absolutely impossible to answer such a
speech--or more truly such a speaker: only in a Country of the Blind
could he have won a hearing. But Chesterton persevered. Even in 1924
the shadow of large scale unemployment had begun. And at this
singularly inappropriate time came the Empire Exhibition at Wembley.
In the failure of its appeal Chesterton saw hope: for he believed
that from a frank facing of truth his country might yet conquer the
coming perils.

That was the real weakness of Wembley; that it so completely
mistook the English temperament as to appeal to a stale mood. It
appealed to a stale mood of success; when we need to appeal to a
new and more noble mood of failure, or at least of peril. The
English . . . no longer care to be told of an Empire on which the sun
never sets. Tell them the sun is setting, and they will fight though
the battle go against them to the going down of the sun: if they do
not stay it, like Joshua. . . .

We seriously propose that England should take her stand among the
unhappy nations; it is too dismal a fate to go on being one of the
happy ones. We must be as proud as Spain and Poland and Serbia;
nations made more dear to their lovers by their disasters. Our
disasters have begun; but they do not seem to have endeared us to
anybody in particular. Our sorrow has come; but we gain no extra
loyalty by it. The time has come to claim our crown of thorns; or at
least not to cover it any longer with such exceedingly faded flowers.*

[* March 21, 1925.]

Always Chesterton was haunted by the present war. He had seen the
Prussian peril conquered: he saw it rising again. Even before the
advent of Hitler he knew that the tribe which had stolen from Austria
and Denmark, had invaded France and crushed Poland was without
repentance, and he feared that again the stupidity (or the greed)
behind English and American policy was giving it another opportunity--
"Those sturdy Teutons," he wrote ironically, "from whom we were
descended up to the outbreak of the Great War, and from whom we are
now showing signs of being descended again."

The misfortune was that Englishmen had ceased to try to get free from
"a secret government; conducted by we know not whom, and achieving we
know not what. The real national life of our country is unconscious
of its own national policy. The right hand of the Englishman, that
holds the plough or the sword, knows not what his