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 them
through the many years in which they cried their unheeded 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 Belloc,
"always at the highest potentiality of courage. . . ."
Gilbert wrote:
He 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 is 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
Churchyard."
The men that worked 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.*
[* _Collected Poems_, p. 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 Reading, 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: an
abasement 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 (Dec. 13, 1918),
he wrote under "The Sign of the World's End" an Open Letter to Lord
Reading:
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 on any private question; and 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.
If I 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 of
sorrow a man finds himself staring at a blot on the tablecloth or an
insect on the ground. I do, of course, realise, with that sort of
dull clarity, that you are in practise 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 honour, it will be partly
because certain men of the tribe of Isaacs kept their own strange
private loyalty. I am willing to count 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 does not
raise 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 stock-broker 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; of 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 sake to be
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 and
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, that those who care, are so idolatrously infatuated
with Rufus 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 and 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 a 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 so 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 peculiar
and personal 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 civilisation
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 as an alien, adventurer. Precisely because I could not feel
them as dignified, I should not know what I had degraded. My fancy may
be quite wrong; it is but one of many attempts I have 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 serious attempt to
sympathise 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,
G. K. 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 that "tribe of Isaacs"
thus established in English government, but upon the unfortunate
Jewish people as a 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 Germanies 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 and 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," Monsignor 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 twenty-five years ago and steadily reiterated, that the
peace of 1918 was only an armistice.
[* In the panegyric preached in Westminster Cathedral, June 27, 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 _G.K.'s Weekly_, doing especially
the dramatic criticism under the pen-name of 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 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 Poles 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 Teschen 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.
He 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 heartily 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 Prussia 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 Chesterton and Belloc 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
freemason 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 favour 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 as their advisers
the Foreign office with all its experience and tradition. Belloc
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 was a man too ignorant to realize the dangers of his
own ignorance and therefore seek help from experience. This peace
would be, Belloc foretold, the parent of many wars. The Czechs got
much of what they wanted just as d'Annunzio got Fiume for Italy--by
seizing it. Poland waited for Versallles 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 of East
Prussia before any plebiscite could be taken there.
Lloyd George and 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 close
investigation by writers for the _New Witness_ failed to discover any
pogroms in the cities in which they were reported as 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 dyke 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 and 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, who do not
care about the national names of the West, which have been the
greatest words in the poetry of the world. So 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
some day attempt to be a whole nation. But we shall come back to the
place where we started, after another cycle of terror and torment and
abominable butchery--and to 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 Prussia strengthened or Ireland
oppressed. 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 Englishmen
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 yet to save England.
And what is theirs, though banners blow on Warsaw risen again, Or
ancient 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 shrivelled laurel-leaf lies crumpled here and curled;
They died to save their country and they only saved the world.*
[* _Collected Poems_, pp. 79-80, "The English Graves."]
In the _New Witness_ he wrote (July 25, 1919):
On Peace Day I set up outside my house two torches, and twined them
with 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 laurelled posts torn off
and lying at random on the rainy ground; while the other 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 for ever; 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 Sinn Feiners. This was an exaggeration, but certainly their
opposition to acting as terrorists led to the employment in their
stead of the jail-birds 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 G.K. put it, "collusion" into "coalition."
A Coalition Government had been in wartime "comprehensible and
defensible; precisely because it is not concerned with construction
or reconstruction but only with the warding off of destruction." A
peace-time 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 a 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." Thus 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 stop-gap; but my action, or rather inaction, as a stop-gap, 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, G.K.'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 Mond 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 Sir Alfred Mond (of the Mond 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 some difficulty a copy of the _New Witness."_ HIS
LORDSHIP--Did Mr. Chesterton charge the witness with being a traitor?
Mr. SMITH (Counsel for the defence)--Yes, in the _New Witness."_
"Irresponsible" was not quite the _mot juste_. 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 £5000 were given against
them--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: he 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 remarked that 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 to Wells 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 have 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 tenens_ 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 welcomed 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 at 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 the 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 Wellsian and even more of an admirer than myself; though he
might be so modern as 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 any one can entertain it; and
certainly I 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
and Pugh's side of the case; but I feel I should say this at once.
Yours 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 Titterton 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 honour 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
of his talents, that I honestly believe I could explain this to him
without offence. . . .
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" Belloc set out a series of proposals,
highly practical and very far from what is usually called
revolutionary: that savings for instance made on a small scale should
be helped by a very high rate of interest; that 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 and which most of the
wealthy admitted to be an abject failure. Most of those, he noted,
who oppose 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 he admitted 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
twofold. In a volume of Essays published near the end of the war and
called _The Utopia of Usurers_ he remarked: "That anarchic future
which the more timid Tories professed 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 fact, or 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 rule 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 have risen." 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 heralded by outdoor tea-parties
with ropes stretched across the streets for safety. The outburst of
pageants was spontaneous and national. "It is time," said 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; put
heavy rates on land reclaimed and 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 Councillors was a lowering of the value of neighbouring 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 Independents. 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. To him it
had 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 labour, 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 Trades Unions might well use some part of their funds in
purchasing land to be held in perpetuity by their members. But I 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 Trades
Unions, from lack of leadership and confusion of thought, beginning
to accept the Servile State?