early poems, each note reflecting a judgment of Belloc's--on
the Dreyfus case which Belloc saw as all French Catholics saw it: on
Anglo-American relations which Belloc saw as most Latin Europeans
would see it.

(1) The first was the poem entitled "To a Certain Nation"--addressed
to France in commentary on the Dreyfus case of 1899 which must be
briefly explained for those who are too young to remember the
excitement it caused. Captain Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French
army, had been found guilty of treachery and sent to Devil's Island.
All France was divided into two camps on the question of his guilt or
innocence. In general, Catholics and what we should call the Right
were all for his guilt; atheists, anti-clericals and believers in the
Republic were for his innocence. Passions were roused to fury on both
sides. English opinion was almost entirely for his innocence. I was a
small girl at the time and I remember that my brother and I amused
ourselves by crying _Vive Dreyfus_, on all possible and impossible
occasions, for the annoyance of our pious French governess. I
remember also that our parents were startled by the vehemence of the
French Catholic paper _La Croix_ from which our governess imbibed her
views. Ultimately the case was reopened, and Dreyfus, after years of
horror on Devil's Island, found not guilty and restored to his rank
in the army. But there are, I know, Catholic Frenchmen alive today
who refuse to believe in his innocence and hold that the whole thing
was a Jewish-Masonic plot that hampered the French espionage service
and nearly lost us the war of 1914.

In the first edition of _The Wild Knight_, written before the meeting
with Belloc, Gilbert, like any other English Liberal, had assumed
Dreyfus' innocence and in the poem "To a Certain Nation" had
reproached the France of the Revolution, the France he had loved, as
unworthy of herself.

. . . and we
Who knew thee once, we have a right to weep.

The Note in the second edition shows him as now undecided
about Dreyfus' guilt and concludes: "There may have been a fog
of injustice in the French courts; I know that there was a fog
of injustice in the English newspapers."

(2) In "An Alliance" Chesterton had gloried in "the blood of Hengist"
and hymned an Anglo-American alliance with the enthusiasm of a young
Republican who took for granted the links of language and of origin
that might draw together two great countries into something