to the Chancellorship, we find the following
among the notes of the Week:

When we are told that the ancient Marshal Hindenburg is now
Dictator of Germany we suspect a note of exaggeration . . .
Hindenburg never was the dictator of anything and never will be. He
is, however the man who keeps the seat warm for a Dictator to come.
Hindenburg has led us back to Frederick the Great. . . .

Hindenburg has now given rein to the extreme Nationalists, with the
delivered provinces to support him in the flush of patriotism. And
the extreme Nationalists have only one policy: to reconstitute the
unjust frontiers of Germany, which Europe fought to amend.

In 1931 had come the Customs Union between Germany and Austria, the
obvious impotence of the League of Nations to restrain Japan, the
"National" Government and falling sterling in England. Less than two
years later Hitler was Chancellor of Germany, and in 1934 came the
murder of Dollfuss. Chesterton wrote of the tragedy whereby the name
Germany was taken from Austria and given to Prussia. With Dollfuss
fell all that was left of the Holy Roman Empire: the barbarians had
invaded the center of our civilisation and like the Turks besieging
Vienna had struck at its heart. He regarded Hitler merely as the tool
of Prussianism. The new Paganism was the logical outcome of the old
Prussianism: it was too the apotheosis of tyranny. "In the Pagan
State, in antiquity or modernity, you cannot appeal from Tyranny to
God; because the Tyranny is the God."

Belloc solemnly warned our country that we were making inevitable
"the death in great pain of innumerable young Englishmen now
boys. . . . It may be in two years or in five or in ten the blow will
fall." (November 8, 1934.)

Yet even this seemed less terrible to Chesterton than the state of
mind then prevailing: the mood--nay the fever--of pacifism that
demanded the isolation of England from Europe's peril. He called it
"Mafficking for peace": a sort of Imperialism that forgot that the
Atlantic is wider than the Straits of Dover and allowed Lord
Beaverbrook to regard England as a part of Canada. "Englishmen who
have felt that fever will one day look back on it with shame." "This
most noble and generous nation," he wrote with a note of agony,
"which lost its religion in the seventeenth century has lost its
morals in the twentieth."

The League of Nations had, G. K. held, been