ight
to propose the complete independence of the small Greek or Italian
towns, a sovereign city of Brixton or Brompton, if that seems the best
way out of our troubles. It would be a way out of some of our troubles;
we could not have in a small state, for instance, those enormous
illusions about men or measures which are nourished by the great
national or international newspapers. You could not persuade a city
state that Mr. Beit was an Englishman, or Mr. Dillon a desperado,
any more than you could persuade a Hampshire Village that the
village drunkard was a teetotaller or the village idiot a statesman.
Nevertheless, I do not as a fact propose that the Browns and the Smiths
should be collected under separate tartans. Nor do I even propose
that Clapham should declare its independence. I merely declare my
independence. I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the universe;
and I shall not admit that any of them are blunted merely because they
have been used.

*****

V. THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE

The task of modern idealists indeed is made much too easy for them by
the fact that they are always taught that if a thing has been defeated
it has been disproved. Logically, the case is quite clearly the other
way. The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world.
If a man says that the Young Pretender would have made England happy,
it is hard to answer him. If anyone says that the Georges made England
happy, I hope we all know what to answer. That which was prevented is
always impregnable; and the only perfect King of England was he who
was smothered. Exactly be cause Jacobitism failed we cannot call it
a failure. Precisely because the Commune collapsed as a rebellion we
cannot say that it collapsed as a system. But such outbursts were brief
or incidental. Few people realize how many of the largest efforts, the
facts that will fill history, were frustrated in their full design and
come down to us as gigantic cripples. I have only space to allude to the
two largest facts of modern history: the Catholic Church and that modern
growth rooted in the French Revolution.

When four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas of
Canterbury, it was not only a sign of anger but of a sort of black
admiration. They wished for his blood, but they wished even more for his
brains. Such a blow will remain forever unintelligible unless we realise
what the brains of St. Thomas were thinking about just before th