In spite of the French antecedents of Belloc’s social ideals, his proprietary traditions are rooted deeply in the English past. Most anti-collectivist thinking in the English-speaking world today looks to Burke and the theory of prescriptive politics. But for all his conservatism, Burke never succeeded in dispelling the Whig curse. There is another tradition that runs back, like a narrow and straight road, through Chesterton and Belloc to the Tory-Radicalism of William Cobbett, and beyond to the Cavaliers and to the King who died for England; there the road broadens into a great highway filled with the yeomen who rose in the Pilgrimage of Grace. And beyond all this stands the high medieval vision of Fortesque: a vision of a land of free men, eating and drinking their own, owing allegiance neither to aristocrat nor capitalist, but to God and England alone. Such is the City of Man in Hilaire Belloc’s thought. But this City, Belloc indicates time and again, _is not of itself_. It has no fully independent existence of its own, nor can it ever be a completely autonomous reality. For it to be at all, it must flourish within the higher City which is the City of God. Just as the individual man can find his natural perfection only by losing himself in Christ, so too can the community of all men find its soul only within the bosom of Christian Wisdom. Religious truth, absolute and unquestioned, not only guarantees but causes a God-oriented humanist culture to come into its own. The sacredness of the person and the eternal relationship he bears to God through Christ are truths of an order which is not human, but these truths act within the bowels of society as Divine Seeds, conceiving in time a temporal order both personal and free. This order is Christendom. It is not the City of God, but it is within that City, and it is what it is because it is the child of Faith. There is a City full, as are all Cities, of halt and maim, blind and evil and the rest: but it is the City of God.... There are not two such cities on earth. There is One. Within that household the human spirit has roof and hearth. Outside it, is the night.[63] Conclusion THE FUTURE PLACE OF HILAIRE BELLOC IN ENGLISH LETTERS