on the other.  This, I think, explains Mr. Chesterton’s indifference to, if not dislike of, Parliaments.  Parliaments are monuments of compromise, and are guilty of the sin of unpicturesqueness.  One would imagine that a historian of England who did not care for Parliaments would be as hopelessly out of his element as a historian of Greece who did not care for the arts.  And it is because Mr. Chesterton is indifferent to so much in the English genius and character that he has given us in his recent short History of England, instead of a History of England, a wild and wonderful pageant of argument.  “Already,” he cries, as he relates how Parliament “certainly encouraged, and almost certainly obliged” King Richard to break his pledge to the people after the Wat Tyler insurrection:—­

     Already Parliament is not merely a governing body, but a governing
     class.

The history of England is to Mr. Chesterton largely the history of the rise of the governing class.  He blames John Richard Green for leaving the people out of his history; but Mr. Chesterton himself has left out the people as effectually as any of the historians who went before him.  The obsession of “the governing class” has thrust the people into the background.  History resolves itself with him into a disgraceful epic of a governing class which despoiled Pope and King with the right hand, and the people with the left.  It is a disgraceful epic patched with splendid episodes, but it culminates in an appalling cry of doubt whether, after all, it might not be better for England to perish utterly in the great war while fighting for liberty than to survive to behold the triumph of the “governing class” in a servile State of old-age pensions and Insurance Acts.

This theory of history, as being largely the story of the evolution of the “governing class,” is an extremely interesting and even “fruitful” theory.  But it is purely fantastic unless we bear in mind that the governing class has been continually compelled to enlarge itself, and that its tendency is reluctantly to go on doing so until in the end it will be coterminous with the “governed class.”  History is a tale of exploitation, but it is also a tale of liberation, and the over-emphasis that Mr. Chesterton lays on exploitation by Parliaments as compared with exploitation by Popes and Kings, can only be due to infidelity in regard to some of the central principles of freedom.  Surely it is possible to condemn the Insurance Act, if it must be condemned, without apologizing either for the Roman Empire or for the Roman ecclesiastical system.  Mr. Chesterton, however, believes in giving way to one’s prejudices.  He says that history should be written backwards; and what does this mean but that it should be dyed in prejudice? thus, he cannot refer to the Hanoverian succession without indulging in a sudden outburst of heated rhetoric such as one might expect rather in a leading article in war-time.  He writes:—­