ern advertisement, having read an essay
which said that good salesmanship made "everything in the garden
beautiful," Gilbert again thought of Genesis:

There was only one actor in that ancient drama who seems to have
had any real talent for salesmanship. He seems to have undertaken to
deliver the goods with exactly the right preliminaries of promises
and praise. He knew all about advertisement: we may say he knew all
about publicity, though not at the moment addressing a very large
public. He not only took up the slogan of Eat More Fruit, but he
distinctly declared that any customers purchasing his particular
brand of fruit would instantly become as gods. And as this is exactly
what is promised to the purchasers of every patent medicine, popular
tonic, saline draught or medicinal wine at the present day, there can
be no question that he was in advance of his age. It is extraordinary
that humanity, which began with the apple and ended with the patent
medicine, has not even yet become exactly like gods. It is still more
extraordinary (and probably the result of a malicious interpolation
by priests at a later date) that the record ends with some
extraordinary remarks to the effect that one thus pursuing the bright
career of Salesmanship is condemned to crawl on his stomach and eat a
great deal of dirt.*

[* March 23, 1929.]

The relation between Belloc and the paper, as between Belloc and
Gilbert himself, was a unique one. Not indeed its "onlie begetter,"
he was equally with Cecil begetter of the original paper and its
first editor. He was Gilbert's chief guide to the historical and
political scene of Europe. Both men shared, had fought all their
lives for, their ideas of Freedom, the Family, Restoration of
Property and all that is involved in Catholic Christianity. And
Belloc said repeatedly that he had no platform for the continuous
expression of these ideas. Such books as his _Cruise of the Nona_
found still as wide a public as had _The Path to Rome_ a quarter
century earlier, and in those books his philosophy may be read. But
he had, too, urgent commentaries on Foreign Affairs and Current
Politics--and for these _G.K.'s Weekly_ became his platform as
completely as the _New Witness_ had been in the past. To Gilbert this
appeared one chief value of his paper: in an article from which I
quote in the next chapter he gives it as one of the two reasons for
which he to