Among the ruling classes of England the romanticism of the early 19th century…with exquisite sensibilities, urgent religious feeling and a passion for social justice…had settled down by the end of Queen Victoria’s Reign into the state of a Dr. Pangloss with a stiff upper lip.

This concealed feelings to such an extent that it was indecent…not good form in the parlance of the day...to envisage the existence among their own kind of love, hunger, poverty, anxiety, anger or the desire for God. To those of other inferior sorts who exposed themselves to germs, emotions and insecurity their attitude was one either of condemnation or of domineering patronage.

This was the atmosphere which Bernard Shaw, H.G.Wells, Hilaire Belloc and G.K.Chesterton reacted fiercely against. These four men…of whom two inherited a French, one an Irish and one a Struggling-Small-Shopkeeper tradition…were united in the desire to shatter the complacency of the Wealthy…whether apathetic or bustling.

The Well-Off…it was not quite nice to call them the Rich so they invariably did so…existed in a kind of overstuffed innocence unspoiled by the economic world. The Rich took for granted that cleanliness was next to godliness and solvency to virtue. For them the respectability which gazed over earnest rationalism obliterated a multitude of sins.

With enormous vitality the instinct of all four writers was to shock…Shaw by rationalist and Chesterton by Christian paradox, Wells by angry comic compassionate fiction and Belloc by satire of what was assumed to be good by an exuberant boastfulness that deliberately outraged all the current canons of gentlemanly modesty.

Hilaire Belloc’s output can be grouped into seven categories: satire, literary criticism, essays, poetry, travel, history and politics. The satirical books are high spirited, genial, fierce or bitter…and written as fiction…The Green Overcoat and The Mercy of Allah; spoof biographies…Lambkin’s Remains…and comic verse…A Moral Alphabet, Cautionary Tales, Peers…More Peers and The Modern Traveller. Belloc’s Literary Criticism was what was expected from a Man of Letters.

There are many volumes of Belloc's Essays… stimulating, irritating, reminiscent…good talk and animated conversation. Belloc’s Poetry has an energy which enables it to reach into both the heart and the mind. To read Belloc’s essays is like dining with a great conversationalist. In them the richness and depth of the written word replace the golden geniality…the spiritual equivalent of candle-lit cigar-smoke and the lingering vibration of wine…which gives to its spoken counterpart a quality evaporated by print. Some are political and polemical…the products of his years in Parliament, of his unsuccessful struggle for the public auditing of Party funds and of the libel action in which his paper the New Witness was involved just before the first world war. Others discuss aspects of the main themes of his large-scale books…religion, history, social patterns, places, buildings and people.

Belloc’s Historical Studies were mainly concerned with England and France and meet Jane Austin’s criterion of perfection…passionate, partial and prejudiced…works of art rather than of scientific truth. Belloc’s Travel books…on foot and under sail…are marked by a keen sense both of history and of the immediacy of the present. The Four Men and The Voyage of the Nona are small masterpieces of this genre. But it is Belloc’s politics that will interest us.

Belloc’s Politics were summed up in his short masterpiece published in 1912 The Servile State. All developed states were organizing their workers into Slavery. This might be more or less comfortable but was always without roots and without power whether the label was Socialist or Capitalist.

To restore men to the happiness and dignity of responsible freedom it was necessary to organize the wide-spread distribution of small property and of shares in both the finance and the direction of communally-owned public services. In the England of 1912 such a theme…though foreshadowed in the papal encyclical De Rerum Novarum in 1881…was considered heretical, radical and reactionary.