that only give them prohibitions.  It has been the custom for a long time to speak of Mr. Chesterton as an optimist; and there was, indeed, a time when he was so rejoiced by the discovery that the children of men were also the children of God, that he was as aggressively cheerful as Whitman and Browning rolled into one.  But he has left all that behind him.  The insistent vision of a world in full retreat from the world of Alfred and Charlemagne and the saints and the fight for Jerusalem—­from this and the allied world of Danton and Robespierre, and the rush to the Bastille—­has driven him back upon a partly well-founded and partly ill-founded Christian pessimism.  To him it now seems as if Jerusalem had captured the Christians rather than the Christians Jerusalem.  He sees men rushing into Bastilles, not in order to tear them down, but in order to inhabit the accursed cells.

When I say that this pessimism is partly ill-founded, I mean that it is arrived at by comparing the liberties of the Middle Ages with the tyrannies of to-day, instead of by comparing the liberties of the Middle Ages with the liberties of to-day, or the tyrannies of the Middle Ages with the tyrannies of to-day.  It is the result, sometimes, of playing with history and, sometimes, of playing with words.  Is it not playing with words, for instance, to glorify the charters by which medieval kings guaranteed the rights and privileges of their subjects, and to deny the name of charter to such a law as that by which a modern State guarantees some of the rights and privileges of children—­to deny it simply on the ground that the latter expresses itself largely in prohibitions?  It may be necessary to forbid a child to go into a gin-palace in order to secure it the privilege of not being driven into a gin-palace.  Prohibitions are as necessary to human liberty as permits and licences.

At the same time, quarrel as we may with Mr. Chesterton’s mediaevalism, and his application of it to modern problems, we can seldom quarrel with the motive with which he urges it upon us.  His high purpose throughout is to keep alive the human view of society, as opposed to the mechanical view to which lazy politicians are naturally inclined.  If he has not been able to give us any very, coherent vision of a Utopia of his own, he has, at least, done the world a service in dealing some smashing blows at the Utopia of machinery.  None the less, he and Mr. Belloc would be the most dangerous of writers to follow in a literal obedience.  In regard to political and social improvements, they are too often merely Devil’s Advocates of genius.  But that is a necessary function, and they are something more than that.  As I have suggested, above all the arguments and the rhetoric and the humours of the little political battles, they do bear aloft a banner with a strange device, reminding us that organized society was made for man, and not man for organized society.  That, in the last analysis, is the useful thing for which Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc stand in modern politics.  It almost seems at times, however, as though they were ready to see us bound again with the fetters of ancient servitudes, in order to compel us to take part once more in the ancient struggle for freedom.