Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 1874-1936 / 2008-09-07 00:00:00

The first was
England, and the second was Prussia.
It is very arguable that England must, in any case, have fought to keep
her influence on the ports of the North Sea. It is quite equally
arguable that if she had been as heartily on the side of the French
Revolution as she was at last against it, she could have claimed the
same concessions from the other side. It is certain that England had no
necessary communion with the arms and tortures of the Continental
tyrannies, and that she stood at the parting of the ways. England was
indeed an aristocracy, but a liberal one; and the ideas growing in the
middle classes were those which had already made America, and were
remaking France. The fiercest Jacobins, such as Danton, were deep in the
liberal literature of England. The people had no religion to fight for,
as in Russia or La Vendee. The parson was no longer a priest, and had
long been a small squire. Already that one great blank in our land had
made snobbishness the only religion of South England; and turned rich
men into a mythology. The effect can be well summed up in that decorous
abbreviation by which our rustics speak of "Lady's Bedstraw," where they
once spoke of "Our Lady's Bedstraw.
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