The new rebel is a skeptic and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never really be a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it.
Thus, he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book, a novel, in which he insults it himself.
He curses Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it.
As a politician he will cry out that war is a waste of life, then as a philosopher that all life is a waste of time.
A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself.
A man denounces marriage as a lie and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie.
He calls a flag a bauble [ornament] and then blames the oppressors of Poland and Ireland because they take away the bauble.
The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts. Then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes to a scientific meeting where he proves that they practically are beasts.
In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality, and in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men.
Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything. ~ G.K Chesterton in Orthodoxy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Publishing House, 1959), 41
Mrs. Grundy, a character from Thomas Morton's play Speed the Plough (1798), was considered by English-language authors to be the personification of the tyranny of conventional propriety
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