n a
broadcast on Liberty he gave that anger vent. For worse than the
presence of lice in our slums was the absence of liberty. He would
gladly, he said, have spoken merely as an Englishman but he had been
asked to speak as a Catholic, and therefore, "I am going to point out
that Catholicism created English liberty; that the freedom has
remained exactly in so far as the faith has remained; and that where
it is true that all our Faith has gone, all our freedom is going. If
I do this, I cannot ask most of you to agree with me; if I did
anything else, I could not ask any of you to respect me."

Other speakers in the series had dwelt on the liberty secured to
Englishmen by our Parliamentary and Juridical system, both, he noted
of Catholic origin. But in his eyes even that liberty was being
imperilled today where it was not lost, while the most important
freedom of all--freedom to handle oneself and one's daily life--had
disappeared for the mass of the people. The liberty so widely praised
that followed the Reformation

has been a limited liberty because it was only a literary
liberty. . . . You always talked about verbal liberty; you hardly
ever talked about vital liberty . . . the faddist was free to preach
his fads; but the free man was no longer free to protect his
freedom. . . . Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, responsible forms of
rule, have collapsed under plutocracy, which is irresponsible rule.
And this has come upon us because we departed from the old morality
in three essential points. First, we supported notions against normal
customs. Second, we made the State top-heavy with a new and secretive
tyranny of wealth. And third, we forgot that there is no faith in
freedom without faith in free will. A servile fatalism dogs the creed
of materialism; because nothing, as Dante said, less than the
generosity of God could give to Man, after all ordinary orderly
gifts, the noblest of all things, which is Liberty.

The thoughts that had thronged and pressed on him for half a century
found final expression in these broadcasts. Most of all in two talks:
one given only three months before his death in a series entitled
"The Spice of Life," the other two years earlier in one called "Seven
Days Hard." He was haunted by the ingratitude of humanity. As in his
boyhood, he saw the wonder of the world that God has given to the
children of men and he saw them unconscious of that wonder. Wha