CHESTERTON-UTOPIA OF USERS





Title: Utopia of Usurers and other Essays

Author: G. K. Chesterton


A SONG OF SWORDS

"A drove of cattle came into a village called Swords;

and was stopped by the rioters."--Daily Paper.

In the place called Swords on the Irish road

It is told for a new renown

How we held the horns of the cattle, and how

We will hold the horns of the devils now

Ere the lord of hell with the horn on his brow

Is crowned in Dublin town.

Light in the East and light in the West,

And light on the cruel lords,

On the souls that suddenly all men knew,

And the green flag flew and the red flag flew,

And many a wheel of the world stopped, too,

When the cattle were stopped at Swords.

Be they sinners or less than saints

That smite in the street for rage,

We know where the shame shines bright; we know

You that they smite at, you their foe,

Lords of the lawless wage and low,

This is your lawful wage.

You pinched a child to a torture price

That you dared not name in words;

So black a jest was the silver bit

That your own speech shook for the shame of it,

And the coward was plain as a cow they hit

When the cattle have strayed at Swords.

The wheel of the torrent of wives went round

To break men's brotherhood;

You gave the good Irish blood to grease

The clubs of your country's enemies;

you saw the brave man beat to the knees:

And you saw that it was good.

The rope of the rich is long and long--

The longest of hangmen's cords;

But the kings and crowds are holding their breath,

In a giant shadow o'er all beneath

Where God stands holding the scales of Death

Between the cattle and Swords.

Haply the lords that hire and lend

The lowest of all men's lords,

Who sell their kind like kine at a fair,

Will find no head of their cattle there;

But faces of men where cattle were:

Faces of men--and Swords.






UTOPIA OF USURERS



I. Art and Advertisement

I propose, subject to the patience of the reader, to devote two or three

articles to prophecy. Like all healthy-minded prophets, sacred and

profane, I can only prophesy when I am in a rage and think things look

ugly for everybody. And like all healthy-minded prophets, I prophesy in

the hope that my prophecy may not come true. For the prediction made by

the true soothsayer is like the warning given by a good doctor. And the

doctor has really triumphed when the patient he condemned to death has

revived to life. The threat is justified at the very moment when it is

falsified. Now I have said again and again (and I shall continue to say

again and again on all the most inappropriate occasions) that we must hit

Capitalism, and hit it hard, for the plain and definite reason that it is

growing stronger. Most of the excuses which serve the capitalists as

masks are, of course, the excuses of hypocrites. They lie when they claim

philanthropy; they no more feel any particular love of men than Albu felt

an affection for Chinamen. They lie when they say they have reached their

position through their own organising ability. They generally have to pay

men to organise the mine, exactly as they pay men to go down it. They

often lie about the present wealth, as they generally lie about their past

poverty. But when they say that they are going in for a "constructive

social policy," they do not lie. They really are going in for a

constructive social policy. And we must go in for an equally destructive

social policy; and destroy, while it is still half-constructed, the

accursed thing which they construct.



The Example of the Arts

Now I propose to take, one after another, certain aspects and departments

of modern life, and describe what I think they will be like in this

paradise of plutocrats, this Utopia of gold and brass in which the great

story of England seems so likely to end. I propose to say what I think

our new masters, the mere millionaires, will do with certain human

interests and institutions, such as art, science, jurisprudence, or

religion--unless we strike soon enough to prevent them. And for the sake

of argument I will take in this article the example of the arts.

Most people have seen a picture called "Bubbles," which is used for the

advertisement of a celebrated soap, a small cake of which is introduced

into the pictorial design. And anybody with an instinct for design (the

caricaturist of the Daily Herald, for instance), will guess that it was

not originally a part of the design. He will see that the cake of soap

destroys the picture as a picture; as much as if the cake of soap had been

used to Scrub off the paint. Small as it is, it breaks and confuses the

whole balance of objects in the composition. I offer no judgment here

upon Millais's action in the matter; in fact, I do not know what it was.

The important point for me at the moment is that the picture was not

painted for the soap, but the soap added to the picture. And the spirit

of the corrupting change which has separated us from that Victorian epoch

can be best seen in this: that the Victorian atmosphere, with all its

faults, did not permit such a style of patronage to pass as a matter of

course. Michael Angelo may have been proud to have helped an emperor or a

pope; though, indeed, I think he was prouder than they were on his own

account. I do not believe Sir John Millais was proud of having helped a

soap-boiler. I do not say he thought it wrong; but he was not proud of it.

And that marks precisely the change from his time to our own. Our

merchants have really adopted the style of merchant princes. They have

begun openly to dominate the civilisation of the State, as the emperors

and popes openly dominated in Italy. In Millais's time, broadly speaking,

art was supposed to mean good art; advertisement was supposed to mean

inferior art. The head of a black man, painted to advertise somebody's

blacking, could be a rough symbol, like an inn sign. The black man had

only to be black enough. An artist exhibiting the picture of a negro was

expected to know that a black man is not so black as he is painted. He

was expected to render a thousand tints of grey and brown and violet: for

there is no such thing as a black man just as there is no such thing as a

white man. A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art.



The First Effect

I should say the first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we

allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely

disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be

advertisement. I do not necessarily mean that there will be no good art;

much of it might be, much of it already is, very good art. You may put it,

if you please, in the form that there has been a vast improvement in

advertisements. Certainly there would be nothing surprising if the head

of a negro advertising Somebody's Blacking now adays were finished with as

careful and subtle colours as one of the old and superstitious painters

would have wasted on the negro king who brought gifts to Christ. But the

improvement of advertisements is the degradation of artists. It is their

degradation for this clear and vital reason: that the artist will work,

not only to please the rich, but only to increase their riches; which is a

considerable step lower. After all, it was as a human being that a pope

took pleasure in a cartoon of Raphael or a prince took pleasure in a

statuette of Cellini. The prince paid for the statuette; but he did not

expect the statuette to pay him. It is my impression that no cake of soap

can be found anywhere in the cartoons which the Pope ordered of Raphael.

And no one who knows the small-minded cynicism of our plutocracy, its

secrecy, its gambling spirit, its contempt of conscience, can doubt that

the artist-advertiser will often be assisting enterprises over which he

will have no moral control, and of which he could feel no moral approval.

He will be working to spread quack medicines, queer investments; and will

work for Marconi instead of Medici. And to this base ingenuity he will

have to bend the proudest and purest of the virtues of the intellect, the

power to attract his brethren, and the noble duty of praise. For that

picture by Millais is a very allegorical picture. It is almost a prophecy

of what uses are awaiting the beauty of the child unborn. The praise will

be of a kind that may correctly be called soap; and the enterprises of a

kind that may truly be described as Bubbles.



II. Letters and the New Laureates

In these articles I only take two or three examples of the first and

fundamental fact of our time. I mean the fact that the capitalists of our

community are becoming quite openly the kings of it. In my last (and

first) article, I took the case of Art and advertisement. I pointed out

that Art must be growing worse--merely because advertisement is growing

better. In those days Millais condescended to Pears' soap. In these days

I really think it would be Pears who condescended to Millais. But here I

turn to an art I know more about, that of journalism. Only in my ease the

art verges on artlessness.

The great difficulty with the English lies in the absence of something one

may call democratic imagination. We find it easy to realise an individual,

but very hard to realise that the great masses consist of individuals.

Our system has been aristocratic: in the special sense of there being only

a few actors on the stage. And the back scene is kept quite dark, though

it is really a throng of faces. Home Rule tended to be not so much the

Irish as the Grand Old Man. The Boer War tended not to be so much South

Africa as simply "Joe." And it is the amusing but distressing fact that

every class of political leadership, as it comes to the front in its turn,

catches the rays of this isolating lime-light; and becomes a small

aristocracy. Certainly no one has the aristocratic complaint so badly as

the Labour Party. At the recent Congress, the real difference between

Larkin and the English Labour leaders was not so much in anything right or

wrong in what he said, as in something elemental and even mystical in the

way he suggested a mob. But it must be plain, even to those who agree

with the more official policy, that for Mr. Havelock Wilson the principal

question was Mr. Havelock Wilson; and that Mr. Sexton was mainly

considering the dignity and fine feelings of Mr. Sexton. You may say they

were as sensitive as aristocrats, or as sulky as babies; the point is that

the feeling was personal. But Larkin, like Danton, not only talks like

ten thousand men talking, but he also has some of the carelessness of the

colossus of Arcis; "Que mon nom soit fletri, que la France soit libre."



A Dance of Degradation

It is needless to say that this respecting of persons has led all the

other parties a dance of degradation. We ruin South Africa because it

would be a slight on Lord Gladstone to save South Africa. We have a bad

army, because it would be a snub to Lord Haldane to have a good army.

And no Tory is allowed to say "Marconi" for fear Mr. George should say

"Kynoch." But this curious personal element, with its appalling lack of

patriotism, has appeared in a new and curious form in another department

of life; the department of literature, especially periodical literature.

And the form it takes is the next example I shall give of the way in which

the capitalists are now appearing, more and more openly, as the masters

and princes of the community.

I will take a Victorian instance to mark the change; as I did in the case

of the advertisement of "Bubbles." It was said in my childhood, by the

more apoplectic and elderly sort of Tory, that W. E. Gladstone was only a

Free Trader because he had a partnership in Gilbey's foreign wines. This

was, no doubt, nonsense; but it had a dim symbolic, or mainly prophetic,

truth in it. It was true, to some extent even then, and it has been

increasingly true since, that the statesman was often an ally of the

salesman; and represented not only a nation of shopkeepers, but one

particular shop. But in Gladstone's time, even if this was true, it was

never the whole truth; and no one would have endured it being the admitted

truth. The politician was not solely an eloquent and persuasive bagman

travelling for certain business men; he was bound to mix even his

corruption with some intelligible ideals and rules of policy. And the

proof of it is this: that at least it was the statesman who bulked large

in the public eye; and his financial backer was entirely in the background.

Old gentlemen might choke over their port, with the moral certainty that

the Prime Minister had shares in a wine merchant's. But the old gentleman

would have died on the spot if the wine merchant had really been made as

important as the Prime Minister. If it had been Sir Walter Gilbey whom

Disraeli denounced, or Punch caricatured; if Sir Walter Gilbey's favourite

collars (with the design of which I am unacquainted) had grown as large as

the wings of an archangel; if Sir Walter Gilbey had been credited with

successfully eliminating the British Oak with his little hatchet; if, near

the Temple and the Courts of Justice, our sight was struck by a majestic

statue of a wine merchant; or if the earnest Conservative lady who threw a

gingerbread-nut at the Premier had directed it towards the wine merchant

instead, the shock to Victorian England would have been very great indeed.



Haloes for Employers

Now something very like that is happening; the mere wealthy employer is

beginning to have not only the power but some of the glory. I have seen

in several magazines lately, and magazines of a high class, the appearance

of a new kind of article. Literary men are being employed to praise a big

business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find

political reasons for the commercial schemes--that they have done for some

time past--they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers.

They describe the capitalist's brain of steel and heart of gold in a way

that Englishmen hitherto have been at least in the habit of reserving for

romantic figures like Garibaldi or Gordon. In one excellent magazine Mr.

T. P. O'Connor, who, when he likes, can write on letters like a man of

letters, has some purple pages of praise of Sir Joseph Lyons--the man who

runs those teashop places. He incidentally brought in a delightful

passage about the beautiful souls possessed by some people called Salmon

and Gluckstein. I think I like best the passage where he said that

Lyons's charming social acaccomplishments included a talent for "imitating

a Jew." The article is accompanied with a large and somewhat leering

portrait of that shopkeeper, which makes the parlour-trick in question

particularly astonishing. Another literary man, who certainly ought to

know better, wrote in another paper a piece of hero-worship about Mr.

Selfridge. No doubt the fashion will spread, and the art of words, as

polished and pointed by Ruskin or Meredith, will be perfected yet further

to explore the labyrinthine heart of Harrod; or compare the simple

stoicism of Marshall with the saintly charm of Snelgrove.

Any man can be praised--and rightly praised. If he only stands on two

legs he does something a cow cannot do. If a rich man can manage to stand

on two legs for a reasonable time, it is called self-control. If he has

only one leg, it is called (with some truth) self-sacrifice. I could say

something nice (and true) about every man I have ever met. Therefore, I

do not doubt I could find something nice about Lyons or Selfridge if I

searched for it. But I shall not. The nearest postman or cab-man will

provide me with just the same brain of steel and heart of gold as these

unlucky lucky men. But I do resent the whole age of patronage being

revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets,

under kings that have taken no oath, nor led us into any battle.





III. Unbusinesslike Business

The fairy tales we were all taught did not, like the history we were all

taught, consist entirely of lies. Parts of the tale of "Puss in Boots" or

"Jack and the Beanstalk" may strike the realistic eye as a little unlikely

and out of the common way, so to speak; but they contain some very solid

and very practical truths. For instance, it may be noted that both in

"Puss in Boots" and "Jack and the Beanstalk" if I remember aright, the

ogre was not only an ogre but also a magician. And it will generally be

found that in all such popular narratives, the king, if he is a wicked

king, is generally also a wizard. Now there is a very vital human truth

enshrined in this. Bad government, like good government, is a spiritual

thing. Even the tyrant never rules by force alone; but mostly by fairy

tales. And so it is with the modern tyrant, the great employer. The

sight of a millionaire is seldom, in the ordinary sense, an enchanting

sight: nevertheless, he is in his way an enchanter. As they say in the

gushing articles about him in the magazines, he is a fascinating

personality. So is a snake. At least he is fascinating to rabbits; and

so is the millionaire to the rabbit-witted sort of people that ladies and

gentlemen have allowed themselves to become. He does, in a manner, cast a

spell, such as that which imprisoned princes and princesses under the

shapes of falcons or stags. He has truly turned men into sheep, as Circe

turned them into swine.

Now, the chief of the fairy tales, by which he gains this glory and

glamour, is a certain hazy association he has managed to create between

the idea of bigness and the idea of practicality. Numbers of the

rabbit-witted ladies and gentlemen do really think, in spite of themselves

and their experience, that so long as a shop has hundreds of different

doors and a great many hot and unhealthy underground departments (they

must be hot; this is very important), and more people than would be needed

for a man-of-war, or crowded cathedral, to say: "This way, madam," and

"The next article, sir," it follows that the goods are good. In short,

they hold that the big businesses are businesslike. They are not. Any

housekeeper in a truthful mood, that is to say, any housekeeper in a bad

temper, will tell you that they are not. But housekeepers, too, are human,

and therefore inconsistent and complex; and they do not always stick to

truth and bad temper. They are also affected by this queer idolatry of

the enormous and elaborate; and cannot help feeling that anything so

complicated must go like clockwork. But complexity is no guarantee of

accuracy--in clockwork or in anything else. A clock can be as wrong as

the human head; and a clock can stop, as suddenly as the human heart.

But this strange poetry of plutocracy prevails over people against their

very senses. You write to one of the great London stores or emporia,

asking, let us say, for an umbrella. A month or two afterwards you

receive a very elaborately constructed parcel, containing a broken parasol.

You are very pleased. You are gratified to reflect on what a vast

number of assistants and employees had combined to break that parasol.

You luxuriate in the memory of all those long rooms and departments and

wonder in which of them the parasol that you never ordered was broken. Or

you want a toy elephant for your child on Christmas Day; as children, like

all nice and healthy people, are very ritualistic. Some week or so after

Twelfth Night, let us say, you have the pleasure of removing three layers

of pasteboards, five layers of brown paper, and fifteen layers of tissue

paper and discovering the fragments of an artificial crocodile. You smile

in an expansive spirit. You feel that your soul has been broadened by the

vision of incompetence conducted on so large a scale. You admire all the

more the colossal and Omnipresent Brain of the Organiser of Industry, who

amid all his multitudinous cares did not disdain to remember his duty of

smashing even the smallest toy of the smallest child. Or, supposing you

have asked him to send you some two rolls of cocoa-nut matting: and

supposing (after a due interval for reflection) he duly delivers to you

the five rolls of wire netting. You take pleasure in the consideration

of a mystery: which coarse minds might have called a mistake. It consoles

you to know how big the business is: and what an enormous number of people

were needed to make such a mistake.

That is the romance that has been told about the big shops; in the

literature and art which they have bought, and which (as I said in my

recent articles) will soon be quite indistinguishable from their ordinary

advertisements. The literature is commercial; and it is only fair to say

that the commerce is often really literary. It is no romance, but only

rubbish.

The big commercial concerns of to-day are quite exceptionally incompetent.

They will be even more incompetent when they are omnipotent. Indeed,

that is, and always has been, the whole point of a monopoly; the old and

sound argument against a monopoly. It is only because it is incompetent

that it has to be omnipotent. When one large shop occupies the whole of

one side of a street (or sometimes both sides), it does so in order that

men may be unable to get what they want; and may be forced to buy what

they don't want. That the rapidly approaching kingdom of the Capitalists

will ruin art and letters, I have already said. I say here that in the

only sense that can be called human, it will ruin trade, too.

I will not let Christmas go by, even when writing for a revolutionary

paper necessarily appealing to many with none of my religious sympathies,

without appealing to those sympathies. I knew a man who sent to a great

rich shop for a figure for a group of Bethlehem. It arrived broken. I

think that is exactly all that business men have now the sense to do.





IV. The War on Holidays

The general proposition, not always easy to define exhaustively, that the

reign of the capitalist will be the reign of the cad--that is, of the

unlicked type that is neither the citizen nor the gentleman--can be

excellently studied in its attitude towards holidays. The special

emblematic Employer of to-day, especially the Model Employer (who is the

worst sort) has in his starved and evil heart a sincere hatred of holidays.

I do not mean that he necessarily wants all his workmen to work until

they drop; that only occurs when he happens to be stupid as well as wicked.

I do not mean to say that he is necessarily unwilling to grant what he

would call "decent hours of labour." He may treat men like dirt; but if

you want to make money, even out of dirt, you must let it lie fallow by

some rotation of rest. He may treat men as dogs, but unless he is a

lunatic he will for certain periods let sleeping dogs lie.

But humane and reasonable hours for labour have nothing whatever to do

with the idea of holidays. It is not even a question of tenhours day and

eight-hours day; it is not a question of cutting down leisure to the space

necessary for food, sleep and exercise. If the modern employer came to

the conclusion, for some reason or other, that he could get most out of

his men by working them hard for only two hours a day, his whole mental

attitude would still be foreign and hostile to holidays. For his whole

mental attitude is that the passive time and the active time are alike

useful for him and his business. All is, indeed, grist that comes to his

mill, including the millers. His slaves still serve him in

unconsciousness, as dogs still hunt in slumber. His grist is ground not

only by the sounding wheels of iron, but by the soundless wheel of blood

and brain. His sacks are still filling silently when the doors are shut

on the streets and the sound of the grinding is low.



The Great Holiday

Now a holiday has no connection with using a man either by beating or

feeding him. When you give a man a holiday you give him back his body and

soul. It is quite possible you may be doing him an injury (though he

seldom thinks so), but that does not affect the question for those to whom

a holiday is holy. Immortality is the great holiday; and a holiday, like

the immortality in the old theologies, is a double-edged privilege. But

wherever it is genuine it is simply the restoration and completion of the

man. If people ever looked at the printed word under their eye, the word

"recreation" would be like the word "resurrection," the blast of a trumpet.



A man, being merely useful, is necessarily incomplete, especially if he be

a modern man and means by being useful being "utilitarian." A man going

into a modern club gives up his hat; a man going into a modern factory

gives up his head. He then goes in and works loyally for the old firm to

build up the great fabric of commerce (which can be done without a head),

but when he has done work he goes to the cloak-room, like the man at the

club, and gets his head back again; that is the germ of the holiday. It

may be urged that the club man who leaves his hat often goes away with

another hat; and perhaps it may be the same with the factory hand who has

left his head. A hand that has lost its head may affect the fastidious as

a mixed metaphor; but, God pardon us all, what an unmixed truth! We could

almost prove the whole ease from the habit of calling human beings merely

"hands" while they are working; as if the hand were horribly cut off, like

the hand that has offended; as if, while the sinner entered heaven maimed,

his unhappy hand still laboured laying up riches for the lords of hell.

But to return to the man whom we found waiting for his head in the

cloak-room. It may be urged, we say, that he might take the wrong head,

like the wrong hat; but here the similarity ceases. For it has been

observed by benevolent onlookers at life's drama that the hat taken away

by mistake is frequently better than the real hat; whereas the head taken

away after the hours of toil is certainly worse: stained with the cobwebs

and dust of this dustbin of all the centuries.



The Supreme Adventure

All the words dedicated to places of eating and drinking are pure and

poetic words. Even the word "hotel" is the word hospital. And St. Julien,

whose claret I drank this Christmas, was the patron saint of innkeepers,

because (as far as I can make out) he was hospitable to lepers. Now I do

not say that the ordinary hotel-keeper in Piccadilly or the Avenue de

l'Opera would embrace a leper, slap him on the back, and ask him to order

what he liked; but I do say that hospitality is his trade virtue. And I

do also say it is well to keep before our eyes the supreme adventure of a

virtue. If you are brave, think of the man who was braver than you. If

you are kind, think of the man who was kinder than you.

That is what was meant by having a patron saint. That is the link between

the poor saint who received bodily lepers and the great hotel proprietor

who (as a rule) receives spiritual lepers. But a word yet weaker than

"hotel" illustrates the same point--the word "restaurant." There again

you have the admission that there is a definite building or statue to

"restore"; that ineffaceable image of man that some call the image of God.

And that is the holiday; it is the restaurant or restoring thing that, by

a blast of magic, turns a man into himself.

This complete and reconstructed man is the nightmare of the modern

capitalist. His whole scheme would crack across like a mirror of Shallot,

if once a plain man were ready for his two plain duties--ready to live and

ready to die. And that horror of holidays which marks the modern

capitalist is very largely a horror of the vision of a whole human being:

something that is not a "hand" or a "head for figutes." But an awful

creature who has met himself in the wilderness. The employers will give

time to eat, time to sleep; they are in terror of a time to think.

To anyone who knows any history it is wholly needless to say that holidays

have been destroyed. As Mr. Belloc, who knows much more history than you

or I, recently pointed out in the "Pall Mall Magazine," Shakespeare's

title of "Twelfth Night: or What You Will" simply meant that a winter

carnival for everybody went on wildly till the twelfth night after

Christmas. Those of my readers who work for modern offices or factories

might ask their employers for twelve days' holidays after Christmas. And

they might let me know the reply.






V. THE CHURCH OF THE SERVILE STATE

I confess I cannot see why mere blasphemy by itself should be an excuse

for tyranny and treason; or how the mere isolated fact of a man not

believing in God should be a reason for my believing in Him.

But the rather spinsterish flutter among some of the old Freethinkers has

put one tiny ripple of truth in it; and that affects the idea which I wish

to emphasise even to monotony in these pages. I mean the idea that the

new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very

complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing

really independent of itself. Now, it is true that any positive creed,

true or false, would tend to be independent of itself. It might be Roman

Catholicism or Mahomedanism or Materialism; but, if strongly held, it

would be a thorn in the side of the Servile State. The Moslem thinks all

men immortal: the Materialist thinks all men mortal. But the Moslem does

not think the rich Sinbad will live forever; but the poor Sinbad will die

on his deathbed. The Materialist does not think that Mr. Haeckel will go

to heaven, while all the peasants will go to pot, like their chickens.

In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men, there is some trace of

the doctrine of the equality of men. But the capitalist really depends on

some religion of inequality. The capitalist must somehow distinguish

himself from human kind; he must be obviously above it--or he would be

obviously below it. Take even the least attractive and popular side of

the larger religions to-day; take the mere vetoes imposed by Islam on

Atheism or Catholicism. The Moslem veto upon intoxicants cuts across all

classes. But it is absolutely necessary for the capitalist (who presides

at a Licensing Committee, and also at a large dinner), it is absolutely

necessary for him, to make a distinction between gin and champagne. The

Atheist veto upon all miracles cuts across all classes. But it is

absolutely necessary for the capitalist to make a distinction between his

wife (who is an aristocrat and consults crystal gazers and star gazers in

the West End), and vulgar miracles claimed by gipsies or travelling

showmen. The Catholic veto upon usury, as defined in dogmatic councils,

cuts across all classes. But it is absolutely necessary to the capitalist

to distinguish more delicately between two kinds of usury; the kind he

finds useful and the kind he does not find useful. The religion of the

Servile State must have no dogmas or definitions. It cannot afford to

have any definitions. For definitions are very dreadful things: they do

the two things that most men, especially comfortable men, cannot endure.

They fight; and they fight fair.

Every religion, apart from open devil worship, must appeal to a virtue or

the pretence of a virtue. But a virtue, generally speaking, does some

good to everybody. It is therefore necessary to distinguish among the

people it was meant to benefit those whom it does benefit. Modern

broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else. It was

meant to benefit the rich; and meant to benefit nobody else. And if you

think this unwarranted, I will put before you one plain question. There

are some pleasures of the poor that may also mean profits for the rich:

there are other pleasures of the poor which cannot mean profits for the

rich? Watch this one contrast, and you will watch the whole creation of a

careful slavery.

In the last resort the two things called Beer and Soap end only in a froth.

They are both below the high notice of a real religion. But there is

just this difference: that the soap makes the factory more satisfactory,

while the beer only makes the workman more satisfied. Wait and see if

the Soap does not increase and the Beer decrease. Wait and see whether

the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the

encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement

of the huge virtues that defy it. Many great religions, Pagan and

Christian, have insisted on wine. Only one, I think, has insisted on Soap.

You will find it in the New Testament attributed to the Pharisees.






CHESTERTON-UTOPIA OF USERS