[* April 4, 1925.]
G.K. goes on to talk of an old idea of his: that a young journalist should write one article for the Church Times and another for the Pink 'Un and then put them into the wrong envelopes.
It is that sort of contrast and that sort of combination that I am going to aim at in this paper . . . I cannot see why convictions should look dull or why jokes should be insincere. I should like a man to pick up this paper for amusement and find himself involved in an argument. I should like him to pursue it purely for the sake of argument and find himself pulled up short by a joke . . . I never can see why a thing should not be both popular and serious; that is, in the sense of being both popular and sincere.
For the paper had a most serious purpose. He acknowledged its defects of bad printing (which the printers indignantly denied), bad proof-reading, bad editing, and claimed "to raise against the banner of advertisement the noble banner of apology." Because a creative revolution was what he wanted, words and forms were hard to find. It was easy to dress up stale ideas in a new dress but the terminology for something outside the old hack party programmes had to be fresh minted.
He proposed various changes after a few months' running and introduced them thus:
We should be only too glad if for this week only our readers would have the tact to retire and leave us alone. We are in a Hegelian condition, a condition not so much of Being as of Becoming. And no generous person should spy on an unfortunate fellow creature who is going through the horrible and degrading experience of being a Hegelian. It is even more embarrassing than being caught in the very act of evolution, which every clear headed person would desire to avoid.*
[* December 12, 1925.]
In this number he began The Return of Don Quixote and also a sort of scrapbook. He invited contributions dealing with every sort of approach to Distributism and promised "more than one series of constructive proposals and definite schemes of legislation. We do not promise that all these schemes will exactly agree with each other or that we shall agree with all of them. Some will be more conservative, some more drastic than our own view." This article ends on an ambitious note. Very varying schemes will be admitted, but the idea of the paper will thereby be strengthened not destroyed—
For what we desire is not a paltry party programme but a
Renaissance.
It was not the first time he had demanded a revolution but, as the depression hit our country and Big Business seemed less and less capable of coping with it, the demand became more understandable and the fight against Monopoly more urgent.