What's wrong with Land & Water

The latest additions are mostly from Land & Water, the periodical edited by Hilaire Belloc during WWI and its aftermath. They comprise a series of articles by GKC between 1916 and 1918 that were not collected and now have been all but forgotten. Perhaps justly so, since they generally sound more like war rhetoric than anything else. Still some passages are worth recovering, like this bit from The Old and New Tables:

Broadly speaking, man is pre-eminent over the brutes by certain perceptions which to them would appear paradoxes. What is true of the man and the brutes is true, with differences important but here irrelevant, of the civilised and the quite brutalised man. These perceptions are really paradoxes, in the sense that a sub-human intelligence would find them fantastic. To take the obvious case “Thou shalt not steal” would seem to make a mystical difference between some apples and other apples; a quality which is not in their being green fruit, or red fruit, or ripe fruit, but forbidden fruit. It needs a certain stride of primeval paradox to perceive that in ensuring our neighbour’s apples we ensure our own. To avoid confusion, I will note here that this is true quite apart from current debates about private property, and applies as certainly to public property. Even if the apples were everybody’s, they could not be anybody’s. There is the same paradox in any other moral platitude, such as that of keeping one’s word. The purely brutal mind could not understand how it could be bound this year by certain gasps and grunts which had issued from its mouth last year. Nor could it make a mental picture of itself a year hence, and compel the person in that picture to behave in a certain way. These truisms are tremendous; they are, to the reflective, startling. Therefore the prophets and poets have rightly conceived these truisms as sculptured on superhuman tables by the finger of God, and given in the blaze of lightning when the thunder was in the mountains.