uld show them reason,
To keep the matter hid,
And subtly lead the questions
Away from what he did.

Thou mirror of uprightness,
What ails thee at thy vows,
What means the risen whiteness
Of skin between thy brows?
The boils that shine and burrow,
The sores that slough and bleed--
The leprosy of Naaman
On thee and all thy seed?

Stand up, stand up, Gehazi,
Draw close thy robe and go
Gehazi, judge in Israel.
A leper white as snow!

As the _Times_ leading article of June 19, 1913, put it: "A man is
not blamed for being splashed with mud. He is commiserated. But if he
has stepped into a puddle which he might easily have avoided, we say
that it is his own fault. If he protests that he did not know it was
a puddle, we say that he ought to know better; but if he says that it
was after all quite a clean puddle, then we judge him deficient in
the sense of cleanliness. And the British public like their public
men to have a very nice sense of cleanliness."

That, fundamentally, was what troubled Gilbert Chesterton then and
for the rest of his life. He was not himself an investigator of
political scandals--in that field he trusted his brother and Belloc,
and on this particular matter Cecil had certainly said more than he
knew and possibly more than was true. But it did not take an expert
to know that some of the men involved in the Marconi Case had no very
nice sense of cleanliness: and these men were going to be dominant in
the councils of England, and to represent England in the face of the
world, for a long time to come.

CHAPTER XX

The Eve of the War (1911-1915)

DURING THE EARLIER YEARS of the _New Witness_ Gilbert had nothing to
do with the editing, and his contributions to it were only part of
the continuing volume of his weekly journalism. It would be almost
impossible to trace all the articles in papers and magazines that
were never republished: the volumes of essays appearing year by year
probably contained the best among them. He was still in 1911 writing
for the _Daily News_ and every week until his death he continued to
do "Our Notebook" for the _Illustrated London News_. I have found an
unpublished ballade he wrote on the subject:

BALLADE OF A PERIODICAL

In icy circles by the Behring Strait,
In moony jungles where the tigers roar,
In tropic isles where civil servants wait,
And wonder what the deuce they're waiting for,
In lo