But while he was writing the Autobiography and giving thanks for his life, its last months were shadowed by trials especially heavy for a man of his imagination and temperament. For now more than ever his thought was not allowed to concentrate on those realities where the joy of contemplation overpowers the pain of growth.
He loved Italy—even more than France he says in one letter—yet he could not but condemn the invasion of Abyssinia. The shadow of the Spanish war loomed on the horizon and behind it a darker shadow. In his political thinking Chesterton was haunted by the present war. Then too, while public controversy did not trouble him at all, he hated any breach of the peace within the ranks of his own small army. The fights among the staff of the paper about Distributism had been as nothing compared with those about Abyssiania. There are leading articles taking one line and letters in the Cockpit in violent opposition. Maurice Reckitt writes in As it Happened:
In the last autumn of his life I wrote to him privately in distress at the line which the Weekly was taking on Abyssinia, and saying that I felt that I ought to leave the board, as I was so much out of sympathy with this. I received this reply, from which I have deleted only some personal references:
"Top Meadow, Beaconsfield 19th September 1935.
"MY DEAR MR. MAURICE RECKITT,
"I do hope you will forgive me for the delay in answering your most important letter, involving as it does tragic dooms of separation which I hope need not be fulfilled. . . . I should like to ask you to defer your decision at least until you have seen the next week's number of the paper, in which I expand further the argument I have used in the current number and bring it, I think, rather nearer to your natural and justifiable point of view. Between ourselves, and without prejudice to anybody, I do think myself that there ought to have been a more definite condemnation of the attack on Abyssinia. The whole thing happened while I was having a holiday. . . .
"Very shortly, the mortal danger, to me, is the rehabilitation of Capitalism, in spite of the slump, which will certainly take the form of a hypocritical patriotism and glorification of England, at the expense of Italy or anybody else. For the moment I only want you to understand that this is the mountainous peril that towers in my own mind.
"Yours always,
"G. K. CHESTERTON."
Three months later in G.K.'s Weekly he wrote about the whole matter in an article in which he treated the question as largely one of proportion. Not enough was being said in England of her own or the League's position about Japan's attack on China: too much (in proportion) about Italy in Abyssinia. "If the League of Nations really were an impartial judicial authority; and if (what is about as probable) I were one of the judges; and if the Abyssinian Case were brought before me, I should decide instantly against Italy. I have again and again in this place stated in the strongest words the particular case against Italy." He was against Italy in Abyssinia as he had been against England in South Africa. But "I should not be bound to rejoice at the Prussians riding into Paris because it might prevent the British riding into Pretoria."