rest of a year and returning fresh to _G.K.'s Weekly_ I was
surprised at finding how much I enjoyed reading it and also at
finding that it had been of more practical use than I remembered to
the cause it served. The trend of the whole world is to make the
State powerful and the family powerless. It was something that in
these years _G.K.'s Weekly_ should have helped to smash two bills of
this nature-the Mental Deficiency and the Canal Children's Bills.
Both these aimed at taking children from their parents, the first in
the cause of health, the second of education. Against both Gilbert
wrote brilliantly and successfully.

_G.K.'s Weekly_ has much more G.K. in it and quite as much Belloc as
in the earlier years of the _New Witness_. Eric Gill, too, long a
friend of the Chestertons, became the chief contributor on art. In
1925 he spent a night at Top Meadow to discuss the policy of the
paper, especially with reference to industrialism and art. A little
later the Gills moved from Wales much nearer to Beaconsfield and the
two men met fairly often. Gill's letters are interesting. They are
mostly before the visit to Beaconsfield and probably led to it. He
begins by attacking Gilbert for "(1) supporting Orpenism as against
Byzantinism and (2) thinking that the art of painting _began_ with
Giotto, whereas Giotto was really much more the end."

In June 1925, G.K. was asking him to write about Epstein. Gill agreed
to do so but insisted that Chesterton and Belloc must not disagree
with him but "accept my doctrine as the doctrine of _G.K.'s Weekly_
in matters of art--just as I accept yours in other matters." "I don't
intend to write for you as an outsider (have I not put almost my last
quid into your blooming Company?--7% or not). . . . God forbid that
you should have an art critic who'll go round the picture shows for
you and write bilge about this painter and that--this 'art movement'
and that."

In the first state of effervescence the labour he delighted in quite
deadened the pain of the Editor's chair. Gilbert was prepared if
necessary to write the whole paper and to treat it as a variant on
the Toy Theatre or the Sword Stick:

It was said that the Chicago pork machine used every part of a pig
except the squeal. It might be said that the Fleet Street press
machine uses only the squeal. . . .

In short, nobody reading the newspapers could form the faintest
notion of how intelligent we newspaper people are. T