bad, but are "too small" to support a charge of
undemocracy. And I want to ask you one last question, which is the
question.

Why do you think of these things as small? They are really
enormous. One alters the daily habits of millions of people; the
other destroys the public law of thousands of years. What can be more
fundamental than food, drink, and children? What can be more
catastrophic than putting us back in the primal anarchy, in which a
man was flung into a dungeon and left there "till he listened to
reason?" There has been no such overturn in European ethics since
Constantine proclaimed the cross.

Why do you think of these things as small? I will tell you.
Unconsciously, no doubt, but simply and solely because the Front
Benches did not announce them as big. They were not "first-class
measures"; they were not "full-dress debates." The governing class
got them through in the quick, quiet, secondary way in which they
pass things that the people positively detests; not in the pompous,
lengthy, oratorical way in which they present measures that the
people merely bets on, as it might on a new horse. A "first-class
measure" means, for instance, tinkering for months at some tottery
compromise about a Religious Education that doesn't exist. The reason
is simple. "Sound Church Teaching" and "Dogmatic Christianity" both
happen to be hobbies in the class from which Cabinets come. But going
to public-houses and going to prison are both habits with which that
class is, unfortunately, quite unfamiliar. It is ready, therefore, at
a stroke of the pen, to bring all folly into the taverns and all
injustice into the jails.

Yours,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

February 2nd, 1911.

It was not only in the _Nation_ that such letters as these appeared.
"We can't write in every paper at once," runs a letter in the _New
Age_. "We do our best." ("We" meant Gilbert, Cecil and Hilaire
Belloc.) And G.K. goes on to answer four questions which have been
put by a correspondent signing himself, "Political Journalist."

First, in whose eyes but ours has the Party System lost credit? I
say in nearly everybody's. If this were a free country, I could
mention offhand a score of men within a stone's throw; an innkeeper,
a doctor, a shopkeeper, a lawyer, a civil servant. As it is, I may
put it this way. In a large debating society I proposed to attac