And you will not fight usury by hanging Rothschilds, for usury is
worst where that sort of thing is resorted to. Widespread debt is
the outcome of bad management and incompetence, economic or social,
and only better management will remedy it. Mr. Chesterton is sure
that better management is only arrived at by "killing and being
killed." He really does urge this method even in civil matters. (He
tells us that the power of Parliament over the Crown is real, and
that of the people over Parliament a sham, "because men killed and
were killed for the one, and not for the other.") It is the method
of Spanish America where it is applied more frankly and logically,
and where still, in many places, elections are a military affair,
the questions at issue being settled by killing and being killed,
instead of by the cowardly, pacifist methods current in Europe. The
result gives us the really military civilisations of Venezuela,
Colombia, Nicaragua, and Paraguay. And, although the English system
may have many defects--I think it has--those defects exist in a
still greater degree where force "settles" the matters in dispute,
where the bullet replaces the ballot, and where bayonets are
resorted to instead of brains. For Devonshire is better than
Nicaragua. Really it is. And it would get us out of none of our
troubles for one group to impose its views simply by preponderant
physical force, for Mr. Asquith, for instance, in the true Castro
or Zuyala manner, to announce that henceforth all critics of the
Insurance Act are to be shot, and that the present Cabinet will
hold office as long as it can depend upon the support of the Army.
For, even if the country rose in rebellion, and fought it out and
won, the successful party would (if they also believed in force) do
exactly the same thing to _their_ opponents; and so it would go on
never-endingly (as it has gone on during weary centuries throughout
the larger part of South America), until the two parties came once
more to their senses, and agreed not to use force when they
happened to be able to do so; which is our present condition. But
it is the condition of England merely because the English, as a
whole, have ceased to believe in Mr. Chesterton's principles; it is
not yet the condition of Venezuela because the Venezuelans have not
yet ceased to believe those principles, though even they are
beginning to.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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