rom Mr. Chamberlain simply and finally in this--that
to our hand had lain (as it once laid to his) an old, an effectual,
an infallible, and a filthy weapon, and that we let it lie.*

[* Letter to the _Daily News_, October 1902.]

Yet it was fairly easy to be a Liberal in opposition. At the
elections of 1902 (which the Liberals lost) and 1906 (which they won)
Chesterton canvassed for the Liberal party. Charles Masterman used to
tell a story of canvassing a street in his company. Both started at
the same end on opposite sides of the road. Masterman completed his
side and came back on the other to find Chesterton still earnestly
arguing at the first house. For he was passionately serious in his
belief that the Liberal Party stood for a real renewal, even
revolution, in the life of England. "At the present moment of
victory," says the report of a speech by Gilbert following the great
swing of the Liberal party into power in 1906, he called for "that
magnanimity towards the defeated that characterized all great
conquerors. It was important that all should develop--even the Tory."
It needed the experience of seeing the Liberal party in power to
shake his faith.

In the new House of Commons the Conservatives were in a minority:
against them were the two old parties--the Liberals and the Irish
members who were in general allied to them, and a small group forming
a new party known as Labour. The Labour Members who got into
Parliament in 1906 and 1909 were regarded by Conservatives as being a
kind of left-wing extension of the Liberal Party. Such a Liberal as
Chesterton saw them there with delight, and, although he would still
have called himself a Liberal, he at first hoped in the Labour men as
something more truly expressive of the people's wishes.

In an introduction to _From Workhouse to Westminster_, a life of Will
Crooks, Gilbert expressed a good deal of his own political
philosophy. As a democrat he believed in the ideal of direct
government by the people. But obviously this was only possible in a
world that was also his ideal--a world consisting of small and even
of very small states. The democrat's usual alternative,
representative government, was, Gilbert said, symbolic in character.
Just as religious symbolism "may for a time represent a real emotion
and then for a time cease to represent anything, so representative
government may for a time represent the people, and for a time cease
to represent anything."