Blatchford himself.
The experiences of the Founder of Christianity have perhaps left us
in a vague doubt of the infallibility of Courts of Law."

In reference to the many rationalists whose refusal to accept any
miracle is based on the fact that "Experience is against it," he
says: "There was a great Irish Rationalist of this school who when he
was told that a witness had seen him commit a murder said that he
could bring a hundred witnesses who had not seen him commit it."

The final essay on "The Eternal Heroism of the Slums" has two main
points. It begins with an acknowledgment of the crimes of Christians,
only pointing out that while Mr. Blatchford outlaws the Church for
this reason, he is prepared to invoke the State whose crimes are far
worse. But the most vigorous part of the essay is a furious attack on
determinism. Blatchford apparently held that bad surroundings
inevitably produced bad men. Chesterton had seen the heroism of the
poor in the most evil surroundings and was furious at "this
association of vice with poverty, the vilest and the oldest and the
dirtiest of all the stories that insolence has ever flung against the
poor." Men can and do lead heroic lives in the worst of circumstances
because there is in humanity a power of responsibility, there is
freewill. Blatchford, in the name of humanity, is attacking the
greatest of human attributes.

More numerous than can be counted, in all the wars and persecutions
of the world, men have looked out of their little grated windows and
said, "at least my thoughts are free." "No, No," says the face of Mr.
Blatchford, suddenly appearing at the window, "your thoughts are the
inevitable result of heredity and environment. Your thoughts are as
material as your dungeons. Your thoughts are as mechanical as the
guillotine." So pants this strange comforter, from cell to cell.

I suppose Mr. Blatchford would say that in his Utopia nobody would
be in prison. What do I care whether I am in prison or no, if I have
to drag chains everywhere. A man in his Utopia may have, for all I
know, free food, free meadows, his own estate, his own palace. What
does it matter? he may not have his own soul.

An architect once discoursed to me on the need of humility in face of
the material; the stone and marble of his building. Thus Chesterton
was humble before the reality he was seeking to interpret. Pride, he
once defined as "the falsification of fac