For Chesterton… British public rhetoric was more than a mere style: "The motive is the desire to disguise a thing even when expressing it."At least they said openly what was being done openly. The British rhetoric, for Chesterton, was one with the decayed British liberalism that allowed exploitation of workers by plutocrats who were never rebuked by government or the courts.Gazing back across the horrors of World War II, it is hard for us to imagine how good men like Chesterton, whatever their objections to British liberalism, could admire Mussolini, though several prominent intellectuals and politicians did.Mussolini's thuggish violence, of course, Chesterton and others rejected. But their admiration was an index of the scale of reform they thought needed.
G. K. Chesterton