period he considers cardinal in the history of what he would call "our own kind." This is one of the pillars of his conception of the world: what the other pillars are will appear later in this chapter.

In pursuing the story, he insists on minimizing the effect and extent of the barbaric invasions. He does not indeed regard the auxiliary troops of the Empire who set up kingdoms in the West as invaders at all. The Wandering of the Peoples which assumes such a dreadful aspect in Gibbon, is, to him, until after Charlemagne at least, certainly a sign of decay and certainly an element of disorganization, but neither the one nor the other to the extent which we are accustomed to believe. Here we have a sign of a definite attitude towards historical fact, an attitude which is open to question but which is still permissible. He believes that the civilization of Rome endured for the main part, particularly in Gaul, until the ninth century. In The Eye-Witness he states roundly that Charlemagne came of an old family of wealthy and powerful Gallo-Roman nobles. In Paris, an earlier work, he declines to estimate the exact amount of German blood in this ruler's veins.[3]

In any case, he believes that the German auxiliaries partly replaced and partly allied themselves with a rich, powerful and long-established aristocracy; that they did in truth separate the State into fragments; but that they touched very little the main social fabric, and only at most hastened the elements of change. He perpetually insists on the fewness of the invaders who settled, and he believes that the Western race, welded almost into one people by the vast political action of Rome, was, in bulk, but little affected by the Northern barbarians.

Not until the ninth century will he admit anything approaching the death of Roman influence in her Western provinces, except in Britain. Here, in the ninth century, under the invasions of the Danes and the onslaughts of the Arabs, civilization is in peril and the West suffers its most serious wounds at the hands of the barbarians. And here already, the new influence, the Roman Church, which began to show itself in the coronation of Charlemagne, first takes up its inheritance of the œcumenical power of the Empire. The ninth century saw the climax of "the gradual despair of the civil power; the new dream of the Church which meant to build a city of God on the shifting sands of the invasions."[4]

The new dream was but beginning to take on reality and the civil power had in all fullness despaired. The old civilization, which had lasted so long and changed so gradually, required to be refreshed by catastrophe: even as some men believe of our own times. The catastrophe came, and, through the struggle with the North and with Asia, the transformation took place unseen in that lowest ebb of humanity. Europe had reached the crest of one wave in the height of the Empire under the power of the Roman government. It was to reach another in the thirteenth century under the influence of the Roman Church.

The most of Mr. Belloc's conception of the Middle Ages is to be found in his book Paris, where it is really incidental though profoundly important. We cannot too often insist upon this fact, that the brief and insufficient historical sketch presented in this chapter is a piecing together often of mere indications as well as of detached statements. The reader will do well to bear in mind that in this exposition we are laying before him to the best of our powers what we take to be the definite scheme of events undoubtedly present in our author's mind, but never as a whole expressed by him. It is frequently necessary to infer from what he states, the precise curve of his thought: this skeleton of history is deduced only from a few bones.

In the book Paris, then, we find the best guide to his conception of the Middle Ages. It is naturally in principle a work of topographical and architectural purpose. But architecture is a guide to history. It is the capital art of a happy society. (And, incidentally, an art that is, in a definite and positive manner, dead in the present age.) Athens, at her climax, built: and the grandeur of Rome has been preserved in arches and aqueducts. For Mr. Belloc, the progress of the upward curve from the ninth century to the thirteenth reaches its culmination in the best of the Gothic. He sees in that structural time one of humanity's periods of achievement, and he will not assent to the common theory of a gradual upward curve from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance.

The progress of the Middle Ages was a progress towards unity, less successful but more spontaneous than that which was achieved under the compelling hand of the Roman armies. Christianity, wounded and threatened by the advance of the heathen, of a power opposed to them by religion and by race, was shocked into feeling the existence of Christendom. The Western spirit, which had rallied to the Republic against Carthage, now gathered under the flag of the Church and expressed itself in the Crusades.

The levying of Europe for a common and a noble purpose began the process which was continued by the intellectual stimulation of these wars. It flowered briefly but exquisitely in the Gothic, in the foundation of the universities and the teaching of philosophy, and in the establishment of strong, well-ordered central governments in the feudal scheme.

The merits of the Middle Ages, to Mr. Belloc, lie not only in their artistic and philosophical achievements, but also and especially in their security. He has the French, the Latin attachment to a vigorous central power, and, of all political forms, he most fears and hates an oligarchy. To others, to Dr. Johnson and to Goldsmith, for example, it has seemed very clear that the interests of the poor lie with the king against the rich. Mr. Belloc sees in the feudal system strongly administered from a centre, with the villein secured in his holding and the townsman controlled and protected by his guild, if not a perfect, at least a solidly successful polity. He applauds therefore those ages in which central justice was effective, the ages of Edward I in England and St. Louis in France.

Why, then, was this crest of the curve so much less durable than that on which the Empire rode safely through four ordered centuries? To that there are many possible answers. Some might suppose that the binding spiritual force of the Roman Church was weaker than the physical force of the Roman army. Mr. Belloc suggests that the mediaeval system came too suddenly into flower and had not enough strength to deal with new problems. He offers also other reasons, such as these[6]:

So for two hundred years the curve continued evilly downwards, and at last, after a period of horror, rose in the lesser crest of the Renaissance, a time more splendid than solid, more active than beneficent. In this period occurred the Reformation, an event which Mr. Belloc, a Catholic, frankly regards as evil.

He thinks that it tore in two the still expanding body of Christendom. But, with the exception of one province, it left to the See of Rome all those Western countries which the Empire of Rome had governed. Britain was torn away in the process, but the remainder of the Western races was left, if not united, at least with a bond of unity.

So the course of history went into the welter of religious wars which gradually merge into dynastic wars and confuse the record of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century. At the end of the last of these divisions of time came the Revolution.

This event is the third of the three pillars on which Mr. Belloc supports his notion of Western history: the Roman Empire, the thirteenth century, and the Revolution. He sees in it the principle result of the Reformation, but an event which also undid and increasingly nullified the effects of that schism.

He regards the Reformation as having not only disturbed the unity of Europe, but also having encouraged the growth of those wealthy and selfish classes of whom he has a particular dread. He speaks—in his Marie Antoinette, which becomes for some little distance here our principal guide—of how "the attempt to force upon the French doctrines convenient, in France as in England, to the wealthy merchants, the intellectuals and the squires was met by popular risings." He believes that to the Catholic tradition descended from the Roman Empire that idea of the State which is always the salvation of the people as opposed to the rich. The violent adhesion of France to the Church—only tempered by some jealousy of Austria—saved the Faith for Europe: France thus became the capital stronghold of the Western idea, whence it issued in renewed force at the Revolution.[7] The Revolution itself was a drastic return to the ideas of universality and equality which are essentially Roman.

It has been Mr. Belloc's task and delight to reconcile the principles of the Revolution with his own faith. He would show that the two were opposed only by this intellectual accident or that political blunder: that the dogmas of each are capable of being held by the same mind. And, in the revival of religion in our own times, which "may be called, according to the taste of the scholar, the Catholic reaction or the Catholic renaissance," he sees not only the first and most beneficent result of the principles of the Revolution, but also a sign that the wounds then inflicted are beginning to be healed.

His clearest and most connected exposition of these things is to be found in the little book which is called The French Revolution, of which the object, he says, is "to lay, if that be possible, an explanation of it before the reader."

He begins by making a detailed explanation of the democratic theory, which is drawn from Rousseau's treatise Le Contrat Social. Let us select one significant passage on the doctrine of equality: