With George there entered England something that had scarcely been seen there before; something hardly mentioned in mediaeval or Renascence writing, except as one mentions a Hottentot—­the barbarian from beyond the Rhine.

Similarly, his characterization of the Revolution of 1688 is largely a result of his dislike of the governing classes at the present hour:—­

The Revolution reduced us to a country wholly governed by gentlemen; the popular universities and schools of the Middle Ages, like their guilds and abbeys, had been seized and turned into what they are—­factories of gentlemen when they are not merely factories of snobs.

Both of these statements contain a grain of truth, but neither of them contains enough truth to be true.  One might describe them as sweetmeats of history of small nutritious value.  One might say the same of his comment on the alliance between Chatham and Frederick the Great:—­

     The cannibal theory of a commonwealth, that it can of its nature
     eat other commonwealths, had entered Christendom.

How finely said!  But, alas! the cannibal theory of a commonwealth existed long before Chatham and Frederick the Great.  The instinct to exploit is one of the most venerable instincts of the human race, whether in individual men or in nations of men; and ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek and ancient Roman had exhausted the passion of centuries in obedience to it before the language spoken either by Chatham or by Frederick was born.  Christian Spain, Christian France, and Christian England had not in this matter disowned the example of their Jewish and Pagan forerunners.

What we are infinitely grateful to Mr. Chesterton for, however, is that he has sufficient imagination to loathe cannibalism wherever he sees it.  True, he seems to forgive certain forms of cannibalism on the ground that it is an exaggeration to describe the flesh of a rich man as the flesh of a human being.  But he does rage with genius at the continual eating of men that went on in England, especially after the spoliation of the monasteries in the reign of Henry the Eighth gave full scope to the greed of the strong.  He sees that the England which Whig and Tory combined to defend as the perfection of the civilized world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an England governed by men whose chief claim to govern was founded on the fact that they had seized their country and were holding it against their countrymen.  Mr. Chesterton rudely shatters the mirror of perfection in which the possessing class have long seen themselves.  He writes in a brilliant passage:—­