To Chesterton modern thought is merely the polite description of a noisy crowd of persons proclaiming that something or other is wrong. Mr. Bernard Shaw denounces meat and has been understood to denounce marriage. Ibsen is said to have anathematized almost everything (by those who have not read his works). Mr. MacCabe and Mr. Blatchford think that, on the whole, there is no God, and Tolstoy told us that nearly everything we did, and quite all we wanted to do, was opposed to the spirit of Christ's teaching. Auberon Herbert disapproved of law, and John Davidson disapproved of life. Herbert Spencer objected to government, Passive Resisters to State education, and various educational reformers to education of any description. There are people who would abolish our spelling, our clothing, our food and, most emphatically, our drink. Mr. H. G. Wells adds the finishing touch to this volume of denials, by blandly suggesting in an appendix to his Modern Utopia, headed "Scepticism of the Instrument," that our senses are so liable to err, that we can never be really sure of anything at all. This spirit of denial is extraordinarily infectious. A man begins to suspect what he calls the "supernatural." He joins an ethical society, and before he knows where he is, he is a vegetarian. The rebellious moderns have a curious tendency to flock together in self-defence, even when they have nothing in common. The mere aggregation of denials rather attracts the slovenly and the unattached. The lack of positive dogma expressed by such a coalition encourages the sceptic and the uneducated, who do not realize that the deliberate suppression of dogma is itself a dogma of extreme arrogance. We trust too much to the label, nowadays, and the brief descriptions we attach to ourselves have a gradually increasing connotation. In politics for example, the conservative creed, which originally contained the single article that aristocracy, wealth and government should be in the same few hands, now also implies adhesion to the economic doctrine of protection, and the political doctrine that unitary government is preferable to federal. The liberal creed, based principally upon opposition to the conservative, and to a lesser degree upon disrespect for the Established Church, has been enlarged concurrently with the latter. The average liberal or conservative now feels himself in honour bound to assert or to deny political dogmas out of sheer loyalty to his party. This does not make for sanity. The only political creed in which a man may reasonably expect to remain sane is Socialism, which is catholic and not the least dependent upon other beliefs. Apart from the inconsiderable number of Socialists, the average politician follows in the footsteps of those gentlemen already mentioned. He is not allowed to believe, so he contents himself with a denial of the other side's promises. Assertion is infinitely more brain-wearing than denial.