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."