somewhat in the position of such an
aristocrat of romance, whose splendour has the dark spot of a
secret and a sort of blackmail.... His glory did not come from the
Crusades, but from the Great Pillage.... The oligarchs were
descended from usurers and thieves. That, for good or evil, was the
paradox of England; the typical aristocrat was the typical upstart.

But the secret was worse; not only was such a family founded on
stealing, but the family was stealing still. It is a grim truth
that, all through the eighteenth century, all through the great
Whig speeches about liberty, all through the great Tory speeches
about patriotism, through the period of Wandiwash and Plassey,
through the period of Trafalgar and Waterloo, one process was
steadily going on in the central senate of the nation. Parliament
was passing Bill after Bill for the enclosure by the great
landlords of such of the common lands as had survived out of the
great communal system of the Middle Ages. It is much more than a
pun, it is the prime political irony of our history that the
Commons were destroying the commons.

It would be folly to suggest, however, that, conscious though Mr.
Chesterton is of the crimes of history, he has turned history into a
mere series of floggings of criminals. He is for ever laying down the
whip and inviting the criminals to take their seats while he paints
gorgeous portraits of them in all the colours of the rainbow. His praise
of the mighty rhetoricians of the eighteenth century could in some
passages scarcely be more unstinted if he were a Whig of the Whigs. He
cannot but admire the rotund speech and swelling adventures of those
days. If we go farther back, we find him portraying even the Puritans
with a strange splendour of colour:--

They were, above all things, anti-historic, like the Futurists in
Italy; and there was this unconscious greatness about them, that
their very sacrilege was public and solemn, like a sacrament; and
they were ritualists even as iconoclasts. It was, properly
considered, but a very secondary example of their strange and
violent simplicity that one of them, before a mighty mob at
Whitehall, cut off the anointed head of the sacramental man of the
Middle Ages. For another, far away in the western shires, cut down
the thorn of Glastonbury, from which had grown the whole st