G. K. Chesterton, who in an essay titled “On Man: Heir of All the Ages” argued that we have the whole of history available to us as our rightful inheritance, and that “the mind of man is at its largest, and especially at its broadest, when it feels the brotherhood of humanity linking it up with remote and primitive and even barbaric things.” Alas, says Chesterton, “If the modern man is indeed the heir of all the ages, he is often the kind of heir who tells the family solicitor to sell the whole damned estate, lock, stock, and barrel, and give him a little ready money to throw away at the races
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