ses at the present hour:--

The Revolution reduced us to a country wholly governed by
gentlemen; the popular universities and schools of the Middle Ages,
like their guilds and abbeys, had been seized and turned into what
they are--factories of gentlemen when they are not merely factories
of snobs.

Both of these statements contain a grain of truth, but neither of them
contains enough truth to be true. One might describe them as sweetmeats
of history of small nutritious value. One might say the same of his
comment on the alliance between Chatham and Frederick the Great:--

The cannibal theory of a commonwealth, that it can of its nature
eat other commonwealths, had entered Christendom.

How finely said! But, alas! the cannibal theory of a commonwealth
existed long before Chatham and Frederick the Great. The instinct to
exploit is one of the most venerable instincts of the human race,
whether in individual men or in nations of men; and ancient Hebrew and
ancient Greek and ancient Roman had exhausted the passion of centuries
in obedience to it before the language spoken either by Chatham or by
Frederick was born. Christian Spain, Christian France, and Christian
England had not in this matter disowned the example of their Jewish and
Pagan forerunners.

What we are infinitely grateful to Mr. Chesterton for, however, is that
he has sufficient imagination to loathe cannibalism wherever he sees it.
True, he seems to forgive certain forms of cannibalism on the ground
that it is an exaggeration to describe the flesh of a rich man as the
flesh of a human being. But he does rage with genius at the continual
eating of men that went on in England, especially after the spoliation
of the monasteries in the reign of Henry the Eighth gave full scope to
the greed of the strong. He sees that the England which Whig and Tory
combined to defend as the perfection of the civilized world in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an England governed by men whose
chief claim to govern was founded on the fact that they had seized their
country and were holding it against their countrymen. Mr. Chesterton
rudely shatters the mirror of perfection in which the possessing class
have long seen themselves. He writes in a brilliant passage:--

It could truly be said of the English gentleman, as of another
gallant and gracious individual, that his honour stood rooted in
dishonour. He was, indeed,