e example of the immense
vitality of a Catholicism which had had so many rebirths that it had
buried its own past deeper than the past of paganism. He loved the
fountains that threw their water everywhere and he felt about Rome
that the greatest monuments might be removed and yet the city's
personality would remain. For Rome is greater than her monuments. He
wanted to argue with those who cared for Pagan Rome alone and who
spent their time despising the "oratory in stone" of the Papal city
and gazing only on the Forum. "And it never once occurs to them to
remember that the old Romans were Italians, or to ask what a Forum
was for."

He was, as usual, constantly invited to lecture--at the English
College, the Scots College, the American College, the Beda. At the
Holy Child Convent he spoke to a crowded audience on "Thomas More and
Humanism." Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C., thanking him, remarked on the
mental resemblance between More and Chesterton, saying that he could
quite well imagine them sitting together making jokes, some of them
very good and some of them very bad. "Chesterton and More," says
Father Vincent McNabb, "were both cockneys." Gilbert's classical
insight also seemed to him like the great Chancellor's; "Erasmus says
that though More didn't know much Greek, he knew what the words ought
to mean."

He interviewed Mussolini and found that Mussolini was interviewing
him, so that he talked at some length of Distributism and his own
social ideal. Mussolini knew at least some of Gilbert's books. He
told Cyril Clemens that he had keenly enjoyed _The Man Who Was
Thursday_. He promised at the end of this interview that he would go
away and think over what Chesterton had said, and it might have been
better for the world had he kept that promise. For what had been said
was an outline of the one possible alternative to the growing tyranny
of governments.

From his anxiety to be fair to Fascism, Gilbert was often accused of
being in favour of it, but, both in this book and in several
articles, having given the case for it he went on to give the case
against it--a much stronger case than that usually given by its
opponents. The case for Fascism lay in the breakdown of true
democracy and the reign of the tyranny of wealth in the democratic
countries. Chesterton would, he said, have been on the side of the
Partito Popolare as against the Fascism that succeeded it; in England
and America he would "have infinitely preferred