acquaintance, try to recall what we already know of
him.

At the present time Mr. Hilaire Belloc to his largest public is quite
simply and solely the war expert. To those people, thousands in number,
who have become acquainted with Mr. Belloc through the columns of _Land
and Water_, the _Illustrated Sunday Herald_, and other journals and
periodicals, or have swelled the audiences at his lectures in London and
the various provincial centres, his name promises escape from the
bewilderment engendered by an irritated Press and an approximation, at
least, to a clear conception of the progress of the war. Those who
realize, as Mr. Belloc himself points out somewhere, that there has
never been a great public occasion in regard to which it is more
necessary that men should have a sound judgment than it is in regard to
this war, gladly turn to him for guidance. His _General Sketch of the
European War_ is read by the educated man who finds himself hampered in
forming an opinion of the progress of events by an ignorance of military
science, while the mass of public opinion, which is less well-informed
and less able to distinguish between the essential and the
non-essential, finds in the series of articles, reprinted in book-form
under the title _The Two Maps_, a rock-basis of general principles on
which it may rest secure from the hurling waves of sensationalism,
ignorance, misrepresentation and foolishness which are striving
perpetually to engulf it.

So intense and so widespread, indeed, is the vogue of Mr. Belloc to-day
as a writer on the war, that one is almost compelled into forgetfulness
of his earlier work and of the reputation he had established for himself
in many provinces of literature and thought before, in the eyes of the
world, he made this new province his own. The colossal monument of
unstinted public approbation, which records his work since the outbreak
of the great war, overshadows, as it were, the temples of less
magnitude, though of equally solid foundation and often of more precious
design, in which his former achievements in art and thought were
enshrined.

That there existed, however, before the war, a large and increasing
public, which was gradually awakening to a realization of Mr. Belloc's
importance, there can be no question.

There can be equally little question, that only a very small percentage
of his readers were in a position even to attempt an appreciation of Mr.
Belloc's full importance.