of things that belong to mere chaos or uncoercible
nature; they may force children to go to school before the sun rises,
but they will not try to force the sun to rise; they will not, like
Canute, banish the sea, but only the sea-bathers. But inside the outline
of the state their lines are confused, and entities melt into each
other. They have no firm instinctive sense of one thing being in its
nature private and another public, of one thing being necessarily
bond and another free. That is why piece by piece, and quite silently,
personal liberty is being stolen from Englishmen, as personal land has
been silently stolen ever since the sixteenth century.

I can only put it sufficiently curtly in a careless simile. A Socialist
means a man who thinks a walking-stick like an umbrella because
they both go into the umbrella-stand. Yet they are as different as a
battle-ax and a bootjack. The essential idea of an umbrella is breadth
and protection. The essential idea of a stick is slenderness and,
partly, attack. The stick is the sword, the umbrella is the shield, but
it is a shield against another and more nameless enemy--the hostile but
anonymous universe. More properly, therefore, the umbrella is the roof;
it is a kind of collapsible house. But the vital difference goes far
deeper than this; it branches off into two kingdoms of man's mind, with
a chasm between. For the point is this: that the umbrella is a shield
against an enemy so actual as to be a mere nuisance; whereas the
stick is a sword against enemies so entirely imaginary as to be a pure
pleasure. The stick is not merely a sword, but a court sword; it is a
thing of purely ceremonial swagger. One cannot express the emotion in
any way except by saying that a man feels more like a man with a stick
in his hand, just as he feels more like a man with a sword at his side.
But nobody ever had any swelling sentiments about an umbrella; it is
a convenience, like a door scraper. An umbrella is a necessary evil. A
walking-stick is a quite unnecessary good. This, I fancy, is the real
explanation of the perpetual losing of umbrellas; one does not hear of
people losing walking sticks. For a walking-stick is a pleasure, a piece
of real personal property; it is missed even when it is not needed. When
my right hand forgets its stick may it forget its cunning. But anybody
may forget an umbrella, as anybody might forget a shed that he has stood
up in out of the rain. Anybody can forget a