ed
that he might slay his foe and return to his country; and the gods
heard half the prayer, and the other half was scattered to the winds.
For I knew we were right to rejoice; since the tyrant was indeed
slain and his tyranny fallen for ever; but I know not when we shall
find our way back to our own land.

English soldiers in Ireland felt, as we all remember, a strong
sympathy with the Irish people: most of them, said the _New Witness_,
became Sinn Feiners. This was an exaggeration, but certainly their
opposition to acting as terrorists led to the employment in their
stead of the jail-birds known as Black and Tans.

And in England itself the feeling was stirring that grew stronger as
the years passed. The soldiers, who were the nation, had won the
victory, the politicians had thrown it away. A rushed election before
most of the men were demobilized had brought back the same old
politicians by turning, so G.K. put it, "collusion" into "coalition."
A Coalition Government had been in wartime "comprehensible and
defensible; precisely because it is not concerned with construction
or reconstruction but only with the warding off of destruction." A
peace-time coalition could do nothing but show up the absurdity of
the old party labels. For if these meant anything they meant that
their wearers wanted an entirely different kind of construction, at
which therefore they could not collaborate. How could a real Tory
co-operate in construction with a genuine Radical? It was the
culmination of unreality.

The idea that it succeeded (for the moment) because the country
really believed that Lloyd George had won the war seemed to
Chesterton the crowning absurdity. It succeeded because the party
machines combined to finance their candidates and offered them to a
rather dazed country whose men were still in great numbers under
arms. "There is naturally no dissentient when hardly anybody seems to
be sentient. Indifference is called unanimity."

How then could this indifference be thrown off: How could the
returning manhood of the nation be given a true democracy: was there
still hope? If there was, never had the _New Witness_ been more
needed than now. It had told the truth about political corruption,
today it had to fight it: "We are not divided now into those who know
and those who do not know. We are divided now into those who care and
those who do not care." Thus wrote Chesterton in an article about his
own continue