.

Douglas Jerrold in a brilliant article on Belloc,* treats his theory
of the Party System as a false one, and maintains that he mistook for
collusion that degree of co-operation that alone could enable a
country to be governed at all under a party system. A certain
continuity must be preserved if, in the old phrase, "The King's
Government is to be carried on"--but such continuity did not spell a
corrupt collusion. If at this distance of time such a view can be
held by a man of Mr. Jerrold's ability it could certainly be held at
the time by the majority--and it may be that the continual assumption
of an unproved fact got in the way in the fight against more obvious
evil.

[* "Hilaire Belloc and the Counter Revolution" in _For Hilaire
Belloc_.]

For bound up with this question is another: _The Eye Witness_ seemed
so near success and yet never quite succeeded. Might it have done so
had it been founded with a single eye to creative opportunity--to the
attack on the Servile State and the building of some small beginning
of an alternative? _G.K.'s Weekly_ was a slight improvement from that
point of view--for it did create the Distributist League; but both
papers, I think, had from their inception a divided purpose that made
failure almost inevitable.

The fight against corruption which had been placed equal with the
fight for property and liberty at the start of the _Eye Witness_ is a
noble aim. But, like the other, it is a life work. To do it a man
must have time to spend verifying rumours or exploding them,
following up clues, patiently waiting on events. I began to read the
files with an assumption of the accuracy of the claims of the _Eye_
and _New Witness_ as to its own achievement in all this, but when the
dates and facts in the Marconi case had been tabulated for me
chronologically I began to wonder. Again and again the editor stated
that _The New Witness_ had been first to unearth the Marconi matter.
But it hadn't. As we have seen, questions in the House and attacks in
other papers had _preceded_ their first mention of the subject.

So too the statement that the Marconi affair had proved how little
Englishmen cared about corruption seemed almost absurd when one read
not only the Conservative but also the Liberal comment of the time.
"Political corruption is the Achilles heel of Liberalism," said an
outstanding Liberal Editor; while Hugh O'Donnell in the _New Witness_
paraphrased the wail of the "Cadbury" pape