In one sense, a Christian is always an exile. In another sense, he is an island; and it is in _this_ that is to be found the heart of the need for Christendom—a _corporate_ theocentric humanism—a _place_ so penetrated by the Faith that a man who was there could say that “Jesus Christ was in the morning skies.”[60] Belloc grasps the older European Christendom, in its ideals and in the best of its actualities, as a truly human society, permeated from top to bottom with grace, and given direction and destiny by the Universal Faith. Personal perfection necessitates the communal act in which society is built as a home for man. The City of Man exists for the furthering of human perfection. The City must be personal: from this follows Belloc’s detestation of impersonal governments. The best government would be one personally exercised by all men, acting together for the common good. Where this democratic society is impossible of fulfillment, the community is best incarnated in a monarchy: one man sums up in himself a people, and one man is responsible to all. The Bellocian concepts of both democracy and monarchy are not co-extensive with the more usually accepted meanings of those terms. For Belloc democracy is less a static thing than something dynamic. The French erupting into the Revolution, organizing great armies and local governments almost overnight—such is democracy as Belloc sees it. It is the older ideal of the Citizen assuming personal responsibility; it is Drouet accepting history at the crossroads, the Parisians before the Tuileries, man at the barricades. In Belloc’s eyes the only surviving democracies in the West are the Swiss cantons and the mountain state of Andorra. Belloc’s monarchy is one man, symbolizing a people and its traditions, exercising personal authority, responsible before the law, a public sacrifice to the land. He finds his best example in modern times in the United States of America: in the Office of the Presidency.[61]