l was dismissed. Perjury had lain on one side or the
other!

Meanwhile news came that Rufus Isaacs, now Lord Reading, had gone
with Lloyd George to Paris to attend the Peace Conference. All that
this might mean: the peril to Poland: the danger of a Prussia kept at
the head of the Germanies for the sake of international finance: an
abasement of England before those countries that had not forgotten
Marconi: all this was vivid to Gilbert Chesterton. In the same number
of the _New Witness_ in which he mourned his brother (Dec. 13, 1918),
he wrote under "The Sign of the World's End" an Open Letter to Lord
Reading:

My Lord--I address to you a public letter as it is upon a public
question: it is unlikely that I should ever trouble you with any
private letter on any private question; and least of all on the
private question that now fills my mind. It would be impossible
altogether to ignore the irony that has in the last few days brought
to an end the great Marconi duel in which you and I in some sense
played the part of seconds; that personal part of the matter ended
when Cecil Chesterton found death in the trenches to which he had
freely gone; and Godfrey Isaacs found dismissal in those very Courts
to which he once successfully appealed. But believe me I do not write
on any personal matter; nor do I write, strangely enough perhaps,
with any personal acrimony. On the contrary, there is something in
these tragedies that almost unnaturally clarifies and enlarges the
mind; and I think I write partly because I may never feel so
magnanimous again. It would be irrational to ask you for sympathy;
but I am sincerely moved to offer it. You are far more unhappy; for
your brother is still alive.

If I turn my mind to you and your type of politics it is not wholly
and solely through that trick of abstraction by which in moments of
sorrow a man finds himself staring at a blot on the tablecloth or an
insect on the ground. I do, of course, realise, with that sort of
dull clarity, that you are in practise a blot on the English
landscape, and that the political men who made you are the creeping
things of the earth. But I am, in all sincerity, less in a mood to
mock at the sham virtues they parade than to try to imagine the more
real virtues which they successfully conceal. In your own case there
is the less difficulty, at least in one matter. I am very willing