d graciousness, was conscious and even self-conscious. But
this was only another way of saying that he had a mind which mirrored
everything, including himself; and that, whatever else he did, he did
not act blindly or in the dark. He was sometimes quite wrong; but his
errors were purely patriotic; both in the narrow sense of nationalism
and in the larger sense of loyalty and disinterestedness.

He instances Balfour's policies in Ireland and Egypt and continues:

In some ways he seems to me to have been too good a Stoic to be
entirely a good Christian; or rather (to put it more correctly) to
feel, like the rest of us, that he was a bad Christian. . . . There
was much more in him of the Scotch Puritan than of the English
Cavalier.

It is supremely characteristic of the present Parliamentary
atmosphere that everybody accused Lord Balfour of incomprehensible
compromise and vagueness, because he was completely logical and
absolutely clear. Clarity does look like a cloud of confusion to
people whose minds live in confusion twice confounded. . . .

. . . people said his distinctions were fine distinctions; and so
they were; very fine indeed. A fine distinction is like a fine
painting or a fine poem or anything else fine; a triumph of the human
mind . . . the great power of distinction; by which a man becomes in
the true sense distinguished.*

[* March 29, 1930.]

The distinction Mr. Swinnerton draws* between Belloc and Chesterton
may be a little too absolute, but substantially it is right. "One
reason for the love of Chesterton was that while he fought he sang
lays of chivalry and in spite of all his seriousness warred against
wickedness rather than a fleshly opponent, while Belloc sang only
after the battle and warred against men as well as ideas."

[* _Georgian Scene_, p. 88.]

Did the tendency to find good in his opponents, did Chesterton's
universal charity deaden, as Belloc believes, the effect of his
writing?

He wounded none, but thus also he failed to provide weapons
wherewith one may wound and kill folly. Now without wounding and
killing, there is no battle; and thus, in this life, no victory;
but also no peril to the soul through hatred.*

[* _The Place of Chesterton in English Letters_, p. 81.]

In various controversies during the final years of _G.K.'s Weekly_
the very opposite opinion is expressed. Hoffman Nickerson writes of
the