y define certain
phases in the history of various countries when this was the state of
affairs, when a countryside of prosperous communities with a healthy
family life and a wide distribution of property, animated by roads and
towns and unified by a generally intelligible religious belief, lived in
a transitory but satisfactory harmony under a sympathetic government. I
take it that this is the condition to which the minds of such original
and vigorous reactionary thinkers as Mr. G.K. Chesterton and Mr. Hilaire
Belloc for example turn, as being the most desirable state of mankind.

But the general effect of history is to present these phases as phases
of exceptional good luck, and to show the surplus forces of humanity as
on the whole antagonistic to any such equilibrium with the Normal Social
Life. To open the book of history haphazard is, most commonly, to open
it at a page where the surplus forces appear to be in more or less
destructive conflict with the Normal Social Life. One opens at the
depopulation of Italy by the aggressive great estates of the Roman
Empire, at the impoverishment of the French peasantry by a too
centralised monarchy before the revolution, or at the huge degenerative
growth of the great industrial towns of western Europe in the nineteenth
century. Or again one opens at destructive wars. One sees these surplus
forces over and above the Normal Social Life working towards unstable
concentrations of population, to centralisation of government, to
migrations and conflicts upon a large scale; one discovers the process
developing into a phase of social fragmentation and destruction and
then, unless the whole country has been wasted down to its very soil,
the Normal Social Life returns as the heath and furze and grass return
after the burning of a common. But it never returns in precisely its old
form. The surplus forces have always produced some traceable change; the
rhythm is a little altered. As between the Gallic peasant before the
Roman conquest, the peasant of the Gallic province, the Carlovingian
peasant, the French peasant of the thirteenth, the seventeenth, and the
twentieth centuries, there is, in spite of a general uniformity of life,
of a common atmosphere of cows, hens, dung, toil, ploughing, economy,
and domestic intimacy, an effect of accumulating generalising
influences and of wider relevancies. And the oscillations of empires and
kingdoms, religious movements, wars, invasions, settlement