that spoilt their comfort.

Chesterton in his _Autobiography_ complains of the falsity of most of
the pictures of England during the Victorian era. The languishing,
fainting females, who were in fact far stronger-minded than their
grand-daughters today, the tyrannical pious fathers, the dull
conventional lives: it all rings false to anyone who grew up in an
average Victorian middle-class home and was happy enough there. There
was, however, one thing fundamentally wrong in such homes; and it was
on this fundamental sin that he agreed with Shaw in waging a
relentless war.

The middle classes of England were thoroughly and smugly satisfied
with social conditions that were intolerable for the great mass of
their fellow countrymen. They had erected between the classes
artificial barriers and now did not even look over the top of them. I
remember how when my mother started a settlement in South London the
head worker told us she often saw women groping in the dirt under the
fish barrows for the heads and tails of fishes to boil for their
children. The settlement began to give the children dinners of
dumplings or rice pudding and treacle, and many well-to-do friends
would give my mother a pound or so to help this work. But the
suggestion that government should intervene was Socialism: the idea
that here was a symptom of a widespread evil, was scouted utterly.
People might have learnt much from their own servants of how the rest
of humanity were living, but while, said Chesterton, they laughed at
the idea of the mediaeval baron whose vassals ate below the salt,
their own vassals ate and lived below the floor. At no time in the
Christian past had there been such a deep and wide cleavage in
humanity.

The first thing that G.K.C. and G.B.S., Wells too, and Belloc, were
all agreed upon was that the upper and middle classes of England must
be reminded, if need were by a series of earthquakes, that they were
living in an unreal world. They had forgotten the human race to which
they belonged. They, a tiny section, spoke of the mass of mankind as
"the poor" or "the lower orders" almost as they might speak of the
beasts of the forest, as beings of a different race. Chesterton had a
profound and noble respect for the poor: Shaw declared that they were
"useless, dangerous, and ought to be abolished." But for both men,
the handful of quarrelsome cliques called the literary world was far
too small, because it was so tiny a section of th