e things would be grotesque, I might hardly feel them as
incongruous. Precisely because they meant nothing to me I might be
satisfied with them, I might enjoy them without any shame at my own
impudence as an alien, adventurer. Precisely because I could not feel
them as dignified, I should not know what I had degraded. My fancy may
be quite wrong; it is but one of many attempts I have made to imagine
and allow for an alien psychology in this matter; and if you, and
Jews far worthier than you, are wise they will not dismiss as
Anti-Semitism what may well prove the last serious attempt to
sympathise with Semitism. I allow for your position more than most
men allow for it; more, most assuredly, than most men will allow for
it in the darker days that yet may come. It is utterly false to
suggest that either I or a better man than I, whose work I now
inherit, desired this disaster for you and yours, I wish you no such
ghastly retribution. Daniel son of Isaac. Go in peace; but go.

Yours,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

In those last sentences the spirit of prophecy was upon Chesterton
after a truly dark and deep fashion. Yet even he did not guess that
the retribution he feared would fall, not upon that "tribe of Isaacs"
thus established in English government, but upon the unfortunate
Jewish people as a whole, from the German nation that Isaacs had gone
to Paris to protect. For there was no doubt in Chesterton's mind that
it was his work at the Peace Conference to strive for the survival of
Prussia, no matter how Europe and the rest of the Germanies suffered.
The _New Witness_ hated the Treaty of Versailles in its eventual form
as much as Hitler hates it, but for a very different reason.

All human judgments are limited and no doubt there was a mixture of
truth and error in Chesterton's view of the years that followed. But
in the universal reaction from the war-spirit to Pacifism the truths
he was urging received scant attention, his really amazing prophecies
fell on deaf ears. "He will almost certainly," Monsignor Knox has
said,* "be remembered as a prophet, in an age of false prophets." And
it is not insignificant that today it has become the fashion to say,
as he said twenty-five years ago and steadily reiterated, that the
peace of 1918 was only an armistice.

[* In the panegyric preached in Westminster Cathedral, June 27, 1936.]

Just before leaving England for the Front, Cecil had