oking for blackberries. Run away and play."

The attitude of the middle-class suburbanite towards the working man and
his wife is not exactly graceful, but the former at any rate does not
pretend to love the latter, and to find all decency of feeling and
righteousness of behaviour in them. Chesterton both pretends to
reverence the working classes, and exhibits a profound contempt for
them. He is never happier than when he is telling the working classes
that they are wrong. He delights in attacking the Labour Party in order
to have the supreme satisfaction of demonstrating that working men are
their own worst enemies.

At the beginning of August, 1914, the Great War broke out, and
everything seemed changed. No man now living will be able to say
definitely what effects the war will have upon literature, but one
thing is certain: nothing will remain the same. We have already learned
to view each other with different eyes. For better or for worse, old
animosities and party cleavages have given way to unforeseen
combinations. To assert that we have all grown better would be untrue.
But it might reasonably be argued that the innate generousness of the
British people has been vitiated by its childlike trust in its
journalists, and the men who own them. When Mr. Bernard Shaw wrote a
brilliant defence of the British case for intervention in the war, his
mild denigration of some of the defects of the English nation, a few
trivial inaccuracies, and his perverse bellicosity of style made him the
object of the attentions of a horde of panic-stricken heresy-hunters.
Those of us who had not the fortune to escape the Press by service
abroad, especially those of us who derived our living from it, came to
loathe its misrepresentation of the English people. There seemed no end
to the nauseous vomits of undigested facts and dishonourable prejudices
that came pouring out in daily streams. Then we came to realize, as
never before, the value of such men as Chesterton. Christianity and the
common decencies fare badly at the hands of the bishops of to-day, and
the journalists threw them over as soon as the war began. But,
unfortunately for us all, G.K.C. fell seriously ill in the early period
of the war, and was in a critical state for many months. But not before
he had published a magnificent recantation--for it is no less--of all
those bitternesses which, in their sum, had very nearly caused him to
hate the British. It is a poem, _Blessed ar