n. The substantial difference
comes to something uncommonly like this: Eighteenth century tyranny
meant that you could say "The K__ of Br__rd is a profligate." Twentieth
century liberty really means that you are allowed to say "The King of
Brentford is a model family man."

But we have delayed the main argument too long for the parenthetical
purpose of showing that the great democratic dream, like the great
mediaeval dream, has in a strict and practical sense been a dream
unfulfilled. Whatever is the matter with modern England it is not
that we have carried out too literally, or achieved with disappointing
completeness, either the Catholicism of Becket or the equality of Marat.
Now I have taken these two cases merely because they are typical of
ten thousand other cases; the world is full of these unfulfilled ideas,
these uncompleted temples. History does not consist of completed and
crumbling ruins; rather it consists of half-built villas abandoned by
a bankrupt-builder. This world is more like an unfinished suburb than a
deserted cemetery.

*****

VI. THE ENEMIES OF PROPERTY

But it is for this especial reason that such an explanation is necessary
on the very threshold of the definition of ideals. For owing to that
historic fallacy with which I have just dealt, numbers of readers will
expect me, when I propound an ideal, to propound a new ideal. Now I
have no notion at all of propounding a new ideal. There is no new ideal
imaginable by the madness of modern sophists, which will be anything
like so startling as fulfilling any one of the old ones. On the day
that any copybook maxim is carried out there will be something like an
earthquake on the earth. There is only one thing new that can be done
under the sun; and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt it on a
blue day in June, you will know why men do not look straight at their
ideals. There is only one really startling thing to be done with the
ideal, and that is to do it. It is to face the flaming logical fact, and
its frightful consequences. Christ knew that it would be a more stunning
thunderbolt to fulfil the law than to destroy it. It is true of both
the cases I have quoted, and of every case. The pagans had always adored
purity: Athena, Artemis, Vesta. It was when the virgin martyrs began
defiantly to practice purity that they rent them with wild beasts, and
rolled them on red-hot coals. The world had always loved the notion of
the poor man uppe