Now it is extremely significant that Hilaire Belloc, almost alone of his Edwardian generation, reversed that historical perspective. He called before the bar of Christendom the capitalist, industrialist present, and found it wanting. Belloc insisted on judging the present in the light of the past, and the past itself was seen in terms of _its_ own immediate and remote antecedents. The reality of the European traditions of individual freedom and proprietary justice, the very being of cultural historical continuity, entered bodily into his perspective. Whereas the Whig historian judged King Charles I, to take an obvious example, in the light of the twentieth-century development to liberal parliamentary government, Belloc saw the man in terms of the ancient traditions of popular monarchy within the law for which the Stuart monarch died. Cromwell, for the Whig historian, was he who made for parliamentary supremacy; for Belloc, Cromwell was he who was made by an aristocracy swollen with the wealth of the religious revolution. Since Belloc’s conception of history is traditional and organic, he constantly insisted on judging the past in the light of the lines of efficient causality that were actually productive of this or that historical event or crisis. These lines are many and diverse, but at least one of them, Belloc insists, renders European history a steady continuity. This line of causality is the Catholic and Greco-Roman classical tradition; an almost immemorial tradition existing in the present in two dimensions: corporately—in Christendom as a whole, molding it by shaping institutions, forming consciences, transforming the land, incarnating the hopes of generations of men in the visual and literary arts, and handing on the religious heritage to the unborn; and personally—as summing itself up in a man, annealing him, and giving direction to his destiny. In taking his historical stand on the Catholic tradition, Belloc was fitting his historical judgment to a reality that had been, and although radically attenuated still was, the one bond of continuity that could enable the historian to grasp a steady, continuous causality in his province. The Whig doctrines were myths, but even assuming for a moment that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were superior to the Medieval and Continental traditions—that the present was the threshold to a golden age, as the Victorians and Edwardians still thought—nonetheless, that supposition was completely valueless as a principle of historical explanation.