o him he roars at you in a thick, hoarse voice
something that is conjectured to be "Do 'em good!" Nor is Hudge more
happy; for he is a lean vegetarian with a gray, pointed beard and an
unnaturally easy smile, who goes about telling everybody that at last we
shall all sleep in one universal bedroom; and he lives in a Garden City,
like one forgotten of God.

Such is the lamentable history of Hudge and Gudge; which I merely
introduce as a type of an endless and exasperating misunderstanding
which is always occurring in modern England. To get men out of a rookery
men are put into a tenement; and at the beginning the healthy human
soul loathes them both. A man's first desire is to get away as far as
possible from the rookery, even should his mad course lead him to a
model dwelling. The second desire is, naturally, to get away from the
model dwelling, even if it should lead a man back to the rookery. But
I am neither a Hudgian nor a Gudgian; and I think the mistakes of these
two famous and fascinating persons arose from one simple fact. They
arose from the fact that neither Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought for
an instant what sort of house a man might probably like for himself.
In short, they did not begin with the ideal; and, therefore, were not
practical politicians.

We may now return to the purpose of our awkward parenthesis about the
praise of the future and the failures of the past. A house of his own
being the obvious ideal for every man, we may now ask (taking this need
as typical of all such needs) why he hasn't got it; and whether it is
in any philosophical sense his own fault. Now, I think that in
some philosophical sense it is his own fault, I think in a yet more
philosophical sense it is the fault of his philosophy. And this is what
I have now to attempt to explain.

Burke, a fine rhetorician, who rarely faced realities, said, I think,
that an Englishman's house is his castle. This is honestly entertaining;
for as it happens the Englishman is almost the only man in Europe whose
house is not his castle. Nearly everywhere else exists the assumption of
peasant proprietorship; that a poor man may be a landlord, though he is
only lord of his own land. Making the landlord and the tenant the same
person has certain trivial advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent,
while the landlord does a little work. But I am not concerned with the
defense of small proprietorship, but merely with the fact that it exists
almost e