sely knit that it was difficult to leave out
passages without spoiling the effect. He walked into the room as my
pencil went through a fairly long extract from Shaw's speech.

"And whose words are you so gaily murdering?" he asked.

"Shaw's, Mr. Chesterton."

"Very well. Now put them all back and murder mine. I refuse to deny
Shaw a full opportunity to state his case in my paper."

As a result Shaw's speech took up a great part of the space
allotted and G.K.C. was inadequately reported.

He was always careful if he had reviewed a book in the paper
criticising its ideas to take an immediate opportunity to show the
author his warm personal friendliness. Middleton Murry, sending him a
book of his own, criticised G.K. as "Perverse" for thinking communism
and capitalism alike.

Your clean idea [of liberty and property] delights me, I believe,
quite as much as it does you. But it is a vision and a dream, in this
capitalistic world. . . . The communist is the man who has made up
his mind to "go through with" the grim business of Capitalism to the
bitter end because he knows there is no going back. He makes a choice
between following a dream which he _knows_ is only a dream, and
following a hope which he knows his own devotion may help to make
real. Communism is the faith which a man wins through blank and utter
despair. . . .

For my own part, if it were possible, I would rather see the world
converted to Christianity than to communism. But the world has had
its chance of becoming Christian; it will not get it again. . . .

The wrath to come--that is what communism is. And we can flee from
it only by repentance. And repentance itself means communism. That is
the fact as I see it. I hope, and sometimes dream, that we shall have
the communism of repentance, and not the communism of wrath here in
England.

Chesterton replied (May 19, 1932):

Thank you so very much for your most interesting and generous
letter, which reached me indirectly and was delayed; also for your
most interesting and generous book, which I immediately sat down and
read at a sitting; which in its turn so stimulated me that I
immediately wrote a rapid and rather curt reply for my own little
rag. I fear you will find the reply more controversial than I meant
it to be; for your book is so packed with challenges that I could not
but make my very short ar