principle of property. All, or most--the normal family--should own.
And on ownership the freedom of the State should repose.... Slavery
had gone and in its place had come that establishment of free
possession which seemed so normal to men, and so consonant to a
happy human life. No particular name was then found for it. To-day,
and now that it has disappeared, we must construct an awkward one,
and say that the Middle Ages had instinctively conceived and
brought into existence the Distributive State.[20]

By the mishandling of an artificial economic revolution which was so
sudden as to be overwhelming, namely, the Dissolution of the
Monasteries, an England which was economically free, was turned into the
England we know to-day, "of which at least one-third is indigent, of
which nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of capital and of land, and
of which the whole industry and national life is controlled upon its
economic side by a few chance directors of millions, a few masters of
unsocial and irresponsible monopolies."

Thus Mr. Belloc traces the growth and development of our economic
conditions. In _The Servile State_ he goes further and shows what new
conditions are rapidly developing out of those now in existence.

At the present time, we know, the economic freedom of
nineteen-twentieths of the English people has disappeared. Will their
political freedom also disappear?

To this question Mr. Belloc's answer is as decided as it is startling.
He does not argue that the political freedom of the proletariat may
possibly disappear. He says that it has _already begun_ to disappear.

The Capitalist State, he argues, in which all are free but in which the
means of production are in the hands of a few, grows unstable in
proportion as it grows perfect. The internal strains which render it
unstable are, first, the conflict between its social realities and its
moral and legal basis, and, second, the insecurity to which it condemns
free citizens; the fact, that is, that the few possessors can grant or
withhold livelihood from the many non-possessors. There are only three
solutions of this instability. These are, the distributive solution, the
collectivist solution, and the servile solution. Of these three stable
social arrangements the reformer, owing to the Christian traditions of
society, will not advocate the introduction of the servile state, which
Mr. Belloc defines as "that arrangement o