The great and grave changes in our political civilization all belong to the early nineteenth century, not to the later. They belong to the black-and-white epoch, when men believed fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism, in Calvinism, in Reform, and not infrequently in Revolution. And whatever each man believed in, he hammered at steadily, without scepticism: and there was a time when the Established Church might have fallen, and the House of Lords nearly fell. It was because Radicals were wise enough to be constant and consistent; it was because Radicals were wise enough to be conservative. . . . Let beliefs fade fast and frequently if you wish institutions to remain the same. The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. The net result of all our political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism, Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy--the plain fruit of them all is that Monarchy and the House of Lords will remain. The net result of all the new religions will be that the Church of England will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished. It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Graham, Bernard Shaw, and Auberon Herbert, who between them, with bowed, gigantic backs, bore up the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is on these grounds that we must believe that, even as the Church survives, and prevails, in order to get a hearing when the atheist and the New Theologian have finished shouting themselves hoarse at each other, so must political creeds be in conformity with the doctrines of the Church. Such is the foundation of democracy, according to Chesterton. Will anybody revise his political views on this basis? Probably not. Every Christian believes that his political opinions are thoroughly Christian, and so entire is the disrepute into which atheism has fallen as a philosophy of life, that a great many atheists likewise protest the entire Christianity of their politics. We are all democrats to-day, in one sense or another; each of us more loosely than his neighbour. It is strange that by the criterion of almost every living man who springs to the mind as a representative democrat, Chesterton is the most undemocratic of us all. This, however, needs a separate chapter of explanation. VII THE POLITICIAN WHO COULD NOT TELL THE TIME