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:--

It could truly be said of the English gentleman, as of another
gallant and gracious individual, that his honour stood rooted in
dishonour. He was, indeed, somewhat in the position of such an
aristocrat of romance, whose splendour has the dark spot of a
secret and a sort of blackmail.... His glory did not come from the
Crusades, but from the Great Pillage.... The oligarchs were
descended from usurers and thieves. That, for good or evil, was the
paradox of England; the typical aristocrat was the typical upstart.

But the secret was worse; not only was such a family founded on
stealing, but the family was stealing still. It is a grim truth
that, all through the eighteenth century, all through the great
Whig speeches about liberty, all through the great Tory speeches
about patriotism, through the period of Wandiwash and Plassey,
through the period of Trafalgar and Waterloo, one process was
steadily going on in the central senate of the nation. Parliament
was passing Bill after Bill for the enclosure by the great
landlords of such of the common lands as had survived out of the
great communal system of the Middle Ages. It is much more than a
pun, it is the prime political irony of our history that the
Commons were destroying the commons.