e Prussians, whose sufferings too were those of
humanity.

Into the opposite error there was no risk that they would fall. Never
for them would heroism be belittled in the name of the very horrors
it was encountering. In one article Belloc touched on this strange
perversion and reminded his readers that the power to ravage and
destroy was not really a new result of modern machinery. Attila and
his Huns had inflicted even greater devastation and had left a desert
behind them. Barbarism in its nature was destructive and we were
encountering barbarism. In so doing we were acting the part of
Christian men.

But the old fights still had to be waged on the home front: against
the money power and against what the _New Witness_ called Prussianism
at home. Unceasingly they battled for fair treatment for soldiers'
wives and children, for freedom from unmeaning and unnecessary
regulations, against the profiteering by big firms and the consequent
crushing of small. About two thousand small butchers' shops for
instance had to close at the very beginning of the war owing to a
cornering of supplies by the large firms. Against this and all the
ramifications of the meat "scandal" the _New Witness_ struggled,
publishing, they claimed, facts unpublished elsewhere and inspiring
questions in the House of Commons. Belloc's irony, Chesterton's wit,
point these articles and make them worth reading as literature; and
there is some of the old fooling. A further series on the Servile
State is attacked by Shaw who thinks that Belloc, since he is not a
Socialist, must be a follower of Herbert Spencer! G.K. accounts for
this by saying that Shaw had not read Belloc. "How do you know,"
retorts Shaw, "it is not Herbert Spencer I have not read? Suppose you
had your choice of not reading a book by Belloc and not reading one
by Spencer which would you choose? Hang it all, be reasonable."

The economic front was never abandoned and the paper continued to
attack all forms of Socialism including the recreation of Bumble by
Mrs. Sidney Webb, with all the regimentation of the poor "for their
own good" that Bumble represented. The inner secrets of the Fabian
Office are unfolded by Shaw in a letter to Gilbert (dated Aug. 6,
1917).

MY DEAR G.K.C.

If you want to expose a scandalous orgy in the _New Witness_, you
may depend on the following as being a correct account by an eye
witness.

You know that there is a body called The Fabian Resea