Hilaire Belloc: Edwardian Radical sheds new light on the roots of British (and American) social welfare legislation. Belloc became convinced that party divisions and the “new liberalism” that emerged in the twentieth century masked a fundamental subservience to a dominant plutocracy, and that England was moving toward a state which would be neither conventionally socialist nor conventionally capitalist, but servile. The Servile State was Belloc’s most important political work, a prophetic warning of what we now call the “welfare state”.