It is inevitably happening to you.

That is the case against the success of CHESTERTON'S.

Your only chance finally is either to broaden your basis, or to
have no basis at all, like Dickens in "Household Words" and "All The
Year Round," and say, "Give me something with imagination in it, and
I can do without politics or theoretic sociology of any kind." This
is perhaps the only true catholicism in literature; but it will
hardly serve your turn; because all the articles and stories that
Dickens got are now mopped up by the popular press, which in his day
stuck to politics and news and nothing else. So I am afraid you will
have to stand for a policy, or at least a recognisable attitude,
unless you are prepared to write a detective story every week and
make Belloc write a satirical story as well.

You could broaden your basis if you had money enough to try the
experiment of giving ten poor but honest men in Beaconsfield and ten
more in London capital enough to start for themselves as independent
farmers and shopkeepers. The result would be to ruin 18 out of the
twenty, and possibly to ruin the lot. You would then learn from your
feelings what you would never learn from me, that what men need is
not property but honorable service. Confronted either with 20 men
ruined by your act, or 18 ruined and one Fascination Fledgby owning
half a street in London, and the other half a parish in Bucks, you
would--well, perhaps join the Fabian Society.

The pseudo race feuds you should drop, simply because you cannot
compete with the _Morning Post_, which gives the real thing in its
succulent savagery whilst you can give only a "wouldn't hurt a fly"
affectation of it. In religion too you are up against the fact that
an editor, like an emperor, must not belong to a sect. Wells is on
the right tack: my tack. See my prefaces to Androcles and Methuselah.
We want the real Catholic Church above the manufactured one. The
manufactured one is useful as the Salvation Army is useful, or the
formulas of the Church of Christ Scientist; but they do not strike on
the knowledge box of the modern intellectual; and it is on the modern
intellectual that you are depending. I am an Irishman, and know how
far the official Catholic Church can go. Your ideal Church does not
exist and never can exist within the official organization, in which
Father Demp