[* Collected Poems, p. 318.]

The poem was of course only a boyish expression of a boyish dream; like all dreams, like all boyhood dreams especially, it omitted too much; yet it contained a thought that might well have borne rich fruit in Gilbert's Catholic life.

My mother told me once that when after three years' study of Queen Elizabeth's character she came to a different conclusion from Belloc, she found it almost impossible to resist his power and hold on to her own view. It must be realised that Chesterton actually preferred the attitude of a disciple. A mutual friend has told me that Chesterton listened to Belloc all the time and said very little himself. In matters historical where he felt his own ignorance, Gilbert's tendency was simply to make an act of faith in Belloc.

On nothing were the two men more healthily in accord than on the Boer War. In an interesting study of Belloc, prefixed to a French translation of Contemporary England, F. Y. Eccles explains how he and most of the Speaker group differed from the pacifist pro-Boers, who hated the South African war because they hated all wars. The young Liberals on the Speaker were not pacifists. They hated the war because they thought it would harm England—harm her morally—to be fighting for an unjust cause, and even materially to be shedding the blood of her sons and pouring out her wealth at the bidding of a handful of alien financiers. Thus far Gilbert was among one group with whom he was in fullest sympathy. But I think he went further. Mr. Eccles told me that most of the Speaker group had no sympathy with the Boers. Gilbert had. He thought of them as human beings who might well have been farmers of Sussex or of Kent, something of an older civilization, resisting money power and imperialism and perishing thereby.

Few, indeed, of the Liberal Party held Chesterton's ideal—an England territorially small, spiritually great. The Speaker was struggling against odds: it was the voice of a tiny group. To Gilbert it seemed that this mattered nothing so long as that little group held to their great ideas, so long as the paper represented not merely a group or a party but the Liberal Idea. In an unfinished letter to Hammond is to be found this idea as he saw it and his dawning disappointment even with the paper that most nearly stood for it:

I am just about to commit a serious impertinence. I believe however that you will excuse it because it is about the paper and I know there is not another paper dead or alive for which I would take the trouble or run the risk of offence.

I am hearing on all sides the Speaker complained of by the very people who should be and would be (if they could) its enthusiastic supporters and I cannot altogether deny the truth of their objections, though I am glad to notice both in them and in myself the fact that those objections are tacitly based on the assumption of the Speaker having an aim and standard higher than other papers. If the Speaker were a mere party rag like "Judy" or "The Times," it would be only remarkable for moderation, but to us who have built hopes on it as the pioneer of a younger and larger political spirit it is difficult to be silent when we find it, as it seems to us, poisoned with that spirit of ferocious triviality which is the spirit of Birmingham eloquence, and with that evil instinct which has disintegrated the Irish party, the instinct for hating the man who differs from you slightly, more than the man who differs from you altogether.

Of two successive numbers during the stress of the fight (a fight in which we had first to unite our army and then to use it) a considerable portion was devoted, first to sneering at "The Daily News" and then to sneering at "The Westminster Gazette." . . .

There is a sentence in the Book of Proverbs which expresses the whole of my politics. "For the liberal man deviseth liberal things and by his liberality he shall stand." Now what I object to is sneering at "The Westminster" as a supporter of Chamberlain when everyone knows that it hardly lets a day pass without an ugly caricature of him. What I object to in this is that it is talking Brummagem—it is not "devising liberal things" but spiteful, superficial, illiberal things. It is claptrap and temporary deception of the "Patriotism before Politics" order. . . .

To all this you will say there is an obvious answer. The Speaker is a party paper and does not profess to be otherwise. But here I am sure we are mistaking our mission. What the Speaker is (I hope and believe) destined to do, is to renovate Liberalism, and though Liberalism (like every other party) is often conducted by claptrap, it has never been renovated by claptrap, but by great command of temper and the persistent exposition of persuasive and unanswerable truths. It is while we are in the desert that we have the vision: we being a minority, must be all philosophers: we must think for both parties in the State. It is no good our devoting ourselves to the flowers of mob oratory with no mob to address them to. We must, like the Free Traders, for instance, have discoveries, definite truths and endless patience in explaining them. We must be more than a political party or we shall cease to be one. Time and again in history victory has come to a little party with big ideas: but can anyone conceive anything with the mark of death more on its brow than a little party with little ideas?*