Explore "The Red Reactionary" by G.K. Chesterton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The one case for Revolution is that it is the only quite clean and complete road to anything -- even to restoration. Revolution alone can be not merely a revolt of the living, but also a resurrection of the dead.
A friend of mine (one, in fact, who writes prominently on this paper) was once walking down the street in a town of Western France, situated in that area that used to be called La Vendee; which in that great creative crisis about 1790 formed a separate and mystical soul of its own, and made a revolution against a revolution. As my friend went down this street he whistled an old French air which he had found, like Mr. Gandish, "in his researches into 'istry," and which had somehow taken his fancy; the song to which those last sincere loyalists went into battle. I think the words ran: