e was assistant editor. Charles Granville
had financed it. When he went bankrupt the title was altered to _The
New Witness_. When Cecil joined the Army in 1916, G.K. became Editor.
In 1923 the paper died, but two years later rose again under the
title, _G.K.'s Weekly_. After Gilbert's own death Belloc took it back.
Today, as _The Weekly Review_, it is edited by Reginald Jebb, Belloc's
son-in-law. With all these changes of name, the continuity of the
paper is unmistakable. Its main aim may be roughly defined under two
headings. 1. To fight for the liberty of Englishmen against
increasing enslavement to a Plutocracy. 2. To expose and combat
corruption in public life.

The fight for Liberty appears in the letters quoted above in the form
of an attack on certain bills: Belloc unified and defined it with
real genius in the articles which became two of his most important
books: _The Servile State_ and _The Restoration of Property_. If
these two books be set beside Chesterton's _What's Wrong With the
World_ and _The Outline of Sanity_ the Chesterbelloc sociology stands
complete.

In his _Cobbett_, G.K. was later to emphasise the genius with which
Cobbett saw the England of today a hundred years before it was there
to be seen. Belloc in the same way saw both what was coming and the
way in which it was coming. Especially far-sighted was his attitude
to Lloyd George's Compulsory Health Insurance Act. It was the first
act of the kind in England and the scheme in outline was: every week
every employed person must have a stamp stuck on a card by his
employer, of which he paid slightly less and the employer slightly
more than half the cost. The money thus saved gave the insured person
free medical treatment and a certain weekly sum during the period of
illness. Agricultural labourers were omitted from the act and a
ferment raged on the question of domestic servants, who were
eventually included in its operation. It was practically acknowledged
that this was done to make the Act more workable financially. For
domestic servants were an especially healthy class and, moreover, in
most upper and middle-class households they were already attended by
the family doctor without cost to themselves.

The company in which the _Eye Witness_ found itself in opposing this
Act was indeed a case of "strange bedfellows." For the opposition was
led by the Conservatives (on the ground that the Act was Socialism).
Many a mistress and many a maid did