Expanding his polemic, Belloc informed the nation that liberal capitalism would not issue into the golden age, but would work inexorably toward the Servile State: a state in which the vast majority of the populace laboured perforce for a small minority of wealthy owners, or for an entrenched government dominated by technical experts. He grounded his predictions on the drying up of the traditional economic basis of Western Christian societies: the institution of small property, widely distributed, giving the tone to society, and reposing on the family community. As far back as 1908, in _The Servile State_, Belloc deduced that unless the institution of property were reestablished, the nation would give itself over to slavery. The England of the late forties and early fifties has borne him out with tragic finality. Belloc contended that party control was an irrelevant point; if the society were propertyless, contractual slavery would inexorably result. The age of the ration card, the social leveling of the whole people, the increasing drabness of life, the elimination of the middle classes, the legislation of enforced labour—this age is upon England, and it will remain until and unless property is restored. Belloc’s prophecies were successes in the only way any prophecy can succeed. What he said would come to pass did come to pass; and it came to pass the way he said it would. There is more than irony in looking back thirty years to that superman of the Wells school of thought: that uninhibited, traditionless blank who was to be the term of the march of liberal progress; that dull abstraction, “the man of the future,” who was to inherit the earth. Who is he today, and where is he? He is the industrial slave of an impoverished and spiritually bankrupt Europe—Heidegger’s faceless “one” who neither owns nor can be said even to be.