ose who built just
then will tell you, as they gaze disconsolate at their unwieldy
heritage. Old and new families alike built or rebuilt, added and
improved.

Cobbett rode rurally and angrily through the ruins of a better
England (described a century earlier by another horseman, Daniel
Defoe). Goldsmith mourned an early example in his "Deserted Village,"
but they are the only voices in an abundant literature. Jane Austen
is, indeed, the perfect example of what Chesterton always
realised--the ignorance that was almost innocence with which the
wealthy had done their work of destruction. He did not account them
as evil as they would seem by a mere summary of events. And what he
saw at the root of those events was in his eyes still present:
England was still possessed and still governed by a minority. The
Conservatives were "a minority that was rich," the liberals "a
minority that was mad." And those two minorities tended to join
together and rob and oppress the ordinary man, in the name of some
theory of progress and perfection.

Thus the Protestant Reformation had closed the monasteries, which
were the poor man's inns, in the name of a purer religion; the
economists had taken away his land and driven him into the factories
with a promise of future wealth and prosperity. These had been the
experts of their day. Now the new experts were telling him with equal
eagerness that hygienic flats and communal kitchens would bring about
for him the new Jerusalem. But never did the expert think of asking
Jones, the ordinary man, what he himself wanted. Jones just wanted
the "divinely ordinary things"--a house of his own and a family life.
And that was still denied him as is related in the chapter called
"The Homelessness of Jones."

In a debate in the Oxford Union, G.K. maintained that the House of
Lords was a menace to the State, because it failed precisely in what
was supposed to be its main function, that of conservation. It had
not saved, it had destroyed the Church lands and the common lands; it
was ready to pass any Bill that affected only the lower classes. "We
are all Socialists now," Sir William Harcourt had lately said, and
Chesterton saw that Socialism would mean merely further restriction
of liberty and continued coercion of the poor by the experts and the
rich. So, looking at the past, Chesterton desired a restoration which
he often called a Revolution. There were two forms of government that
might succeed--a real M