f criticism, slowly washes itself clean from the mass
of partial statement, hasty misstatement, sheer error and presumption
that obscured its first emergence.

But it is well to be very clear upon one point at this stage, and that
is, that this present time is not a battle-ground between individualism
and socialism; it is a battle-ground between the Normal Social Life on
the one hand and a complex of forces on the other which seek a form of
replacement and seem partially to find it in these and other doctrines.

Nearly all contemporary thinkers who are not too muddled to be
assignable fall into one of three classes, of which the third we shall
distinguish is the largest and most various and divergent. It will be
convenient to say a little of each of these classes before proceeding to
a more particular account of the third. Our analysis will cut across
many accepted classifications, but there will be ample justification for
this rearrangement. All of them may be dealt with quite justly as
accepting the general account of the historical process which is here
given.

Then first we must distinguish a series of writers and thinkers which
one may call--the word conservative being already politically
assigned--the Conservators.

These are people who really do consider the Normal Social Life as the
only proper and desirable life for the great mass of humanity, and they
are fully prepared to subordinate all exceptional and surplus lives to
the moral standards and limitations that arise naturally out of the
Normal Social Life. They desire a state in which property is widely
distributed, a community of independent families protected by law and an
intelligent democratic statecraft from the economic aggressions of large
accumulations and linked by a common religion. Their attitude to the
forces of change is necessarily a hostile attitude. They are disposed to
regard innovations in transit and machinery as undesirable, and even
mischievous disturbances of a wholesome equilibrium. They are at least
unfriendly to any organisation of scientific research, and scornful of
the pretensions of science. Criticisms of the methods of logic,
scepticism of the more widely diffused human beliefs, they would
classify as insanity. Two able English writers, Mr. G.K. Chesterton and
Mr. Belloc, have given the clearest expression to this system of ideals,
and stated an admirable case for it. They present a conception of
vinous, loudly singing, earth