It is Shaw's theory that G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are not two persons, but one mythological monster to be known as "The Chesterbelloc."

Chesterton's ideals are large and generous and very solid: A divinely ordered church, a really democratic state, and a life of that hopeful and humble wonder that men call romance. But his usefulness as a moral philosopher is impaired by the possession of a number of blind spots or inveterate prejudices that prevent him from seeing clearly. He is like the tenor who had aelurophobia and was upset whenever a cat came into the room. So whenever one of these phobias comes into his mind Chesterton loses his poise and sings false. Some of the things for which he has a particular abhorrence are: cocoa, colonies, divorce, equal suffrage, Esperanto, eugenics, large scale production, latitudinarianism, Lloyd George, official sanitation, organized charity, peace movement, pragmatism, prohibition, public schools, simplified spelling, vaccination, vivisection, and workingmen's insurance, all of which some of the rest of us look upon with favor. His inability to see any good in these and a score of other modern movements brings him into curious inconsistencies. For instance, he is an enthusiast for universal manhood suffrage. But any mention of woman suffrage is like waving a red coat before an Irish bull. His statement that there are three things which women can never understand, liberty, equality, and fraternity, is as brutal and untrue as anything Nietzsche or Strindberg has said.

In his essay on William James he says "pragmatism is bosh", yet his whole system of apologetics is based upon the pragmatic argument; religion is true because it works. "If Christianity makes a man happy while his legs are being eaten off by a lion, might it not make me happy while my legs are still attached to me and walking down the street?" In order to make due allowance for Chesterton's class and race prejudices while reading his works, it is convenient to keep a list like this as a bookmark:

TABLE OF CHESTERTON'S AFFECTIONS AND AVERSIONS
CLASSES
He likes most: 1. Children
2. Peasants
3. Domestic women
4. Artisans and laborers
5. Priests and soldiers
6. Poets and adventurers
7. Shopkeepers
(hereabouts is a great gulf fixed)
8. Business and professional men
9. Criminals (including politicians)
10. The conceited professional classes (the intellectuals)
11. Landlords
12. Millionaires
He dislikes most: 13. Multimillionaires
RACES
He likes most: 1. Irish
2. French
3. English
4. Russians
5. Turks
6. Jews
7. Germans
He dislikes most: 8. Cosmopolites

In his youth Chesterton wrote a poem in defense of Dreyfus, "To A Certain Nation", but by the time he came to publish it in his first volume, "The Wild Knight", he had so changed his opinion that he makes a partial apology for it in the preface. Since then he has, in connection with his brother Cecil and Mr. Belloc, introduced into British journalism a foreign element from which it had formerly been free, the political anti-Semitism which has been the cause of so much disturbance in France, Russia, and Germany. Almost every number of The New Witness, edited by Cecil Chesterton, contains sneers at Jewish financiers and politicians, and in 1912 he went so far that he was fined five hundred dollars and costs for defamatory libel of Godfrey Isaacs, director of the Marconi Company. The prosecution significantly was conducted by Sir Edward Carson and F. E. Smith.

It is greatly to be hoped that The New Witness group may get rid of their race prejudice and cut down on their muckraking, which, though often necessary, is never nice, and bring forward the constructive part of their program, for this is the time when there is a chance to do something. For instance, the British Party system against which they so long clamored without effect has now broken down under stress of the war, but there is nothing in sight to take its place. G. K. Chesterton was quite right when he said that "the party system of England is an enormous and most efficient machine for preventing political conflicts",[15] and that what party politics had done was to turn Balfour from the analysis of the doubtful to the defense of the dubious and Morley from writing on compromise to practicing it. And again, "I think the cabinet minister should be taken a little less seriously and the cabinet maker a little more."[16]

Chesterton protests against being regarded as a mere obstructionist and reactionary in such language as the following:

I do not propose (like some of my revolutionary friends) that we should abolish the public schools. I propose the much more lurid and desperate experiment that we should make them public. I do not wish to make Parliament stop working, but rather to make it work; not to shut up the churches, but rather to open them; not to put out the lamp of learning or destroy the hedge of property, but only to make some rude effort to make universities fairly universal and property decently proper.[17]

Man has always believed in a paradise, but he has never been certain whether to look for it in the past or the future, or both. We have very detailed descriptions of Atlantis, Valhalla, the Golden Age, Utopia, and the like, but the tense of the verb is indeterminable. Chesterton is equally uncertain as to whether to look forward or backward for his ideal state. His "Christmas Song for Three Gilds" is headed "To be sung a long time ago—or hence." He has not yet favored us with a blueprint of his Utopia, so we are left to surmise what he likes from the very plain indications he has given us of what he does not like. Chesterton seems to obey a negative magnetism and orients himself by his antipathies.

We may infer that his ideal would be a self-governing community of equally well-to-do, leisurely, patriotic, domestic, religious, jolly, beer-drinking, pork-eating, art-loving, freehold farmers and gild craftsmen, clustered about the village inn and church. They would all be of one race and creed, healthy without doctors, wealthy without financiers, governed without politicians. He believes with Belloc that the nearest historical approach to this ideal was Western Europe about 1200-1500. He probably would agree with Doctor James J. Walsh in calling the thirteenth "the greatest of all centuries." Among contemporary communities I should say that the mujiks of the Russian mir come the nearest to complying with his specifications, although he has not, to my knowledge, shown any disposition to leave London and take to the steppes in order to live the simple life in these communities of pure democracy. But perhaps this is because women vote in the mir. Of the made-to-order utopias I presume that of William Morris's "News from Nowhere" would suit him better than the Socialists for whom it was written.