onarchy, in which one ordinary man governed
many ordinary men--or a real democracy, in which many ordinary men
governed themselves. Aristocracy may have begun well in England when
it was an army protecting England: when the Duke was a Dux. Now it
was merely plutocracy and it had become "an army without an enemy
billeted on the people."

All this and more formed the background of Chesterton's mind. But
what he wrote was a comment on the scene, not a picture of it. He
wrote of the terrible irony whereby "the Commons were enclosing the
commons." He spoke of the English revolution of the eighteenth
century, "a revolution of the rich against the poor." He mourned with
Goldsmith the destruction of England's peasantry. He cried aloud like
Cobbett, for he too had discovered the murder of England his mother.
But his cry was unintelligible and his hopes of a resurrection
unmeaning to those who knew not what had been done to death.

CHAPTER XVIII

The Eye Witness

THE PUBLICATION OF _What's Wrong With the World_ brings us to 1910.
Gilbert had, as we have seen, originally intended to call the book
_What's Wrong?_ laying some emphasis on the note of interrogation. It
amused him to perplex the casual visitor by going off to his study
with the muttered remark: "I must get on with What's Wrong." The
change of name and the omission of the note of interrogation (both
changes the act of his publishers) represented a certain loss, for
indeed Gilbert was still asking himself what was wrong when he was
writing this book, although he was very certain what was right--his
ideals were really a clear picture of health. His doubts about the
achievement of those ideals in the present world and with his present
political allegiance were, as he suggests in the _Autobiography_,
vague but becoming more definite.

Did this mean that he ever looked hopefully towards the other big
division of the English political scene--the Tory or Conservative
party to which his brother had once declared he belonged without
knowing it? That would be a simpler story than what really happened
in his mind--and I confess that I am myself sufficiently vague and
doubtful about part of what the Chesterbelloc believed they were
discovering, to find it a little difficult to describe it clearly.
Cecil Chesterton and Belloc set down their views in a book called
_The Party System_. Gilbert made his clear in letters to the Liberal
Press.

The English party system ha