To this G. K. replied:
Sir,
I want to thank you for printing my letters, and especially for your last important comment, in which you say that the Crimes and Children's Acts were bad, but are "too small" to support a charge of undemocracy. And I want to ask you one last question, which is the question.
Why do you think of these things as small? They are really enormous. One alters the daily habits of millions of people; the other destroys the public law of thousands of years. What can be more fundamental than food, drink, and children? What can be more catastrophic than putting us back in the primal anarchy, in which a man was flung into a dungeon and left there "till he listened to reason?" There has been no such overturn in European ethics since Constantine proclaimed the cross.
Why do you think of these things as small? I will tell you. Unconsciously, no doubt, but simply and solely because the Front Benches did not announce them as big. They were not "first-class measures"; they were not "full-dress debates." The governing class got them through in the quick, quiet, secondary way in which they pass things that the people positively detests; not in the pompous, lengthy, oratorical way in which they present measures that the people merely bets on, as it might on a new horse. A "first-class measure" means, for instance, tinkering for months at some tottery compromise about a Religious Education that doesn't exist. The reason is simple. "Sound Church Teaching" and "Dogmatic Christianity" both happen to be hobbies in the class from which Cabinets come. But going to public-houses and going to prison are both habits with which that class is, unfortunately, quite unfamiliar. It is ready, therefore, at a stroke of the pen, to bring all folly into the taverns and all injustice into the jails.
Yours,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
February 2nd, 1911.
It was not only in the Nation that such letters as these appeared.
"We can't write in every paper at once," runs a letter in the New
Age. "We do our best." ("We" meant Gilbert, Cecil and Hilaire
Belloc.) And G.K. goes on to answer four questions which have been
put by a correspondent signing himself, "Political Journalist."
First, in whose eyes but ours has the Party System lost credit? I say in nearly everybody's. If this were a free country, I could mention offhand a score of men within a stone's throw; an innkeeper, a doctor, a shopkeeper, a lawyer, a civil servant. As it is, I may put it this way. In a large debating society I proposed to attack the Party System, and for a long time I could not get an opposer. At last, I got one. He defended the Party System on the ground that people must be bamboozled more or less.