imagination and temperament. For now more than ever
his thought was not allowed to concentrate on those realities where
the joy of contemplation overpowers the pain of growth.

He loved Italy--even more than France he says in one letter--yet he
could not but condemn the invasion of Abyssinia. The shadow of the
Spanish war loomed on the horizon and behind it a darker shadow. In
his political thinking Chesterton was haunted by the present war.
Then too, while public controversy did not trouble him at all, he
hated any breach of the peace within the ranks of his own small army.
The fights among the staff of the paper about Distributism had been
as nothing compared with those about Abyssiania. There are leading
articles taking one line and letters in the Cockpit in violent
opposition. Maurice Reckitt writes in _As it Happened:_

In the last autumn of his life I wrote to him privately in distress
at the line which the _Weekly_ was taking on Abyssinia, and saying
that I felt that I ought to leave the board, as I was so much out of
sympathy with this. I received this reply, from which I have deleted
only some personal references:

"Top Meadow, Beaconsfield 19th September 1935.

"MY DEAR MR. MAURICE RECKITT,

"I do hope you will forgive me for the delay in answering your most
important letter, involving as it does tragic dooms of separation
which I hope need not be fulfilled. . . . I should like to ask you to
defer your decision at least until you have seen the next week's
number of the paper, in which I expand further the argument I have
used in the current number and bring it, I think, rather nearer to
your natural and justifiable point of view. Between ourselves, and
without prejudice to anybody, I do think myself that there ought to
have been a more definite condemnation of the attack on Abyssinia.
The whole thing happened while I was having a holiday. . . .

"Very shortly, the mortal danger, to me, is the rehabilitation of
Capitalism, in spite of the slump, which will certainly take the form
of a hypocritical patriotism and glorification of England, at the
expense of Italy or anybody else. For the moment I only want you to
understand that this is the mountainous peril that towers in my own
mind.

"Yours always,

"G. K. CHESTERTON."

Three months later in _G.K.'s Weekly_ he wrote about the whole matter
in an article in which he treated the question as largely one of
proportion. Not enough was being said in Engla