e terminology
for something outside the old hack party programmes had to be fresh
minted.

He proposed various changes after a few months' running and
introduced them thus:

We should be only too glad if for this week only our readers would
have the tact to retire and leave us alone. We are in a Hegelian
condition, a condition not so much of Being as of Becoming. And no
generous person should spy on an unfortunate fellow creature who is
going through the horrible and degrading experience of being a
Hegelian. It is even more embarrassing than being caught in the very
act of evolution, which every clear headed person would desire to
avoid.*

[* December 12, 1925.]

In this number he began _The Return of Don Quixote_ and also a sort
of scrapbook. He invited contributions dealing with every sort of
approach to Distributism and promised "more than one series of
constructive proposals and definite schemes of legislation. We do not
promise that all these schemes will exactly agree with each other or
that we shall agree with all of them. Some will be more conservative,
some more drastic than our own view." This article ends on an
ambitious note. Very varying schemes will be admitted, but the idea
of the paper will thereby be strengthened not destroyed--

For what we desire is not a paltry party programme but a
Renaissance.

It was not the first time he had demanded a revolution but, as the
depression hit our country and Big Business seemed less and less
capable of coping with it, the demand became more understandable and
the fight against Monopoly more urgent.

A thinking man should always attack the strongest thing in
his own time. For the strongest thing of the time is always
too strong. . . . The great outstanding fact and feature of
our time is Monopoly.*

[* April 25, 1925.]

I have already referred to a debate on Monopoly between Chesterton
and Mr. Gordon Selfridge, in which Selfridge, with the familiar
unreality of the millionaire, maintained that there was no such
thing. Anyone was free to open a store in rivalry of Selfridge's or
to start a paper that should eclipse the _Daily Mail!_ The only real
monopoly, he added gracefully, was that of a genius like Chesterton
whose work the ordinary man could not emulate. The graceful
compliment Chesterton answered by offering to share his last epigram
with Mr. Selfridge: but as to the main contention, what could he say?
It was at once too easy and