 Chapter 21 Part 2 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Dick Bourgeois Doyle. Gilbert Keith Chesterton. By Maisie Ward. Chapter 21 Part 2 The War Years In September 1916 Cecil Chesterton bade farewell to the new witness. He was in the army, as a private, in the east, and in the east series, and GK took over the editorship. I like Chesterton's paper, The New Witness, wrote an American journalist in the New York Tribune. No, not yet, Harold Tribune, since GKC has taken it over. Gilbert Chesterton seems to me the best thing England has produced since Dickens. I like the things he believes in, and I hate sociological experts and prohibitionists and ULEN officers, which are the things he hates. I feel in him that a very honest man is speaking. I like his impotence to Northcliffe. As a journalist, Chesterton gets only about a quarter of himself into action, but even a quarter of Chesterton is good measure. He works very hard at his journalism. That is why he doesn't do it as well as his careless things, which give him fun. But for all that, there is no other editorial page in England or the United States written with the snap, wit, and honest humanity of his paragraphs. I hope he won't blunt himself by overwork. It would be an international loss if that sane, jolly mind is bent to routine. England has need of him. The overwork and the high quality of it were alike, undeniable. But after the long repose of his illness, GK seemed like a giant refreshed and ready to run his course. Each week's new witness had an editorial, besides the paragraphs of which the New York Tribune speaks, not all of these, however, written by himself, and a signed article under the suggestive general heading at the sign of the world's end. The difference between articles and a real book, and the degree of work needed to turn the one into the other, may be seen if the essays on marriage and the paper be compared with the superstition of divorce for which they furnished material, and those on Ireland with Irish impressions. There were, besides very many articles in other papers, English and American, and he was also writing his history of England. Although all Englishmen had kept the same unwavering gaze at reality as Chesterton, much of what he called the rather feeble-minded reaction that followed the war might have been avoided, and with it, the advent of Hitler. Particularly, he opposed the tendency to call Kaiserism what is now called Hitlerism, and should always be called Prussianism. While agreeing that care should be taken not to write of German atrocities that could not be substantiated, he insisted that there was no ground for forgetting or ignoring the findings of the American Inquiry in Belgium, which had established more than enough. These horrors, the bombing of civilians, shelling of open towns, and sinking of passengerships, culminating with the Lusitania, were in the main what brought America into the war. Here, as with England, Chesterton did not admit as primary what has since been so exclusively stressed, the economic motive. Here, as with England, he took the volunteer army as one great proof of the will of the nation, and those of us who remember can testify that in America, as in England, the will of the people was ahead of the decision of the politicians. On one point, Chesterton's articles have a special interest, the question of reprisals. When the Germans broke yet another of the promises of the Hague Convention and initiated the use of poison gas, there was much discussion as to the ethics of reprisals, and GK used against reprisals two arguments, one of which was a rare example of a fallacy in his arguments. If a wasp stings you, he said, do not sting back. No, we might reply, but you squash it. You have as a man an advantage over a wasp, and so do not need to use its own weapons to defeat it. His other argument is far more powerful and is indeed overwhelming. If you use, even as reprisals, unlawful weapons, it is harder to prove you did not initiate them. And I remember well another feeling at the time expressed by GK, which was, I believe, that of the majority of the English people, if we use these things, if we accept the Prussian gospel of frightfulness, then spiritually we have lost the war. Spiritually Prussia had conquered, as she has engulfed the old Germanies, and first imposing a rule, then gained acceptance of her ideas, so it may be with us. Ideas are everything, and the barbarians destroy more with ideas than even by material weapons. Horrible as these may be. Inclined at first to hope for the fruits of democracy from the Russian Revolution, Chesterton was soon being reproached by HG Wells for dirty suspiciousness about the Bolshevik leaders and their motives. But the collapse of Russia and the defeat of Romania alike only strengthened the necessity of the fight to a finish with Prussia, that became, as the months passed, the absorbing aim of the new witness. In the treaties, respectively, Brest, Lutovsk and Bucharest, Germany imposed upon these two countries incredibly harsh terms. Thus wrote the new witness after the Treaty of Bucharest. We should like to ask the pacifists and semi-pacifists who are fond of official documents if they have read the white paper dealing with the plain facts about the peace with Romania. If they have a single word to say on the subject, we should be much interested to hear what it is. It makes absolutely plain two facts, both of which have a sort of frightful humor after all. The humanitarian talk about no annexations and no indemnities. The first is that the conquerors have annexed in a direct and personal sense beyond what is commonly meant by annexation. The second is they have indemnified themselves by an immediate coercion and extortion which is generally veiled by the forms of a recognized indemnity. In annexing some 9,000 square miles, they have been particular to attach whole forests to the hunting grounds of the Hungarian nobles and the timber of Hungarian wood merchants. Not merely annexing as a conqueror annexes, but rather stealing as an individual steals. Further, the fun growing fast and furious, they have taken country containing 130,000 Romanians merely because it is uninhabited land. For the second point, we often speak figuratively of tyrants enslaving a country, but tutans do literally enslave. All the mails of the occupied land, which happened to be two-thirds of Romania, are driven to work on pain of death or prison. All this is clear and satisfactory enough, but the white paper keeps the best to the last. Is this sentence? We would commend to our peaceful friends. The German delegates informed the Romanian delegates, who were appalled at being required to accept such conditions, that they would appreciate their moderation when they knew those which would be imposed on the western powers after the victory of the central empires. The reminder was needed. Far less than most people was Chesterton subject to the weakness of the human spirit that brings weariness in sustained effort and premature relaxation. Prussia had not, he said, shown any evidence of repentance, merely of regret for lack of success. The Kaiser said he had not wanted this war. No, said Chesterton, he wanted a different war. Chesterton might, and did say later that he himself had wanted a very different peace. The destruction of Prussia, the reconstruction of the old German states, but at present he wanted only to fight on until this became possible. I do not think he ever hated anybody, but he did hate Prussianism as the wickedness that hindered loving. And he had no liking for the patronizing pacifism of the gentleman, it was Romain Roland, who took a holiday in the Alps and said he was above the struggle, as if there were any Alps from which the soul can look down on Calvary. There is indeed one mountain among them that might be very appropriate to so detached an observer, the mountain named after Pilate, the man who washed his hands. Uses of diversity, page 40, Fountain Library. His keen imagination could visualize the sufferings caused by war. Vicariously he knew something of the life of the trenches, for Cecil, like many another seaman, had managed to get to France. A delightful article on comradeship shows what letters some soldiers confirm, how perfectly at home was Private Chesterton among his fellows, and how much love by them. English soldiers are classed A, B, or C according to their degree of physical fitness, and Cecil was in class C. I can understand a pagan but not a Christian who simply dismisses the suffering of our soldiers as useless. He is like Dr. Hyde's scorning father Damien, or like those who cried at the foot of the cross. He saved others himself he cannot save. They saved others, these men, their suffering was that of the human race whose head is Christ. With him they bore, even if they knew it not, that mysterious burden of humanity that makes some men question God's existence, but draws others into conscious membership of his physical body. They were so drawn in those days and there seemed a new lifting up of the cross. The new witness does, I think, lack one note a little. They were too busy hating Prussianism to give thought to the Christian command to love Prussians, whose sufferings too were those of humanity. Into the opposite error there was no risk that they would fall. Whatever for them would heroism be belittled in the name of the very horrors it was encountering? In one article Bellock touched on this strange perversion and reminded his readers that the power to ravage and destroy was not really a new result of modern machinery. Attila and his Huns had inflicted even greater devastation and had left a desert behind them. Barbarism in its nature was destructive and we were encountering barbarism. And so doing we were acting the part of Christian men. But the old fights still had to be waged on the home front. Against the money power and against what the new witness called Prussianism at home. Unceasingly they battled for fair treatment for soldiers' wives and children, for freedom from unmeaning and unnecessary regulations, against the profiteering by big firms and the consequent crushing of small. About 2,000 small butcher shops for instance had to close at the very beginning of the war owing to a cornering of supplies by the large firms. Against this and all the ramifications of the meat scandal the new witness struggled publishing they claim facts unpublished elsewhere and inspiring questions in the House of Commons. Bellock's irony, Chesterton's wit, point these articles and make them worth reading as literature. And there is some of the old fooling. A further series on the Servile State is attacked by Shaw, who thinks that Bellock, since he is not a socialist, must be a follower of Herbert Spencer. GK accounts for this by saying that Shaw had not read Bellock. How do you know retorts Shaw? It is not Herbert Spencer I have not read. Suppose you had your choice of not reading a book by Bellock and not reading one by Spencer, which would you choose? Hang it all, be reasonable. The economic front was never abandoned and the paper continued to attack all forms of socialism, including the recreation of Bumble by Mrs. Sidney Webb with all the regimentation of the poor for their own good that Bumble represented. The inner secrets of the Fabian office are unfolded by Shaw in a letter to Gilbert dated August 6, 1917. My dear GKC, if you want to expose a scandalous orgy in the new witness, you may depend on the following as being a correct account by an eyewitness. You know that there is a body called the Fabian Research Department, of which I have the hollow honor to be perpetual grand. The real moving spirit being Mrs. Sidney Webb. A large number of innocent young men and women are attracted to this body by promises of employment by the said Mrs. SW in works of unlimited and inspiring uplift, such as our unceasingly denounced, along with Marconi and other matters in your well-written organ. Well, Mrs. Sidney Webb summoned all these young things to an uplifting at home at the Fabian office lately. They came in crowds and sat at her feet while she prophesied unto them with occasional comic relief from the unfortunate perpetual grand. At the decent hour of 10 o'clock, she bade them good night and withdrew to her own residence and to bed. For some accidental reason or other, I lingered until, as I thought, all the young things had gone home. I should explain that I was in the two pair back. At last I started to go home myself. As I descended the stairs, I was stunned by the most infernal din I have ever heard, even at the front, coming from the Fabian Hall, which would otherwise be the backyard. On rushing to this temple, I found the young enthusiasts sprawling over tables, over radiators, over everything except chairs in a state of scandalous abandonment. Roaring at the tops of their voices in a quite unintelligible manner, a string of presumably obscene songs accompanied on the piano with frantic gestures and astonishing musical skill by a man whom I had always regarded as a respectable Fabian researcher, but who now turned out to be a demon pianist out hereding, as my secretary puts in two Rs and explains that she's thinking of Herod's Spangali. A horribly sacrilegious character was given to the proceedings by the fact that the tune that they were singing when I entered was Luther's hymn, Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott. As they went on, for I regret to say that my presence exercised no restraint, whatever, they sang their extraordinary and incomprehensible litany to every tune. However, August its associations which happened to fit it. These, if you please, are the Solomon's Sour Neophytes whose puritanical influence has kept you in dread for so many years, but I have not told you the worst. Before I fled from the building, I did at last discover what words it was they were singing. When it first flashed on me, I really could not believe it, and at the end of the next verse, no doubt or error was possible. The young Maynad next to me was concluding every straf by shrieking that she didn't care where the water went if it didn't get into the wine. Now you know. I've since ascertained that the breviary of this black mask can be obtained at the Fabian office with notes of the numbers of the hymns, ancient and modern, and all the errors sacred and profane homes have been set. This letter needs no answer. Indeed, admits of none. I leave you to your reflections. Ever. GBS. The Shah Worm turns on Wells was a headline in the new witness over a vigorous and lighthearted attack. The others were apt to score off Wells in these exchanges because he lost lightheartedness and became irritable. Even with Gilbert, he sometimes broke out, the Shah, that to get angry with Chesterton was an impossibility. With Cecil Chesterton, it was only too easy to get angry at any rate, and he appeared in the new witness. But I think when he heard Cecil was in France, Wells must have regretted one of the letters he wrote to Gilbert just before the change of editorship. It was curious, the contrast between the genial personality so loved by his friends and the waspishness so often shown by Cecil and his staff in the columns of the paper. His extraordinary personality writes ESP Haynes wonderfully penetrated the eccentricity of his appearance. His features were slightly fantastic and his voice was as loudly discordant as his laughter. But the real charm and generosity of his character were so transparent that one never seemed to be conscious of the physical medium. Yet with all my sympathy, for many of the new witness ideas when I read the volumes of Cecil's editorship and I think jangled nerves explain if they do not excuse this outburst by Wells. My dear GKC, haven't I on the whole behaved decently to you? Haven't I always shown a reasonable civility to you and your brother Embellic? Haven't I betrayed at times a certain affection for you? Very well, then you will understand that I don't start out to pick a needless quarrel with the new witness crowd. But this business of the Huffer book and the new witness makes me sick. Some disgusting little greaser named something has been allowed to insult old FMH in a series of letters that make me ashamed of my species. Huffer has many faults no doubt, but firstly he's poor, secondly he's notoriously unhappy and in the most miserable position. Thirdly, he's a better writer than any of your little crowd and fourthly, instead of pleading his age and his fat and taking refuge from service in a greasy obesity as your brother has done, he is serving his country. His book is a great book and your writer just lies about it. I guess he's a dirty minded priest or some such unclean thing when he says it is the story of a stallion and so forth. The whole outbreak is so envious, so base, so cat and the gutter spitting at the passerby that I will never let the new witness into the house again. Regretful yours, H.G. Wells. Gilbert replied, 11 Warwick Gardens, Kensington West. My dear Wells, as you will see by the above address, I have been away from home and must apologize for delay. I am returning almost at once, however. Most certainly you have always been a good friend to me and I've always tried to express my pride in the fact. I know enough of your good qualities in other ways to put down everything in your last letter to an emotion of loyalty to another friend. Any quarrel between us will not come from me and I confess I am puzzled as to why it should come from you, merely because somebody else who is not I dislikes a book by somebody else who is not you and says so in an article of which neither of us is even remotely responsible. I often disagree with the criticisms of the writer. I do not know anything about the book or the circumstances of Huffer. I cannot help being entertained by your vision of the writer who is not a priest but a poor journalist and I believe a free thinker. But whoever he may be, and I hardly think the problem worth a row between you and me, he has the right to justice. And you must surely see that even if it were my paper I could not either tell a man to find a book good when he found it bad or sack him for a point of taste which has nothing in the world to do with the principles of the paper. For the rest, Haynes represents the new witness much more than a reviewer does, being both on the board and the staff and he has put your view in the paper. I cannot help thinking with a more convincing logic. Don't you sometimes find it convenient, even in my case that your friends are less touchy than you are? By all means drop any paper you dislike, though if you do it for every book review you think unfair, I fear your admirable range of modern knowledge will be narrowed. Of the paper in question, I will merely say this. My brother, and in some degree the few who have worked with him have undertaken a task of public criticism for the sake of which they stand in permanent danger of imprisonment and personal ruin. We are incessantly reminded of this danger and no one has ever dared to suggest that we have any motive but the best. If you should ever think at right to undertake such a venture you will find that the number of those who will commit their journalistic fortunes to it is singularly small and includes some who have more courage and honesty than acquaintance with the hierarchy of art. It is even likely that you will come to think the latter less important. Yours, Solence Rancoun G.K. Chesterton P.S., on re-reading your letter in order to be fair as I am trying to be, I observe you specially mention letters. You will see, of course, that this does not make any difference. To stop letters would be to stop Hain's letter and others on your side and these could not be printed without permitting a rejoinder. I post this from Beaconsfield where anything further will find me. It ended as all quarrels did that anyone started with Gilbert. Dear G.K.C. Also I can't quarrel with you, but the Huffer business aroused my long dormant moral indignation and I let it fly at the most sensitive part of the new witness constellation. The only part about who's soul I care. I hate these attacks on rather miserable exceptional people like Huffer and Masterman. I know these aren't perfect men, but their defects make quite sufficient hells for them without these public peltings. I suppose I ought to have written to me instead of you. One of these days I will go and have a heart to heart talk with him. Only I always get so amiable when I meet a man he, C.C. needs it, I mean the talking to. Yours ever, H.G. Through the war's progress Wells appeared to Chesterton to be expressing a powerful and individual genius, not his own considered views but the reactions of public opinion. As Mr. Brittling he saw the war through and even called it a war to end war. As Mr. Clissald he asked of what use it had all been. Chesterton speaks of him as a rather unstable genius and the genius and instability alike can be seen in his meteor appearances in the new witness and in his books. Several of these he sent to Gilbert who wrote September 12, 1917. I've been trying for a long time though I perpetually balked with business and journalism to write and thank you for sending me in so generous a manner you're ever interesting and delightful books especially as divisions touching the things we care most about drive me every time I review them to deal more in controversy and less in compliment than I intend. The truth in the trouble is that both of us are only too conscious that there is a great war going on all the time on the purely mental plane and I cannot help thinking your view is often a heresy and I know only too well that when you lead it it is likely to be a large heresy. I fear that being didactic means being disproportionate and that the temptation to attack something I think I can correct leads to missing in my writing not in my reading a thousand fine things that I could never imitate. It is lucky for me that you are not very often a book reviewer when I bring out my own shapeless and amateurish books. In the autobiography G.K. calls Welles a sportive but spiritual child of Huxley. He delighted in his wit and his swiftness of mind but he summarized in the same book the quality which runs through all his work. I've always thought that he reacted too swiftly to everything possibly as a part of the swiftness of his work. I've never ceased to admire and sympathize but I think he has always been too much in a state of reaction to use the name which would probably annoy him most I think he is a permanent reactionary. Whenever I met him he seemed to be coming from somewhere rather than going anywhere as he was so often nearly right that his movements irritated me like the sight of somebody's hat being perpetually washed up by the sea and never touching the shore but I think he thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind. Whereas I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind as of opening the mouth is to shut it again on something solid. No change of mood in the public meant any change in the new witness group. In a powerful article in reply to an old friend who asked for peace because the war was destroying freedom Bellick told him that freedom had gone long since for the mass of Englishmen. How many wrote GK, pacifists or semi-pacifists resisted the detailed destruction of all liberty for the populace before the war. It is a bitter choice between freedom and patriotism but how many fought for freedom before it gave them the chance of fighting against patriotism. From the new witness May 31, 1917 Again and again they touched the spot of trading with the enemy. In this as in all their attacks they made one point of enormous importance. Do not they said look for traders and spies among waiters and small traders look up not down. You will find them in high places if you dare to look. They dared. And here came in once more what was commonly regarded as a strange crank peculiar to the Chester Bellock. Their outlook toward Jews Usually those who refer to it spoke of a religious prejudice. Again and again the new witness not always patiently but with unvaryingly clarity explained they had no religious prejudice against Jews. They had not even a racial prejudice against Jews though this I think was true only of some of the staff. Their only prejudice was against the pretense that a Jew was an Englishman. It was undeniable for example Rothschilds in Paris London and Berlin all related in conducting an international family banking business. There were der lingeries in London and Paris pronounced in the French style whose cousins were air lingeries pronounced in the German style in Berlin. How the new witness asked could members of such families feel the same about the war as an Englishman. They could not to put it at its lowest have the same primary loyalty to England or to Germany either. Their primary loyalty must be indeed it ought to be to their own race and kindred. Yet this was surely an excessive simplification. We have only to remember that lately a son of the der lingerie host died gallantly as an English airman. We have only to remember that thousands of Jews who fought in our ranks in this war and the last very many Jews are patriotic for England and for America. Many were patriotic for Germany. This no doubt makes the problem more acute. For any discussion is nonsense that omits this certain fact. There are Jews patriotic first for the country they live in the country that gave them home and citizenship of which often their wives and mothers are descended there are others who feel that Jewry is their patria. This was the fact the new witness could never forget. A Jew might not be especially pro-German in feeling yet his actions might help Germany by being pro-Jewish. International Jewish trading was trading with the enemy and was to a very large extent continuing in spite of assurances to the contrary. Moreover international finance was getting nervous over the continuance of the war as a menace to its own future. It won a peace. A peace that should still leave it in possession in this country and in Germany. Gilbert Chesterton was passionately determined to cast it out. He was a Zionist. He wished for the Jewish people the peaceful possession of a country of their own. But he demanded urgently that they should no longer be allowed to govern his country. Marconi still obsessed him and the surrender of English politics to the money power seemed to him to represent his great a danger for the future as Prussianism. For a moment the two dangers were the one danger and against them was set the people of England. It was at this moment that Chesterton published his epic of the English people which he called a history. Frank Swinerton is told, as recounted in Georgian scene page 93, how this book came to be written. Chateau and Windus, for whom Swinerton worked, had asked GK to write a history of England. He refused on the ground that he was no historian. Later he signed a contract with the same publishers for a book of essays then discovered that he was already under contract to give this book to another firm. He asked Chateau and Windus to cancel the contract and offered to write something else for them. Swinerton's account continues. The publishers concealing jubilation sternly recalled their original proposal for a short history of England. Shrieks and groans were distinctly heard all the way from Beaconsfield but the promise was kept. The short history of England was what Chesterton must have called a wild and awful success. It probably has been the most generally read of all his books. But while the credit for it is his, he must not be blamed for impudence in essaying history. When the inspiration arose in another's head, not mine, and when in fact no man ever went to the writing of a literary work with less confidence. You can find no dates in this history in a minimum of facts, but you can find vision. The history professors at London University said to Lawrence Solomon that it was full of inaccuracies yet he's got nothing we hadn't got. G.K. might well have borrowed from Newman and called it an essay an aid of a history of England. He showed something of the great moral change which turned the Roman Empire into Christendom, by which each great thing to which it afterwards gave birth was baptized into a promise or at least into a hope of permanence. It may be that each of its ideas was, as it were, mixed with immortality. The English people had been free and happy as part of this great thing cultivating their own land establishing by their guilds a social scheme based upon pity and a craving for equality building cathedrals and worshiping God and with the Holy Land much nearer to a plain man's house than Westminster and immeasurably nearer than Runnymede. All life was made lovely by this prodigious presence of a religious transfiguration in common life and only began to darken with the successful rebellion of the rich under Henry VIII. Probably too big a proportion is given by Chesterton to the great crime that overshadowed for him the rest of English history. Yet he does justice in brilliant phrasing to the 18th century wicks still more to Chatham and Burke and to Dr. Johnson whom he so loved and to whom he was often compared but supremely he loved Nelson who dies stars on his bosom and his heart upon his sleeve for Nelson was the type and chief exemplar of the ordinary Englishman. The very hour of his death the very name of his ship are touched with that epic completeness which critics call the long arm of coincidence and prophets the hand of God. His very faults and failures were heroic not in a loose but in a classic sense in that he fell only like the legendary heroes weakened by a woman not foiled by a foe among men. And it remains the incarnation of a spirit in the English that is purely poetic so poetic that it fancies itself a thousand things and sometimes even fancies itself prosaic. At a recent date in an age of reason in a country already calling itself dull and business-like with top hats and factory chimneys already beginning to arise with powers of funerial efficiency this country's clergyman's son moved to the last in a luminous cloud and acted a fairy tale. He shall remain as a lesson to those who do not understand England and a mystery to those who think they do. In outward action he led his ships to victory and died upon a foreign sea but symbolically he established something indescribable and intimate something that sounds like a native proverb. He was the man who burned his ships and who forever set the Thames on fire. The Ballad of the White Horse had been a poem about English legends and origins the history too was called a poem by the reviewers and it was. It was a poem about false staff and Sam Weller and even the artful Dodger who in so many British colonies had turned into Robinson Caruso. His rulers had tried to educate him they had tried to Germanize him and to teach him to embrace a Saxon because he was the other half of an Anglo-Saxon. All English culture had been based for a century and more on ardent admiration for German culture and then the day came and the ignorant fellow found he had other things to learn and he was quicker than his educated countryman for he had nothing to unlearn. He and whose honor had all been said and sung stirred and stepped across the border of Belgium. Then were spread out before men's eyes all the beauties of his culture and all the benefits of his organization. Then we be held under a lifting daybreak but light we had followed and after what image we had labored to refashion ourselves. Nor in any story of mankind has the irony of God chosen the foolish things so catastrophically to confound the wise. For the common crowd of poor and ignorant Englishmen because they only knew that they were Englishmen burst through the filthy cobwebs of 400 years and stood where their father stood when they knew that they were Christian men. The English poor broken in every revolt bullied by every fashion long despoiled of poverty and now being despoiled of liberty entered history with the noise of trumpets and turned themselves in two years into one of the iron armies of the world. And when the critic of politics and literature feeling that this war is after all heroic looks around him to find the hero he can point to nothing but a mob. End of chapter 21. Chapter 22 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Dick Bourgeois Doyle Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward Chapter 22 After the Armistice The months that followed the signing of the armistice were the darkest in Gilbert Chesterton's life. Nothing but the immense natural high spirits of the new witness group could have carried him through the many years in which he cried their unheated warnings to England. But now as the war drew to an end, a new note of optimism had become audible. The Prussian menace was almost conquered. Our soldiers would return and would bring with them the courage and confidence of victors. They might overthrow the governing plutocracy and build again an England of freedom and sanity. But one soldier did not return. The one to whom this group looked for comradeship and inspiration. On December 6, 1918 Cecil Chesterton died in hospital in France. His courage was heroic, native, positive and equal, wrote Bellach, always at the highest potentiality of courage. Gilbert wrote, we lived long enough to march to the victory which was for him a supreme vision of liberty and the light. The work which he put first he did before he died. The work which he put second but very near to the other he left for us to do. There are many of us who will abandon many other things and recognize no greater duty than to do it. This second work was the fight at home against corruption and for freedom for the English people. It was impossible to remember Gilbert Chesterton vividly and to write the word bitterness. It was rather with a profound and burning indignation that he thought of his fellow Englishmen who had fought and died and then looked up and saw Marconi George and Marconi Isaacs, still rulers of the fate of his country. Thus meditating he wrote an elegy in a country church yard. The men that work for England they have their graves at home and bees and birds of England about the cross can roam. But they that fought for England following a falling star, alas, alas for England they have their graves afar. And they that rule in England in stately conclave met, alas, alas for England, they have no graves as yet. From the collected poems page 65 Strange irony of Cecil Chesterton's last weeks. His old enemy Godfrey Isaacs brought an action for perjury against Sir Charles Hobhouse. Both men's counsel agreed and the judge stressed that perjury lay on one side or the other. The case was given against Isaacs. He appealed and his appeal was dismissed. Perjury had lain on one side or the other. Meanwhile, news came that Rufus Isaacs, now Lord Redding, had gone with Lloyd George to Paris to attend the peace conference. All that this might mean, the peril to Poland, the danger of a Prussia kept at the head of the Germanies for the sake of international finance and a basement of England before those countries that had not forgotten Marconi, all this was vivid to Gilbert Chesterton. In the same number of the new witness in which he mourned his brother, December 19, 1918, he wrote under the sign of the world's end an open letter to Lord Redding. My Lord, I address to you a public letter, as it is upon a public question. It is unlikely that I should ever trouble you with any private letter or any private question, at least of all on the private question that now fills my mind. It would be impossible altogether to ignore the irony that has in the last few days brought to an end the great Marconi duel in which you and I in some sense played the part of seconds. That personal part of the matter ended when Cecil Chesterton found death in the trenches to which he had freely gone and Godfrey Isaacs found dismissal in those very courts to which he once successfully appealed. But believe me I do not write on any personal matter nor do I write strangely enough perhaps with any personal acrimony. On the contrary there is something in these tragedies that almost unnaturally clarifies and enlarges the mind. And I think I write partly because I may never feel so magnanimous again. It would be irrational to ask you for sympathy but I am sincerely moved to offer it. You are far more unhappy for your brother is still alive. I will turn my mind to you and your type of politics. It is not wholly and solely through that trick of abstraction by which in moments sorrow a man finds himself staring at a blot on the table cloth or an insect on the ground. I do of course realize with that sort of dull clarity that you are in practice a blot on the English landscape and that the political men who made you are the creeping things of the earth. But I am in all sincerity less in a mood to mock at the sham virtues they parade than to try to imagine the more real virtues which they successfully conceal. In your own case there is the less difficulty at least in one matter. I am very willing to believe that it was the mutual dependence of the members of your family that has necessitated the sacrifice of the dignity and independence of my country. And that if it be decreed that the English nation is to lose its public honor, it will be partly because certain men of the tribe of Isaacs kept their own strange private loyalty. I am willing not this to you for a virtue as your own code may interpret virtue, but the fact would alone be enough to make me protest against any man professing your code and administering our law. And it is upon this point of your public position and not upon any private feelings that I address you today. Not only is there no question of disliking any race, but there is not here even a question of disliking any individual. It is not raised the question of hating you, rather it would raise in some strange fashion the question of loving you. Has it ever occurred to you how much a good citizen would have to love you in order to tolerate you? Have you ever considered how warm indeed how wild must be our affection for the particular stray stockbroker who has somehow turned into a Lord Chief Justice to be strong enough to make us accept him as Lord Chief Justice? It is not a question of how much we dislike you, but of how much we like you, or whether we like you more than England, more than Europe, more than Poland, the pillar of Europe, more than honour, more than freedom, more than facts. It is not, in short, a question of how much we dislike you, but of how far we can be expected to adore you, to die for you, to decay and degenerate for you, for your sake to be despised, for your being despicable. Have you ever considered in a moment of meditation how curiously valuable you would really have to be that Englishmen should in comparison be careless of all the things you have corrupted, and indifferent to all the things that you may yet destroy? Are we to lose the war which we have already won? That nothing else is involved in losing the full satisfaction of the national claim of Poland. Is there any man who doubts that the Jewish international is unsympathetic with that full national demand? And is there any man who doubts that you will be sympathetic with the Jewish international? No man who knows anything of the interior facts of modern Europe has the faintest doubt on either point. No man doubts when he knows whether or no he cares. Do you seriously imagine that those who know, those who care, are so idolatrously infatuated with Daniel Isaacs as to tolerate such risk, let alone such ruin? Are we to set up as the standing representative of England a man who is a standing joke against England? That nothing else is involved in setting up the chief Marconi minister as our chief foreign minister. It is precisely in those foreign countries with which such a minister would have to deal, that his name would be and has been a sort of pantomime proverb like Panama or the South Sea bubble. Foreigners were not threatened with fine and imprisonment for calling a spade a spade and a speculation a speculation. Foreigners were not punished with the perfectly lawless law of libel for saying about public men what those very men had afterwards to admit in public. Foreigners were lookers on who were really allowed to see most of the game. When our public saw nothing of the game and they made not a little game of it are they henceforth to make game of everything that is said and done in the name of England in the affairs of Europe? Have you the serious impudence to call us anti-Semites because we are not so extravagantly fond of one particular Jew as to endure this for him alone? No my lord, the beauties of your character shall not blind us to all elements of reason and self-preservation. We can still control our affections. If we are fond of you, we are not quite so fond of you as that. If we are anything but anti-Semite we are not pro-Semite in that particular impersonal fashion. If we are lovers, we will not kill ourselves for love. After weighing and valuing all your virtues, the qualities of our own country take their due and proportional part in our esteem. Because of you, she shall not die. We cannot tell in what fashion you yourself feel your strange position and how much you know it is a false position. I have sometimes thought I saw in the faces of such men as you that you felt the whole experience as unreal, a mere masquerade. As I myself might feel it if, by some fantastic luck in the old fantastic civilization of China, I were raised from the yellow button to the coral button or from the coral button to the peacock's feather. Precisely because these things would be grotesque I might hardly feel them as incongruous. Precisely because they meant nothing to me I might be satisfied with them. I might enjoy them without any shame at my own impudence. Precisely because I could not feel them as dignified. I should not know what I had degraded. My fancy may be quite wrong but it is, but one of the many attempts I've made to imagine and allow for an alien psychology in this matter. And if you and Jews far worthier than you are wise, they will not dismiss as anti-semitism what may well prove the last series attempt to sympathize with semitism. I allow for your position more than most men allow for it. More most assuredly than most men will allow for it in the darker days that yet may come. It is utterly false to suggest that either I or a better man than I whose work I now inherit desired this disaster for you and yours. I wish you no such ghastly retribution Daniel, son of Isaac, go in peace, but go yours GK Chesterton In those last sentences the spirit of prophecy was upon Chesterton after a truly dark and deep fashion. Yet even he did not guess that the retribution he feared would fall not upon the tribe of Isaacs thus established in English government but upon the unfortunate Jewish people the whole, from the German nation that Isaacs had gone to Paris to protect. For there was no doubt in Chesterton's mind that it was his work at the peace conference to strive for the survival of Prussia no matter how Europe and the rest of the Germany suffered. The new witness hated the treaty of Versailles in its eventual form as much as Hitler hates it but for a very different reason. All human judgments are limited no doubt there was a mixture of truth and error in Chesterton's view of the years that followed but in the universal reaction from the war spirit to pacifism the truths he was urging received scant attention. His really amazing prophecies fell on deaf ears. He will almost certainly, when senior Knox has said be remembered as a prophet in an age of false prophets and it is not insignificant that today it has become the fashion to say as he said 25 years ago and steadily reiterated that the peace of 1918 was only an armistice. When senior Knox in the Penn Gyrick preached in Westminster Cathedral June 27th 1936 Just before leaving England for the front Cecil had married Miss Ada Jones who had long worked with him on the paper and who continued to write both for it and later for GK's weekly doing especially the dramatic criticism under the J.K. Prothero Later on she was to become famous for her exploit in spending a fortnight investigating in the guise of a tramp the London of down and out women. She wrote in the darkest London and founded the Cecil houses to improve the very bad conditions she had discovered and in memory of her husband. At this date Mrs. Cecil Chesterton visited Poland and wrote a series of articles describing the Polish struggle for life and freedom. Several polls also contributed articles to the paper. There was not I imagine on the staff one single writer with the kind of ignorance that enabled Lloyd George to confess in Paris that he did not know where Teshkin was. Here was the first tragedy of Versailles. The representatives of both America and England were ignorant of the reality of Europe. Wilson was as Chesterton often said a much better man than Lloyd George but he knew as little of the world which he had come to reconstruct. There was too a political doctrinaire preferring what was not there in the shape of a League of Nations to the real nations of Poland or Italy and with the American as with the Welshman international finance stood beside the politicians and whispered in their ears. An interesting article appeared in the new witness by an American who said that no leading journal in his own country would print it any more than any English one. He described the opposition of masses of ordinary Americans to the League of Nations and how a Chicago banker who however had no international interests had hardly agreed with this opposition but the same banker had written to him next day eating his own words in the interim he had met the other bankers. This American correspondent held with the new witness that the League of Nations was mainly a device of international finance so framed as to enlist also the support of pacifist idealists who really believed it would make for peace. Only one thing said the new witness would make for a stable peace, remove pressure from her position at the head of Germany, make her regaining of it impossible, make a strong Poland and a strong Italy as well as a strong France. Later on they said they had disapproved of the weakening of Austria but though I do not doubt that this is true in principle I cannot find much mention of Austria in the paper. Poland, Italy and Ireland fill their columns and the freeing of England. They claimed that theirs was in the main the policy of Clemenceau but both Chester and Embellach admitted that Clemenceau even if he desired a strong Poland as a barrier between Germany and Russia shared with his colleagues an equal responsibility in the destruction of Austria which proved so fatal. He was too much a free mason to desire many Catholic states. The interests of France were not those of Italy which certainly went to the wall and was turned thereby from friend and ally into enemy and the new witness summed up the fate of Ireland in the suggestion that Lloyd George had said to Wilson if you won't look at Ireland, I won't look at Mexico. Both Lloyd George and Wilson were too anti-Catholic to do other than dislike in Lloyd George's case hate is the word Catholic Poland it is certain that Lloyd George in particular worked savagely against the Poland that should have been a commission appointed by the peace conference reported in favor of Poland owning the port of Danzig and territory approximating to her age-long historic boundaries and in particular including East Prussia in which there was still a majority of Poles. Lloyd George sent back the report for revision. They made it again on the same lines. It was a strange anomaly that this man should have sat at the council table representing a great country. In the past men had sat there who not only knew much of Europe themselves but who had had as their advisors the foreign office with all its experience and tradition. Vellick pointed out in an article on Versailles that the English tradition had been to hold a balance between conflicting extremes and thus to bring about a peace that at least ensured stability for a long period. But here is a man too ignorant to realize the dangers of his own ignorance and therefore helped from experience. This piece would be, Vellick foretold, the parent of many wars. The Czechs got much of what they wanted just as Danunzio got fiume for Italy by seizing it. Poland wanted for Versailles and enlisted her allies yet while the peace conference was actually in session Germans were persecuting Poles in East Prussia so that many thousands of them fled into Poland proper and thus diminished the Polish population in East Prussia and many plebiscite could be taken there. Lloyd George in Churchill sent a British expeditionary force to Archangel to assist the white Russians but when the Bolsheviks invaded Poland she was not supported. Nor did the allies send her the raw material they had promised to rebuild her commercial life. Again and again our papers reported pogroms in Poland. Yet investigation by writers for the new witness failed to discover any pogroms in the cities in which they were supported is occurring. Powerful are the words in which in April 1919 Chesterton foretells the future that will result if power and her historic port are refused to Poland. We know that a flood threatens the West from the meeting of two streams the Revenge of Germany and the Anarchy of Russia and we know that the West has only one possible dike against such a flood which is not the mere existence but the might and majesty of Poland We know that without some such Christian and chivalric shield on that side we shall have half Europe and perhaps half Asia on our backs. We know exactly what the Germans think about our nationalities in the West and exactly what the Bolshevists think about any nationalities anywhere. We know that if the Poles have a port and a powerful line of communication with the West they will be eager to help the West. We know that if they have no port they will have no reason to help the West with no power to help anybody. We know that if they lose their port it will not be by any act of English public opinion or any public opinion but by the most secret of all secret diplomacy. That it will not even be given up by the English to the Germans but by German Jews to other German Jews. We know that such international adventurers would still find themselves floating on the top of any tide that drowned the nations and that they do not care what nations they drown. We know that out of the whole world the Polish port is the one place that should have been held and the one place that is being surrendered. In short we know what everybody knows and scarcely anybody says. There is one word to be added for those detached persons who see no particular objection to England ceasing to be English. We do not care about the national names of the West which have been the greatest words in the poetry of the world. As far as we know there is only one ideal they do care about and they will not get it. Whatever else this betrayal means it does not mean peace. The Poles have raised revolution after revolution when three colossal empires prevented them from being a nation at all. It is not in the realm of sanity to suppose that if we make them half a nation they will not someday attempt to be a whole nation. But we shall come back to the place after another cycle of terror and torment an abominable butchery into a place where we might in peace and perfect safety stand firm today. Not by any act of English public opinion would Poland be weakened. Not by any act of English opinion pressure strengthened or Ireland depressed. It was the horror of the situation that no act of English public opinion seemed possible for the organs of action were stultified. When they could act by fighting and by dying, Englishman had done it grandly. Not all that they had done had, Chesterton believed, been lost. Because of them the cross once more had replaced the Crescent over the Holy City of Jerusalem. Because of them, Alsace and Lorraine were French once more and Poland lived again. But their sufferings and their death had not availed them yet to save England. And what is theirs? Though banners blow and Warsaw risen again while laughter walks in gold through the vineyards of Lorraine their dead are marked on English stones their loves on English trees how little is the prize they win how mean a coin for these how small a shriveled laurel leaf lies crumpled here and curled. They died to save their country and they only saved the world. From the collected poems pages 79 to 80 the English graves. In the new witness he wrote in 1935 1919 on peace day I set up outside my house two torches and twined them with a laurel because I thought at least there was nothing pacifist about laurel. But that night after the bonfire and the fireworks had faded a wind grew and blew with gathering violence blowing away the rain and in the morning I found one of the laurel posts torn off and lying at random on the rainy ground while the others still stood erect green and glittering in the sun I thought that the pagans would certainly have called it an omen and it was one that strangely fitted my own sense of some great work half fulfilled and half frustrated and I thought vaguely of that man in Virgil who prayed that he might slay his foe and return to his country and the gods heard half the prayer and the other half was scattered to the winds. For I knew we were right to rejoice since the tyrant was indeed slain and his tyranny fallen forever but I know not when we shall find our way back to our own land. English soldiers in Ireland felt as we all remember a strong sympathy with the Irish people most of them said the new witness became shin fainters. This was an exaggeration but certainly their opposition to acting as terrorists led to the employment in their stead of the jailbirds known as black and tans and in England itself the feeling was stirring that grew stronger as the years passed the soldiers who were the nation had won the victory. The politicians had thrown it away. A rushed election before most of the men were demobilized had brought back the same old politicians by turning so GK put it, collusion into coalition. A coalition government had been in war time comprehensible and defensible precisely because it is not concerned with construction or reconstruction but only with the warding off of destruction a peacetime coalition could do nothing but show up the absurdity of the old party labels for if these meant anything they meant that their wearers wanted an entirely different kind of construction at which therefore they could not collaborate. How could a real Tory co-operate in construction with the genuine radical? It was the culmination of unreality the idea that it succeeded for the moment because the country really believed that Lloyd George had won the war seemed to chesterton the crowning absurdity. It succeeded because the party machines combined to finance their candidates and offered them to a rather dazed country whose men were still in great numbers under arms there is naturally no dissentient when hardly anybody seems to be sentient. Indifference is called unanimity. How then could this indifference be thrown off? How could the returning manhood of the nation be given a true democracy? Was there still hope? If there was never had the new witness been more needed than now it had told the truth about political corruption today it had to fight it. We are not divided now into those who know and those who do not know we are divided now into those who care and those who do not care. Vess wrote Chesterton in an article about his own continued editorship of the paper. Politics would never have been my province either in the highest or the lowest sense I have hitherto known myself to be merely a stopgap but my action or rather inaction is a stopgap has come terribly to an end. That gap will never be filled now till God restores all the noble ruin that we name the world and the wisest know best that the gap will yawn as hopelessly in the history of England as in the story of our private lives. I must now either accept this duty entirely or abandon it entirely I will not abandon it for every instinct and nerve of intelligence I have tells me that this is a time when it must not be abandoned. I must accept a comparison that must be a contrast and a crushing contrast but though I can never be so good as my brother I will see if I can be better than myself. The same attacks on financiers and others constantly reiterated might well have put Gilbert in the dock where his brother had stood but I think the upshot of the case against Cecil had not been entirely encouraging to the winners. Then too GK's immense popularity made such an attack a still more doubtful move. Cecil had been less well known than Gilbert but far better known than a Mr. Fraser and a Mr. Beamish a pair of cranks against whom Sir Alfred Maughan brought a libel action in 1919 for having in a placard shown in a window in a back street called him a traitor and accused him of having traded with the enemy. In this case of the Maughan nickel company giving evidence said that he always disregarded charges made by irresponsible persons. Charges had been made against him in the New Witness which was edited by Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. All the world regarded Mr. Chesterton as irresponsible but he was certainly amusing and he the witness had read most of his books he had once procured with such difficulty a copy of the New Witness his lordship did Mr. Chesterton charged the witness with being a traitor. Mr. Smith counsel for the defense. Yes, in the New Witness. Irresponsible was not quite the mojist the unfortunate Fraser and Beamish were not of the metal to win that or any case in that or any court. There was a kind of solemn buffoonery in choosing these two as responsible opponents in preference to the irresponsible G.K. Chesterton. At any rate damages of 5,000 pounds were given against him which gives some measure of the risk G.K. took in making exactly the same attacks Gilbert had not so much natural buoyancy as Cecil you got far less fun out of making these attacks still less had he the recklessness that made Cecil indifferent even to the charge of inaccuracy that charge was in fact the only one that Gilbert feared writing to a contributor whose article he had held back in order to verify an accusation made in it. Gilbert he had no fear of a lawsuit when he was certain of his facts he did not fear fine or imprisonment he had one fear only I am afraid of being answered there was another thing he feared hurting or distressing his friends this was especially a danger for one so many of whose friends were also his opponents in politics or religion and who was now editing a paper of so controversial a character with H.G. Wells he had a real bond of affection and an interesting correspondence with and about him illustrates all Gilbert's qualities consideration for his subordinates for his friendships concern for the integrity of his paper sense of responsibility to Cecil's memory during an editorial absence the assistant editor Mr. Titterton had accepted a series of articles called big little H.G. Wells from Edwin Pugh which seemed to be turning into an attack on Wells instead of an appreciation. Chesterton wrote to Mr. Titterton and simultaneously dewells himself. Dear Wells the sudden demands of other duties which I really could not see how to avoid has prevented my attending to the new witness lately and I've only just heard on the telephone that you have written a letter to the paper touching an unfortunate difference between you and Edwin Pugh. I don't yet know the contents of your letter but of course I have told my Locum tenons that it is to be printed whatever it is this week or next I am really exceedingly distressed to have been out of the business at the time but if you knew the circumstances I think you would see the difficulty and my editorial absence has not been a holiday as it is I agreed to the general idea of a study of your work by Pugh and I confess it never even crossed my mind that anybody would write such a thing except as a tribute to your genius and the intellectual interest of the subject nor can I believe it now. It may strike you as so ironical as to be incredible but it is really one of those ironies that are also facts that I rather welcome the idea of a criticism in the paper which so often differs from you from a modernist and collectivist standpoint more like your own. I should imagine Pugh would agree with you more than I do and not less. I will not prejudge the quarrel till I understand more of it but I now write it once to tell you that I would not dream of tolerating anything meant to be a mere personal attack on you even if I resigned my post on this point and I had already written to the office to say so but I do not believe for a moment that Pugh means any such thing. I regarded him as a strong Wellesian and even more of an admirer than myself though he might be so modernist to use a familiar and mixed method of portraiture which is too modern for my tastes but which many use besides he. For the moment I suggest a possible misunderstanding which he may well correct by a further explanation I had said something myself in my weekly article demurring to a possible undervaluing of you long before I heard of your own letter. Even when I am in closer touch with things of course many things appear in the paper with which I wholly disagree but the notion of a mere campaign against you would always have seemed to me as abominable and absurd as it does now I do not believe anyone can entertain it and I certainly do not. I am perfectly willing to do you anything that can fairly be shown to be justice whether it were explanation or apology or anything else. This is all I can say without your letter in Pugh's side of the case but I feel I should say this at once. Your sincerely G.K. Chesterton. P.S. I have arranged for your letter to appear in next week's number but I may have more light on Pugh's attitude by then. To Titternden he wrote I do hope this work will not turn into anything that looks like a mere attack on wells especially in the rather realistic and personal modern manner which I am perhaps too Victorian myself to care very much about. I do not merely feel this because I have managed to keep wells as a friend on the whole I feel it much more and I know you are a man to understand such sentiments because I have a sort of sense of honor about him as an enemy or at least a potential enemy. We are so certain to collide in controversial warfare that I have a horror of his thinking I would attack him with anything but fair controversial weapons. My feeling is so entirely consistent with a faith in Pugh's motives as well as an admiration for his talents that I honestly believe I could explain this to him without offense. I am honestly in a very difficult position on the new witness because it is physically impossible for me really to edit it and also do enough outside work to be able to edit it unpaid as well as having a little over to give it from time to time. What we should have done without the loyalty and capacity of you and a few others I can't imagine I cannot oversee everything that goes into the paper I cannot resign without dropping as you truly said the work of a great man who is gone and who I feel would wish me to continue it. It is like what Stevenson said about marriage and its duties there is no refuge for you not even suicide. But I should have to consider even resignation if I felt that the acceptance of Pugh's generosity really gave him the right to print something that I really felt bound to disapprove. It may be that I am needlessly alarmed over a slip or two of the pen in vivid descriptions of a very odd character and that Pugh really admires his big little H.G. as much as I thought he did at the beginning of the business. If the general impression on the reader's mind is of the big wells and not the little wells I think the doubt I mean would really be met. Somehow the letter to Titterton got into the hands of a Mr. Hennessy who, after Gilbert's death, sent it to wells. Wells wrote, thank you very much for that letter of G.K.C.'s it is exactly like him from first to last he and I were very close friends and never for a moment did I consider him responsible for Pugh's pathetic and silly little outbreak. I never knew anyone so steadily true to form as G.K.C. Besides the cleansing of public life, two other things were seen as vital by the new witness the restoration of well-distributed property and the restoration of liberty. Under the heading Reconstruction of Property, Bellach said out a series of proposals highly practical and very far from what is usually called revolutionary. The savings for instance made on a small scale should be helped by a very high rate of interest and the purchase by small men of small parcels of land or businesses or houses should be freed from legal charges while these should be made heavier for those who purchased on a large scale thus encouraging small property and checking huge accumulation. He pointed out how vast sums could be found for such subsidies out of the money spent today on an education which the poor detested for their children in which most of the wealthy admitted to be an abject failure. Most of those he noted who opposed distributism do so on the ground that the proposals are unpractical or revolutionary which generally means that they have not examined the proposals. His own were certainly practical and would by many be called reactionary but emitted one doubt. Besides the overwhelming difficulty of turning the current of modern socialism the doubt whether Englishmen from long disuse had not lost the appetite for property. Chesterton's own line of approach to the double problem was also two-fold in a volume of essays published near the end of the war and called the utopia of usurers he remarked that an anarchic figure which the more timid Tories profess to fear has already fallen upon us. We are ruled by ignorant people. The old aristocracy of England in his view had made many mistakes but certain things they had understood very well. The modern governing class cannot face a factor follow an argument or feel a tradition but least of all can they upon any persuasion read through a plain impartial book English or foreign that is not specially written to soothe their panic or to please their pride. There had been reality in the claim of the old aristocracy to understand matters not known to the people. They had read history. They were familiar with other languages and other lands. They had a great tradition of foreign diplomacy even the study of philosophy and theology today confined to a handful of experts was not alien to them. On all this had rested what right they had to govern but today they ruled them by the smiling terror of an ancient secret. They smile and smile but they have forgotten the secret. On the other hand the ordinary workman had the advantage over his probably millionaire master by the necessity of knowing something. He must be able to use his tools. He must know enough arithmetic to know when prices and the hard business of living taught him something. Give him a chance of more through property and liberty and see what he will build on that foundation. The war had already shown not only the courage of our men but their contrivance, their trench newspapers, songs and jests, their initiative as sailors and as airmen. At home the same thing was happening allotments had sprung up everywhere and solved the problem of potato shortage. Men were doing for themselves a rough kind of building. The inclination to get away from the machine and do things oneself was on the increase. Armistice and the men's return were held by outdoor tea parties with ropes stretched across the streets for safety. The outburst of pageants was spontaneous and national. It's time to chesterton for an army of amateurs. For England is perishing of the professionals. Vitality seemed to be flowing back into national life but bureaucracy does not love vitality. Agitated town councils met and stopped the tea parties. Fought against street markets through which allotment holders could sell their produce cheaply. But heavy rates on land reclaimed in buildings erected by hard work. Town families living in single rooms had secured plots on building estates and run-up shacks for themselves and their families. They were forbidden to live in these dwellings. Only intended as temporary but far more healthy than living eight people to a room in a slum. The new witness suspected that the real objection in the eyes of farmers was a lowering of the value of neighboring plots for wealthier purchasers. Worst of all the allotments were taken. Fields sold for speculative building land dug in public parks taken away in the name of amenities. The little spark that could have been fanned into a flame was crushed out. An episode of a few years later best illustrates the spirit chesterton was fighting. In 1926 a threat arose to the traffic monopoly from soldiers who put their war gratuities into the purchase of omnibuses which they drove themselves. The London general omnibus company decided to crush them and with the aid of a government commission succeeded. Chesterton's paper followed the struggle with passionate interest just as he believed that the small shop actually served the public better than the large so too he believed that these owner drivers would serve it better than the combine. But if it could have been proved that the combine was more efficient Gilbert would still have championed the independence. It was better for the community that men should take responsibility and initiative for themselves even if the work could be done more efficiently by wage slaves. To his dismay he found that the trade unions did not dream of applying this test and that they were aligned against the pirates as the independent owners were usually called. He had always been an ardent supporter of the trade unions and to him it seemed they were trying to do the work of the ancient guilds under far more difficult conditions but after the war for the first time a little note of doubt creeps into his voice when he is speaking of them. They were still vocal for the rights of labor but they had begun to lay stress exclusively on the less important of those rights. Writing of the loss of the allotments he suggested in one article that the trade unions might well use some part of their funds in purchasing land to be held in perpetuity by their members. By doubt if he much expected that they would do so many trade unionists were working for the bus company and were more concerned about their conditions of work than about the handful of drivers who were their own masters but the unions had begun to stress almost solely the question of hours and of wages to fight for good conditions but no longer for control or ownership to demand security but to agree to abandon many of their rights in return. It was a chill fear and for long he resisted it but in these terrible years it had begun to shake him were the people of England losing the appetite for freedom and for property were the trade unions from lack of leadership and confusion of thought beginning to accept the servile state.