I digress again, I see, but my drift I hope is clear.  Differ as we may, Belloc and Chesterton are with all Socialists in being on the same side of the great political and social cleavage that opens at the present time.  We and they are with the interests of the mass of common men as against that growing organisation of great owners who have common interests directly antagonistic to those of the community and State.  We Socialists are only secondarily politicians.  Our primary business is not to impose upon, but to ram right into the substance of that object of Chesterton’s solicitude, the circle of ideas of the common man, the idea of the State as his own, as a thing he serves and is served by.  We want to add to his sense of property rather than offend it.  If I had my way I would do that at the street corners and on the trams, I would take down that alien-looking and detestable inscription “L.C.C.,” and put up, “This Tram, this Street, belongs to the People of London.”  Would Chesterton or Belloc quarrel with that?  Suppose that Chesterton is right, and that there are incurable things in the mind of the common man flatly hostile to our ideals; so much of our ideals will fail.  But we are doing our best by our lights, and all we can.  What are Chesterton and Belloc doing?  If our ideal is partly right and partly wrong, are they trying to build up a better ideal?  Will they state a Utopia and how they propose it shall be managed?  If they lend their weight only to such fine old propositions as that a man wants freedom, that he has a right to do as he likes with his own, and so on, they won’t help the common man much.  All that fine talk, without some further exposition, goes to sustain Mr. Rockefeller’s simple human love of property, and the woman and child sweating manufacturer in his fight for the inspector-free home industry.  I bought on a bookstall the other day a pamphlet full of misrepresentation and bad argument against Socialism by an Australian Jew, published by the Single-Tax people apparently in a disinterested attempt to free the land from the landowner by the simple expedient of abusing anyone else who wanted to do as much but did not hold Henry George to be God and Lord; and I know Socialists who will protest with tears in their eyes against association with any human being who sings any song but the “Red Flag” and doubts whether Marx had much experience of affairs.  Well, there is no reason why Chesterton and Belloc should at their level do the same sort of thing.  When we talk on a ceiling or at a dinner-party with any touch of the celestial in its composition, Chesterton and I, Belloc and I, are antagonists with an undying feud, but in the fight against human selfishness and narrowness and for a finer, juster law, we are brothers—­at the remotest, half-brothers.

Chesterton isn’t a Socialist—­agreed!  But now, as between us and the Master of Elibank or Sir Hugh Bell or any other Free Trade Liberal capitalist or landlord, which side is he on?  You cannot have more than one fight going on in the political arena at the same time, because only one party or group of parties can win.