



Produced by Mike Pullen






UTOPIA OF USURERS AND OTHER ESSAYS

By Gilbert Keith Chesterton




CONTENTS

     A Song of Swords

     Utopia of Usurers
      I. Art and Advertisement
      II. Letters and the New Laureates
      III. Unbusinesslike Business
      IV. The War on Holidays
      V. The Church of the Servile State
      VI. Science and the Eugenists
      VII. The Evolution of the Prison
      VIII. The Lash for Labour
      IX. The Mask of Socialism


     The Escape
     The New Raid
     The New Name
     A Workman's History of England
     The French Revolution and the Irish
     Liberalism: A Sample
     The Fatigue of Fleet Street
     The Amnesty for Aggression
     Revive the Court Jester
     The Art of Missing the Point
     The Servile State Again
     The Empire of the Ignorant
     The Symbolism of Krupp
     The Tower of Bebel
     A Real Danger
     The Dregs of Puritanism
     The Tyranny of Bad Journalism
     The Poetry of the Revolution





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