iled to keep _G.K.'s Weekly_ in existence.

Week by week Belloc on Current or Foreign Affairs wrote of what was
happening and what would presently come of it. And who can say
reading those articles today that it would not have changed the
defeats of this war into victory at a far earlier date had our
statesmen read and heeded--the analysis for instance of the peril of
the aeroplane, of the threat to the Empire from Japan, the importance
of keeping Italy's friendship in the Mediterranean, the growing
strength of Germany and the awful risk we took in allowing her to
rearm, in failing to arm against her?

Whether he was right or, as many held, wildly wrong about what
underlay our failures of judgment, his views must be briefly traced
because of their effect on Gilbert and others. In the financial world
he saw England in the first years after the war dominated by the
International Banking Power, which made us as it were a local branch
of Wall Street. In his view it was the bankers both of America and
England who first insisted that Germany could not pay her reparations
and later made England repudiate her own war debts to America (though
she had, he showed, already paid in interest and principal more than
half of what had been lent). The banks did this because they had lent
commercially both to Germany and England sums whose safety meant more
to them than moneys merely owing to the nations--which would not
benefit the banks! England thus became subservient to the United
States and had to follow American financial policies. It was these
policies that led to the abandonment of the unwritten alliance with
France and especially to allowing Germany to rearm (helped by loans
from these same banks), to reoccupy the Rhineland and remilitarise
the Ruhr.

Next, in Belloc's view, came a worse stage yet in which the banks had
given place to Big Business which was increasingly controlling
Parliament. The plutocracy that had bit by bit eaten into our
aristocracy and gained ascendancy in the Govemment was not, like our
ancient aristocracy, trained for the business and was utterly
uninformed especially in foreign affairs. The one remaining hope, the
permanent officials, especially of the Foreign Office, were less and
less listened to; latterly he held too that even the Foreign Office
had lost its old sure touch. Hence a constant vacillation in our
policies which weakened England's position and made certain some
terrible disaster.

Th