me in this matter, one of
which was less pronounced at the time than it became later--the
economic interpretation of history. Started by Karl Marx the idea that
all history can be interpreted solely by economic causes has come
since to have an extraordinary popularity even among those whose own
philosophy and sociology are most widely removed from Marx. It is a
view which Chesterton would always have dismissed with the contempt
it deserves. Both he and Belloc saw as the determining factor in
history, because it is the determining factor in human life, the free
will of man. This does not mean that they would deny that the
economic factor has often been powerful in conquering man's liberty,
or a motive in its exercise. But Chesterton regarded the present age
as a diseased one precisely because the money motive held so
disproportionate a place in it. He looked back to the past and saw
the world of today as almost unique in that respect. He looked
forward to the future and hoped for a release from it.

And as he looked back into the past he saw something in the history
of mankind far stronger than the economic motive--whether that mean
the strife for wealth or the mere struggle for subsistence. He saw
the all-pervading power of religion, which in bygone ages had
presided over man's activities and turned the exercise of that most
noble faculty free-will to the building of a civilization today
undreamed of.

But in 1914 it was easier to get away from the economic
interpretation of history than it was to overcome another difficulty
in the minds of those who had not the Chesterton vision of Europe,
and to whom it seemed that in a war between nations it was extremely
likely that all parties were more or less equally to blame.
"History," said Chesterton, "tends to be a facade of faded
picturesqueness for most of those who have not specially studied it:
a more or less monochrome background for the drama of their own day."
But the nature of that background and the vision of today's drama
will vary with the varying angle of historic vision.

There were two possible meanings for the statement that all nations
were to blame for the world war. All nations had gone away from God.
Motives of personal and national greed had ousted the old ideal of
Christendom. It might roughly be said that no nation was seriously
trying to seek the Kingdom of God and His Justice. International
Finance had become a shadow resting on all the earth, and