These are people who really do consider the Normal Social Life as the only proper and desirable life for the great mass of humanity, and they are fully prepared to subordinate all exceptional and surplus lives to the moral standards and limitations that arise naturally out of the Normal Social Life.  They desire a state in which property is widely distributed, a community of independent families protected by law and an intelligent democratic statecraft from the economic aggressions of large accumulations and linked by a common religion.  Their attitude to the forces of change is necessarily a hostile attitude.  They are disposed to regard innovations in transit and machinery as undesirable, and even mischievous disturbances of a wholesome equilibrium.  They are at least unfriendly to any organisation of scientific research, and scornful of the pretensions of science.  Criticisms of the methods of logic, scepticism of the more widely diffused human beliefs, they would classify as insanity.  Two able English writers, Mr. G.K.  Chesterton and Mr. Belloc, have given the clearest expression to this system of ideals, and stated an admirable case for it.  They present a conception of vinous, loudly singing, earthy, toiling, custom-ruled, wholesome, and insanitary men; they are pagan in the sense that their hearts are with the villagers and not with the townsmen, Christian in the spirit of the parish priest.  There are no other Conservators so clear-headed and consistent.  But their teaching is merely the logical expression of an enormous amount of conservative feeling.  Vast multitudes of less lucid minds share their hostility to novelty and research; hate, dread, and are eager to despise science, and glow responsive to the warm, familiar expressions of primordial feelings and immemorial prejudices The rural conservative, the liberal of the allotments and small-holdings type, Mr. Roosevelt—­in his Western-farmer, philoprogenitive phase as distinguished from the phase of his more imperialist moments—­all present themselves as essentially Conservators as seekers after and preservers of the Normal Social Life.

So, too, do Socialists of the William Morris type.  The mind of William Morris was profoundly reactionary He hated the whole trend of later nineteenth-century modernism with the hatred natural to a man of considerable scholarship and intense aesthetic sensibilities.  His mind turned, exactly as Mr. Belloc’s turns, to the finished and enriched Normal Social Life of western Europe in the middle ages, but, unlike Mr. Belloc, he believed that, given private ownership of land and the ordinary materials of life, there must necessarily be an aggregatory process, usury, expropriation, the development of an exploiting wealthy class.  He believed profit was the devil.  His “News from Nowhere” pictures a communism that amounted in fact to little more than a system of private ownership of farms and trades without money or any buying and selling, in an atmosphere of geniality, generosity,