DIVORCE
versus
DEMOCRACY
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
Reprinted from “Nash’s Magazine”
London
SS. PETER & PAUL
Publishers to the Church of England
32 George St., Hanover Square,
and 302 Regent St., W.
1916
I have been asked to put forward in pamphlet form this rather hastyessay as it appeared in “Nash’s Magazine”; and I do so by the kindpermission of the editor. The rather chaotic quality of its journalismit is now impossible to alter. The convictions upon which it is basedare unaltered and unalterable. Indeed, in so far as circumstances havesince affected them, they are greatly strengthened. In so far as therewas something sporadic and seemingly irrelevant in the writing, it waspartly because I was contending against an evil that was diffused andindefinable, at once tentative and ubiquitous. Since then that diseasehas come to a head and burst; primarily in the North of Europe. By thathistoric habit which generally makes one European people thestandard-bearer of a social tendency, which made the Empire a RomanEmpire and the Revolution a French Revolution, the North Germans havebecome the peculiar champions of that modern change which would make theState infinitely superior to the Family. It is even asserted thatPrussian political authority is now encouraging the abandonment ofcommon morality for the support of population; and even if this horriblething be untrue, it is highly significant that it can be plausibly saidof Prussia, and certainly of no other Christian State. And in the newlight of action it is possible to trace more clearly the trend towardsdivorce, as also that trend towards the other pagan institution ofslavery, which would certainly have accompanied it. But the enslavingforce in Europe struck too early; and the whole movement has beenbrought to a standstill.
The same circumstances have given an importance to a formula of my ownwhich I still think rather{4} important. It may be summarised as thepatriotism of the household. In the experience of nationality we do notadmit that any excess of despair can come into the same logical world asdesertion. No amount of tragedy need amount to treason. The Christianview of marriage conceives of the home as self-governing in a manneranalogous to an independent state; that is, that it may include internalreform and even internal rebellion; but because of the bond, not againstit. In this way it is itself a sort of standing reformer of the State;for the State is judged by whether its arrangements bear helpfully orbear hardly on the human fulness and fertility of the free family. Thusthe Wicked Ten in Rome were condemned and cast down because their publicpowers permitted a wrong against the purity of a private family. Thusthe mediæval revolt against the Poll Tax began by the authority of anofficial insulting the authority of a father. Men do not now, any morethan then, become sinless by receiving a post in a bureaucracy; and ifthe domestic affairs of the poor were once put into the hands of merelawyer