His appreciation would be considerably less if the opponent in question was a mere theory. In point of fact, Chesterton is probably a warm admirer of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb. When they founded (in 1909) their National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution, designed to educate the British public in the ideas of what has been called Webbism, especially those contained in the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission, one of the first to join was G. K. Chesterton. The word Socialism covers a multitude of Socialists, some of whom are not. The political faith of a man, therefore, must not be judged upon his attitude towards Socialism, if we have anything more definite to go upon. Chesterton overflows, so to speak, with predilections, such as beer (in a political sense, of course), opposition to the Jingo, on the one hand, and to middle-class faddery, such as vegetarianism, on the other, and so on. Anybody might indulge in most of his views, in fact, without incurring severe moral reprobation. But there is an exception which, unfortunately, links Chesterton pretty firmly with the sweater, and other undesirable lords of creation. He is an anti-suffragist. In a little essay Chesterton once wrote on Tolstoy, he argued that the thing that has driven men mad was logic, from the beginning of time, whereas the thing that has kept them sane was mysticism. Tolstoy, lacking mysticism, was at the mercy of his pitiless logic, which led him to condemn things which are entirely natural and human. This attitude, one feels (and it is only to be arrived at by feeling), is absolutely right. We all start off with certain scarce expressible feelings that certain things are fundamentally decent and permissible, and that others are the reverse, just as we do not take our idea of blackness and whiteness from a text-book. If anybody proposed that all Scotsmen should be compelled to eat sago with every meal, the idea, although novel to most of us, would be instantly dismissed, even, it is probable, by those with sago interests, because it would be contrary to our instinct of what is decent. In fact, we all believe in natural rights, or at any rate we claim the enjoyment of some. Now natural rights have no logical basis. The late Professor D. G. Ritchie very brilliantly examined the theory of natural rights, and by means of much subtle dissection and argument found that there were no natural rights; law was the only basis of privilege. It is quite easy to be convinced by the author's delightful dialectic, but the conviction is apt to vanish suddenly in the presence of a dog being ill-treated.