rmost; it can be proved by every legend from Cinderella
to Whittington, by every poem from the Magnificat to the Marseillaise.
The kings went mad against France not because she idealized this ideal,
but because she realized it. Joseph of Austria and Catherine of Russia
quite agreed that the people should rule; what horrified them was that
the people did. The French Revolution, therefore, is the type of all
true revolutions, because its ideal is as old as the Old Adam, but
its fulfilment almost as fresh, as miraculous, and as new as the New
Jerusalem.

But in the modern world we are primarily confronted with the
extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they
have not tried the old. Men have not got tired of Christianity; they
have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have never
wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it.

Now, for the purpose of this book, I propose to take only one of these
old ideals; but one that is perhaps the oldest. I take the principle
of domesticity: the ideal house; the happy family, the holy family of
history. For the moment it is only necessary to remark that it is like
the church and like the republic, now chiefly assailed by those who have
never known it, or by those who have failed to fulfil it. Numberless
modern women have rebelled against domesticity in theory because they
have never known it in practice. Hosts of the poor are driven to the
workhouse without ever having known the house. Generally speaking, the
cultured class is shrieking to be let out of the decent home, just as
the working class is shouting to be let into it.

Now if we take this house or home as a test, we may very generally lay
the simple spiritual foundations of the idea. God is that which can make
something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can
make something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God
be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the
combination of creation with limits. Man's pleasure, therefore, is
to possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them; to
be half-controlled by the flute he plays or by the field he digs. The
excitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions; the conditions
will stretch, but not indefinitely. A man can write an immortal sonnet
on an old envelope, or hack a hero out of a lump of rock. But hacking
a sonnet out of a rock would be a laboriou