ation of a letter from me not add
one to your circulation (nothing but a permanent feature will do
that), but it may lead you to disregard the advice I give to all the
people who start Labour papers (about two a week or so), which always
is, "Don't open with an article to say that your paper supplies a
want; don't blight your columns with 'messages'; don't bewilder your
readers with the family jokes of your clique; else there will be no
second number." Ponder this: it is sound.

Your main difficulty is that the class whose champion you have made
yourself reads either Lloyd's or nothing. To the rural proprietor,
no longer a peasant, art, including _belles lettres_, is immorality,
and people who idealize peasants, unpractical fools. Also the Roman
Catholic Church, embarrassed by recruits of your type and born
scoffers like Belloc, who cling to the Church because its desecration
would take all the salt out of blasphemy, will quietly put you on the
unofficial index. The Irish will not support an English journal
because it occasionally waves a Green flag far better than they can
wave it themselves. And the number of Jews who will buy you just to
see what you say about them is not large enough to keep you going.
Thus there is absolutely no public for your policy; and though there
is a select one for yourself one and indivisible, it is largely
composed of people to whom your oddly assorted antipathies and
pseudo-racial feuds are uncongenial. Besides, on these fancies of
yours you have by this time said all you have to say so many thousand
times over, that your most faithful admirers finally (and always
suddenly) discover they are fed up with the _New Witness_ and cannot
go on with it. This last danger becomes greater as you become older,
because when we are young we can tell ourselves a new story every
night between our prayers and our sleep; but later on we find
ourselves repeating the same story with intensifications and
improvements night after night until we are tired of it; and in the
end (which you have not yet reached) a story revived from the old
repertory has to last for months, and is more and more shaky as a
protection against thinking of business, or lying there a prey to
unwelcome reminiscences. And what happens to the story of the
imaginative child happens also to the sermon or the feuilleton of the
adult.