machines "we sometimes tend," said Chesterton in _Sidelights_, "to
overlook the quiet and even bashful presence of the machine gun."

There was an impishness in Gilbert, especially in his youth, that
encouraged the idea of his enmity to science. Where he saw a long
white beard he felt like tweaking it: an enquiring nose simply asked
to be pulled. It was only in (comparatively) sober age that he
bothered in _The Everlasting Man_ to explain "I am not at issue in
this book with sincere and genuine scholars, but with a vast and
vague public opinion which has been prematurely spread from certain
imperfect investigations."* That "vast and vague public opinion"
certainly suspected him of irreverence even towards sincere and
genuine scholars. Yet it was by his use of the most marvelous of
modern inventions that he won in the end the widest hearing among
that public that he had ever known.

[* _The Everlasting Man_, p. 67.]

It is not so many years ago that we donned earphones in a doubtful
hope of being able to hear something over the radio. It is the less
surprising that it was only in the last few years of his life that
Gilbert became first interested in the invention and presently one of
the broadcasters most in request by the B.B.C. He felt about the
radio as he did about most modern inventions: that they were splendid
opportunities that were not being taken--or else were being taken to
the harm of humanity by the wrong people. What was the use of
"calling all countries" if you had nothing to say to them.

"What much modern science fails to realise," he wrote, "is that there
is little use in knowing without thinking."

And again, writing about the amazing discoveries of the day: "Nobody
is taking the smallest trouble to consider who in the future will be
in command of the electricity and capable of giving us the shocks.
With all the shouting about the new marvels, hardly anybody utters a
word or even a whisper about how they are to be prevented from
turning into the old abuses. . . . People sometimes wonder why we not
infrequently refer to the old scandal covered by the word Marconi. It
is precisely because all these things are really covered by that
word. There could not be a shorter statement of the contradiction
than in men howling that word as a discovery and hushing it up as a
story."*

[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, Aug. 15, 1925.]

For the thing that really frightened him about the radio was its
possibilities as a ne