Second, he asks if the Party System does not govern the country to the content of most citizens. I answer that Englishmen are happy under the Party System solely and exactly as Romans were happy under Nero. That is, not because government was good, but because Life is good, even without good government. Nero's slaves enjoyed Italy, not Nero. Modern Englishmen enjoy England but certainly not the British Constitution. The legislation is detested, wherever it is even felt. The other day a Cambridge don complained that, when out bicycling with his boys, he had to leave them in the rain while he drank a glass of cider. Count the whole series of human souls between a costermonger and a Cambridge don, and you will see a nation in mutiny.
Third, "What substitute, etc., etc." Here again, the answer is simple and indeed traditional. I suggest we should do what was always suggested in the riddles and revolutions of the recent centuries. In the seventeenth century phrase, I suggest that we should "call a free Parliament!"
Fourth, "Is Democracy compatible with Parliamentary Government?" God forbid. Is God compatible with Church Government? Why should He be? It is the other things that have to be compatible with God. A church can only be a humble effort to utter God. A Parliament can only be a humble effort to express Man. But for all that, there is a deal of commonsense left in the world, and people do know when priests or politicians are honestly trying to express a mystery—and when they are only taking advantage of an ambiguity.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
Encouraged by the excitement that had attended the publication of The Party System its authors decided to attempt a newspaper of their own. This paper is still in existence but it has in the course of its history appeared under four different titles. To avoid later confusion I had better set these down at the outset.
The Eye Witness, June 1911-October 1912
The New Witness, November 1912-May 1923
G. K.'s Weekly, 1925-1936
The Weekly Review, 1936 till today
During the first year of its existence the Eye Witness was edited by Belloc. Cecil Chesterton took over the editorship after a short interregnum during which he was assistant editor. Charles Granville had financed it. When he went bankrupt the title was altered to The New Witness. When Cecil joined the Army in 1916, G.K. became Editor. In 1923 the paper died, but two years later rose again under the title, G.K.'s Weekly. After Gilbert's own death Belloc took it back. Today, as The Weekly Review, it is edited by Reginald Jebb, Belloc's son-in-law. With all these changes of name, the continuity of the paper is unmistakable. Its main aim may be roughly defined under two headings. 1. To fight for the liberty of Englishmen against increasing enslavement to a Plutocracy. 2. To expose and combat corruption in public life.
The fight for Liberty appears in the letters quoted above in the form of an attack on certain bills: Belloc unified and defined it with real genius in the articles which became two of his most important books: The Servile State and The Restoration of Property. If these two books be set beside Chesterton's What's Wrong With the World and The Outline of Sanity the Chesterbelloc sociology stands complete.
In his Cobbett, G.K. was later to emphasise the genius with which Cobbett saw the England of today a hundred years before it was there to be seen. Belloc in the same way saw both what was coming and the way in which it was coming. Especially far-sighted was his attitude to Lloyd George's Compulsory Health Insurance Act. It was the first act of the kind in England and the scheme in outline was: every week every employed person must have a stamp stuck on a card by his employer, of which he paid slightly less and the employer slightly more than half the cost. The money thus saved gave the insured person free medical treatment and a certain weekly sum during the period of illness. Agricultural labourers were omitted from the act and a ferment raged on the question of domestic servants, who were eventually included in its operation. It was practically acknowledged that this was done to make the Act more workable financially. For domestic servants were an especially healthy class and, moreover, in most upper and middle-class households they were already attended by the family doctor without cost to themselves.
The company in which the Eye Witness found itself in opposing this Act was indeed a case of "strange bedfellows." For the opposition was led by the Conservatives (on the ground that the Act was Socialism). Many a mistress and many a maid did I hear in those days in good Conservative homes declaring they would rather go to prison than "lick Lloyd George's stamps." Most Liberals, on the other hand, regarded the Act as an example of enlightened legislation for the benefit of the poor. The Eye Witness saw in it the arrival of the Servile State. Their main objections cut deep. As with compulsory education, but in much more far-reaching fashion, this Act took away the liberty and the personal responsibilities of the poor—and in doing so put them into a category—forever ticketed and labelled, separated from the other part of the nation. As people for whom everything had to be done, they were increasingly at the mercy of their employers, of Government Inspectors, of philanthropic societies, increasingly slaves.