Chesterton and The Speaker. John Coates (Liberalism)

Chesterton and The Speaker
John Coates
JOHN COATES who holds degrees from Cambridge and Exeter Universi-
ties, is a lecturer in English at Hull University. He is the author of
Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (1984) and of articles on
Romantic, Victorian and Edwardian Literature.
At first sight, an article about The Speaker may seem a relatively

unimportant topic. It was a short-lived, long-forgotten weekly which fig-
ured only as an episode even in the lives of some of those involved in pro-
ducing the paper. The periodical appears to merit only a footnote, at most,
in a history of the press, or of the minute political transactions of the late
Victorian and early Edwardian period. Nevertheless, i f The Speaker'^ life
was brief, for a few years at least, it was the focus for issues of the first
magnitude, those of the crises of Liberalism and of Imperialism. The
Speaker under Hammond's editorship, was at the heart of a debate about
patriotism, about the nature of national values and about the identity of
the nation itself.
Chesterton's early connection with The Speaker should be important
for anyone who seeks to understand his career. Although he had already
appeared in print in The Bookman, it was as a contributor to The Speaker
that he found his distinctive voice and began to be widely noticed. The
role and character of The Speaker under J.L. Hammond, cannot be under-
stood apart from the political and ideological conflicts immediately before
and during the Boer War. These conflicts were the matrix from which
Chesterton's style, his public persona and many of the fundamentals of
his intellectual position were to be developed. His origins as a writer are
implicated in the particular character of The Speaker and in the issue of
South Africa with which the paper was, above all, concerned.
A Transkei woman who is a farm labourer.
29
The Chesterton Review
Anyone examining The Speaker of September 23, 1899 and compar-

ing it with the issue of October 7 would be bound to be struck by a sudden
change of style, emphasis and attitude. The line taken in the September
Editorial ("On the Brink of War") to the South African crisis is one of
hand-wringing vagueness, neither clearly committed to supporting the
war, nor seriously critical of British actions:
That the situation at Johannesberg had become intolerable and
that the British government were bound to find a remedy for it,
no sensible person in this country will deny. But at least it is our
duty to make it as easy as possible for Mr. Kruger to accept our
terms. The Colonial Office has unfortunately tried to make it as
difficult as possible. Hence has come about a situation in which
passions on both sides have been aroused.
If only everyone would just be more polite to each other, all this trouble
could be avoided. There is a similar wish to fudge or to ignore issues, to
avoid real conflict of creed or ideology in the comments on the other great
issue of the time, social deprivation or the "condition-of-England ques-
tion." The second Editorial article, "New Paths for Economists," stresses
how important it is not to let investigation be distorted by "a priori the-
oryby the teetotaller, or the anti-tobacconist or the sentimental, the ro-
mantic medievahst, or the Ruskinian morahst." It is important not to give
"pronouncement prematurely." One w i l l "do more for the welfare of
Britain and the Empire i f one does not "crystallise" one's results "into im-
perative dogmas." From such nebulous pronouncements on the foreign
and domestic situation it is difficult to see what, i f anything. The Speaker
("A Review of Politics, Letters, Science and the Arts") actually stood for.
The issue of October 7 marks a dramatic change. The alteration of the

paper's title is a minor but significant point. It is now The Speaker ("The
Liberal Review"). The Editorial announces that "today a new series of
The Speaker begins in a new guise and under new auspices":
The time is ripe for a fresh effortwhich while it may be par-
tialwill at least be directto apply the permanent principles of
Liberalism to actual conditions.
A trenchant diagnosis of the public malaise then follows. Apart from the
"immediate situation in South Africa," discussed elsewhere, the Editorial
asks "is it not clear from a survey of our foreign relations during recent
years" that "a change is creeping over our national attitude"? The features
of this "change" are listed. Public attention has been narrowed to "com-
30
mercial and material considerations." Britain has acquired the "dangerous

habit" of regarding itself as "something anomalous to the world," as
"bound by no contract, virtually absolved from law." This prevalent
amoral materialism and worship of power is linked to a species of fatalis-
tic evolutionism:
There is, again, the curious tendency to prophecy the future
course of events"this or that is bound to happen""this or that
is a manifest destiny"with an assurance which deceives our-
selves.
The Second Leader, "War or Peace" points to a "revolution in ethics"
which has led to a widespread belief that "the convenience of the stronger
is the only canon of right and wrong." This moral deterioration stems di-
rectly from colonialist and imperial presumption and interference as well
as from the habit of mind which these breed:
Such is the curious reflex action of our missionary benevolence
that in return for civilising mankind we assimilate the lawless-
ness of the unciviUsed ourselves.
"The Future of Liberalism" deplores recent attempts to "include under the
old name of Liberal two very distinct forces," promises to "discriminate
between them" and "to insist on the older and sounder definition." This
editorial policy will necessarily prompt "us to attack that spirit which has
led through the Stock Exchange to foreign adventures and through the
power of vested interests to internal atrophy." The fight against "specula-
tive finance in Imperial affairs" must run parallel "with the attack on class
privilege in the ownership of land" and "other great monopolies."
It is worth dwelHng on the first Editorial of The Speaker in its "new
guise" for several reasons. Most obviously, because the programme here
announced was, in fact, carried out. Thus the opening Editorial offers a
useful summary of The Speaker's pre-occupations during its brief life.
Secondly, this change in the personnel and policy of a minor, faihng mag-
azine offers a window on to some of the dilemmas of Liberalism at that
date. Thirdly, and most importantly for the student of Chesterton, there is
an obvious similarity between the themes of The Speaker Editorial and
several of the chief topics of Chesterton's own early writings. He elabo-
rates with far greater stylistic brilliance and intellectual energy, upon
points made in this Editorial; the growth of materialism and of materialist
explanations of history and society; the admiration of amoral strength; the
justification of men or measures by a so-called practical success; the self-
31
deluding notions of inevitable development, evolution, progress or of the

"laws" of history; the connection between Imperialism and the importa-
tion of alien codes of behaviour from subject territories. There are paral-
lels to Chesterton, too, in the Editorial's call to a battle of ideas at a time
when the ideas which make parties are being transformed and in the readi-
ness to be "partial" as long as one is "direct." The Speaker's Editorial pro-
vides an obvious and suggestive context for these Chestertonian preoccu-
pations in the particular political crisis of 1899. To be fully understood,
however, the context does need some knowledge of the history of late
Victorian Liberalism.
The main features of that history are well-known and need only to be
briefly recalled. The Liberals held office for only three ineffective years
between 1886 and 1905, the Conservatives becoming the "natural" ruling
party in England, the Liberals depending more and more on the "Celtic
fringe" of Wales and Scotland. The movement of the propertied middle
classes towards the Conservative side had begun even before Gladstone
came out in favour of Home Rule for Ireland in 1885. Nevertheless, the
Conservatives could not have won every election except that of 1892 i f
they had not attracted between a third and a half of the working class
vote.i Many reasons are given for the Liberal electoral failure; the aging
Gladstone's preoccupation with the Irish problem which prevented a
recognition of increasing working class demands; his long tenure of office
which thwarted the development of the Liberal Party into a more radical
mass-appeal movement probably under Chamberlain's leadership; the un-
popularity of the noble and far-sighted crusade for Home Rule which had
split the Liberals in 1885 and which one Conservative pamphlet described
as "a direct attack upon England and the English vote" 2 ; the neurasthenic
self-pity of one Liberal leader, Rosebery, the insufferable habitual rude-
ness of his rival Harcourt, their loathing for each other and the deep un-
popularity of both.
Electoral misfortunes and the miscalculations and failures of individ-

uals might have mattered less in the long run i f there had not been a deep
decline in the intellectual and emotional appeal of Liberalism itself. The
Trade Depression after 1875 prompted a mounting interest in collectivist
and Socialist solutions to the sufferings detailed in such widely read
works of investigation and protest as The Bitter Cry of Outcast London
(1883). Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) heralded many
other able and persuasive Socialist pamphlets which appeared in the fol-
32
lowing years. The founding of the Fabian Society (1884) and the series of
Fabian Tracts beginning with Why Are the Many Poor? (1884) and culmi-
nating in the brilliant Fabian Essays (1889) resulted in what the founders
of the Society had intended, a permeation of educated opinion with col-
lectivist and Socialist ideas. Compared with the clarity, cogency and
hopefulness of such writing, the defenders of Liberalism sounded melan-
choly and defensive. Works such as Herbert Spencer's The Man Versus
the State (1884), Henry Maine's Popular Government (1885) or W.E.H.
Lecky's Democracy and Liberty (1896) offered little more than pes-
simistic forebodings about the supposed threats to middle-class interests
posed by a democratic society. The affirmations of J.S. Mill's On Liberty
(1859), the high-point of Victorian Liberalism, had declined to a sigh of
querulous, elderly despondency. As Chesterton put it, "Mill's beautiful
faith in human nature and freedom . . . seemed slowly and sadly to be dry-
ing up."^ To many, mid-Victorian Liberalism looked like an obsolescent
philosophy with little more to say. The "Newcastle Programme," the party
manifesto of 1891, seemed a confession of this intellectual exhaustion and
incoherence, a rambling document trying to win support by appealing to a
disparate collection of protest groups. This pervasive air of Liberal tired-
ness and uncertainty provides a context for the feebleness of The Speaker
before Hammond and Hirst took it over.
In university circles, T . H . Green and his disciples, the "neo-
Hegehans," whose philosophy had superseded J.S. Mill's modified UtiH-
tarianism, added their weight to an increasing interest in strong govern-
ment action. Influential works such as D.G. Ritchie's Principles of State
Interference (1891) called for centralisation and social planning on neo-
Hegelian grounds. These influential idealist philosophers provide a link
with the other current of thought, that of Imperialism which, in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century, was eroding the Liberal verities. It is
worth noting the ramifying personal connections and effects of such a fig-
ure as Arnold Toynbee. Ardent disciple of T.H. Green, author of a semi-
nal book The Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century (1884)
which put the notion that the "Industrial Revolution" (a term he coined)
had been a destructive event, Toynbee remains lastingly associated with
the "settlement movement" and with the influx of hundreds of university
men into the East End in the 1880s and 1890s. At the same time, Toyn-
bee's friendship at Oxford with Alfred Milner remained, throughout M i l -
ner's life, one of his most precious memories.^ Alfred, Lord Milner
(1854-1925), along with Cecil Rhodes, lies at the heart of the Imperialist
33
adventure and of British involvement with the Boer republics. After a tri-
umphant career at Oxford and a succession of important administrative
posts, his career reached its peak as he became British High Commis-
sioner for South Africa (1897-1905), where his activities on behalf of the
Uitlanders (Transvaal immigrants attracted to the gold fields but denied
political rights) were widely seen as provocations to war. This was cer-
tainly the view that Chesterton and his Speaker friends took of Milner.
Milner's powerful intelligence, clarity of mind, charm of personality, and
inflexible political purpose made him the inspirer of a brilliant group of
young men (Milner's "Kindergarten") whom he gathered around him and
who had infiltrated the administrative and educational establishments by
1899. Milner's own views were forged in the Oxford of the 1870s. At the
start of that decade, John Ruskin made his famous appeal to an undergrad-
uate audience to establish "new and better Englands around the seven
seas." England should "found colonies as fast and far as she is able . . .
seizing every piece of fruitful waste land she can set her foot on."^ This
speech, the intellectual launching of Victorian Imperialism, had immense
effect and "young Oxford hearkened to his words." A biographer of M i l -
ner writes:
To emulate Imperial Rome and establish prosperous colonies far
and wide made a deep appeal to such undergraduates as Cecil
Rhodes and Alfred Milner. . . . Inherent in this ideal was the de-
termination to undo much of the havoc wrought in the coming of
uncontrolled industrialism to England at the end of the eighteenth
century. Side by side with colonisation overseas, there must be a
strong policy of Social Reform at home.^
Within a few years. Sir John Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern History
at Cambridge, had published his lectures as The Expansion of England
(1883). This widely-read book, perhaps the key text of Imperialism,
hailed Britain's imperial mission, asserting that the growth of empire was
inevitable. The work was conceived as an effort to influence the young
and to educate future statesmen. It is impossible to deny that Seeley's
effort was, in the short term, an immense success.
It is important to realise how successful was the appeal of Imperial-
ism, on every level from the crude popular slogan to the sophisticated in-
tellectual defence, i f one is to grasp how initially unfashionable and how
courageous were the views of the young men who produced Essays in
Liberalism (1897) and who, two years later, went on to take over The
Speaker. In the relatively brief period between Ruskin's speech and
34
Mafeking night, Imperiahsm, as an intellectual concept and as an ideal,

underwent a more complete corruption than that which, perhaps in-
evitably, touches all or most political creeds and ideals. Yet Imperiahsm
certainly was an ideal and was linked to social reform in figures like M i l -
ner and Joseph Chamberlain, one of far more potent appeal to the young
than the teachings of Gladstonian Liberahsm. As viewed by most of the
Fabian circle of Beatrice Webb (1859-1947), whom, incidentally, Cham-
berlain, the leading Imperialist politician had nearly married, the Boer re-
publics were outmoded, anomalous, futile structures, barring the way to
inevitable and beneficial social, economic and political centralisation and
development. On the Political Right, Milner felt that the Boers in the
Transvaal were "pretty corrupt tyrannies . . . unworthy obstacles in the
way of progress."^
There are hints of something sinister in the generally guarded and

nuanced language of Milner. His "Credo" found among his papers after
his death enunciates "the first great principlefollow the race. . . . We
cannot afford to part with so much of our best blood." ^ He dwells on the
danger to the "hive" i f the "swarms" it throws o f f are lost to it. This
metaphor for the British state recurs interestingly in one of the best stories
of his friend Kipling, "The Mother Hive." These hints become overt in the
"Confession of Faith" that Cecil Rhodes wrote at the outset of his career
in 1877. "Written almost in a style of the cheap novelettes of the day," it
elaborates "the plan for a secret society" of "dedicated fanatics."^ The so-
ciety will minister to the racial pride and power of the "Anglo-Saxons"
whose territorial expansion "serves not only that 'race', but all mankind,
even the 'despicable specimens' brought under British rule." One might
agree that "Rhodes was the greatest of money-spinners, but love of money
was a minor element . . . in his make-up" and that "with great energy
and longer views" he typified his generation: "We were dreamers greatly,
in the man-stifled town/ We yearned beyond the sky-line where the
strange roads go down."^^ What the half-baked "Confession of Faith,"
written with "great care" on the day he "became a member in the Masonic
Order" and not fully pubhshed until 1976, does reveal is the hollowness
of the "dream." Divorced from its romantic appeal, from the literary
power of writers like Kipling or the political sophistication of advocates
like Milner, Imperialism in Rhodes is an ugly, intellectually poverty-
stricken affair. His "immature and naive philosophy," coupled with the
growing financial power that he built up through the De Beers mine
35
where his "nerve never wavered," enabled him, like Robert Maxwell in
our own day, to make an empty noise for a while in the world:
Africa is still lying ready for us and it is our duty to take it. It is
our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory. . . .
More territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race,
more of the best, the most human, the most honourable race the
world possesses. ^3
It is hard to imagine any reader of the Confession of Faith disputing

Chesterton's later view that the racial ideas for which Rhodes "ruined re-
publics" were "babyish."
In the mid-1890s, before the Speaker began its crusade, what

Chesterton in after years was to dismiss as a mere fad dominated intellec-
tual and articulate opinion through almost all its manifestations, overtly
Imperialist or Fabian, Darwinian or neo-HegeUan. A young man like
Chesterton, reared in a pleasant i f somewhat sheltered Liberal house and,
by training and instinct, valuing the individual and the small unit, national
or communal, felt politically homeless. He felt so intellectually smothered
by the prevaihng ideology that he was almost unable, for some time, to
formulate an alternative to it. Indeed, to most of Chesterton's contempo-
raries during his youth, there seemed no alternative to the expansion and
the larger units of Sociahsm or Imperiahsm. For Rosebery, a year before
he briefly became Prime Minister in 1894, the best electoral hope for the
Liberal Party itself was a wholesale conversion to Imperialism: "We have
to look forward beyond the chatter of platforms and the passions of party
to the future of the raceto take our share in the partition of the world."
Chesterton's feeling in the mid-1890s is a measure of the degree to which
authentic Liberahsm seemed to have lost the battle of ideas. In his Autobi-
ography, he writes:
But nothing in my heart or my imagination went with these wide

generahsations: and something inside me was always subcon-
sciously burrowing in the very opposite direction. . . . Until
something happened in the outer world which not only woke me
from my dreams like a thunder-clap, but like a lightning-flash re-
vealed me to myself. In 1895 came the Jameson Raid.^^
The train of events which enabled Chesterton to articulate his new found
consciousness in The Speaker began in the Spring of 1897, when a young
Yorkshireman of well-to-do background and distinguished Oxford career,
F.W. Hirst (1873-1953) induced his friends Belloc, Phillimore, Simon,
36
and Hammond "to enter into partnership for the purpose of writing a
small volume of essays." Hirst then persuaded Sir T. Wemyss Reid,
manager of Cassell, and current Editor of The Speaker, to publish the
book.
If the rise of Imperiahsm is, at least in part, associated with Milner's
and Rhodes's Oxford of the 1870s, with Ruskin's speech and with the in-
fluence of T.H. Green and his followers, then the reaction against Imperi-
alism grew in the Oxford of the 1890s. I f Milner was "the fine flower of
Oxford culture," then, in Hirst's view, "there were equally fine flowers
who detested his political character." Like Imperialism, the reaction
against it was bound up with personal encounters and influences. In the
Preface to Essays in Liberalism, Hirst, after remarking that while "six
years ago Undergraduate Oxford tended to be Tory or Socialist," since
that time Liberahsm had come to absorb "most of those who care for po-
htical discussions." He went on to add that, as far as the causes of this
were personal, "Mr Belloc had been the leading spirit."
We had drawn inspiration from his kindling, eloquence, his prac-
tical enthusiasm, and a companionship in which we had all found
a Liberal education,
Many accounts, including Chesterton's, suggest why the young Belloc
might have become the centre of a circle of hero-worshipping fellow stu-
dents. In the words of one biographer, "at twenty-three, he seemed strik-
ingly old and his experiences had been extraordinarily exotic." 21 The un-
dergraduate magazine Isis described the intellectual energy, political
maturity and eloquence of Belloc's speeches at the Oxford Union, his
"consistent view of almost every subject, based on intelligent and broad
principles." 22
It is doubtful, however, that Belloc's inspiring personaUty would
have been enough to re-launch The Speaker, to which he was to be a dis-
tinguished contributor, if it had not been for Hirst. Far less vivid than Bel-
loc, Hirst was far more practical and businesslike. After paying tribute to
Belloc's role in creating the climate which produced Essays in Liberalism,
he wryly added "when we had safely harvested the other essays, Belloc's
was unfinished. . . . We could only surmise that it had been lost at sea."^^
Although a simple and even limited man. Hirst had the strength of pur-
pose that sometimes accompanies simplicity and limitation. A close
friend, Gilbert Murray, later recalled how, as a young man. Hirst "might
be called rigid and unbending" or even "old-fashioned"; how he would
37
not yield "to any pressure of interest or popularity," being "always alert
against the false hghts of national prejudice." ^4 Sustained by the strong
traditions of his family, who had been close and friendly supporters of
Richard Cobden, Hirst was, in another friend's words "a disciple of Adam
Smith," a strict Gladstonian Liberal, "always critical of high spending by
the government," especially on armaments.^^ In later life, he maintained
his position with stolid obstinacy, denouncing Keynsian economics and
the Welfare State or "Beveridge Hoax" as he preferred to call it.
The divergence between Hirst and his friend and collaborator,
Lawrence Hammond, epitomises the increasingly incompatible tendencies
of early twentieth-century Liberahsm. J.L. Hammond (1872-1949), a "de-
viatist" from the "fearless rectitude" of his friend's position, tried to "re-
mind the Liberal Party of what it had omitted here-to-for, the actual wel-
fare of the working class."^6 While Hirst as editor of The Economist
(1907-1916) was to uphold "sound finance" as a "stern and unbending
Cobdenite." 27 Hammond, a gentler character, who, in the words of the
Dictionary of National Biography, "never made a personal enemy or lost
a friend," in collaboration with his wife Barbara, produced their great tril-
ogy on the human cost of the Industrial Revolution: The Village Labourer
(1911), The Town Labourer (1917) and The Skilled Labourer (1919).
Chesterton later caught the pecuhar fineness of Hammond's mind and
character when describing his former Editor's Radical concerns: "No in-
dignation could have been at once more fiery and more delicate in the
sense of discriminating." Nevertheless, any account of The Speaker
must emphasise the role of Hirst. It was he who made the contacts and se-
cured the funds to start the new version of the periodical. He combined "a
genius for friendship" with an air of premature maturity seeming, when
he was twenty, like a man in his thirties. Such qualities were useful in
deahng with somewhat touchy older men. Hirst's most important contact
was with John Morley. Morley (1838-1923), Gladstone's favourite col-
league as Chief Secretary for Ireland (1886 and 1892-1895) was later the
Grand Old Man's biographer. Morley liked Essays in Liberalism when
Hirst sent him a copy, and he invited the young man to help him go
through the Gladstone papers at Hawarden. "Honest John" Morley the
"embodiment of philosophical Liberahsm," author of the standard work
on Cobden and unswerving guardian of the mid-Victorian Liberal ortho-
doxy, was a difficult and prickly character. In Chesterton's view, he was
"a great and good man but not what his admirers thought him."3i A l -
though widely regarded as an ascetic in Edwardian high society since he
38
rarely drank anything but champagne at meals, Morley's air of relentless

high-mindedness irritated many people. One Liberal Prime Minister,
Campbell-Bannerman found Morley's touchiness and vanity offensive,^^
while another, Asquith, encouraged his butler to imitate "Honest John"
for the amusement of dinner guests.Hirst and Morley got on well, how-
ever, and Morley put his young friend in touch with William McEwan,
the wealthy owner of The Edinburgh Evening News.
Hammond and Hirst had already discussed the possibility of taking
over The Speaker. This periodical had been founded in 1886, when The
Spectator, a philosophical review which, under R.H. Hutton's distin-
guished editorship, had "gradually crept into the homes and affections of
liberally-minded people all over the country," ^5 turned against Gladstone
over Irish Home Rule. Although The Speaker had been designed as a
counterblast, it never acquired influence or a wide circulation. In fact, it
had been running at a loss for some years. In Hirst's view, the problem
was that Sir T. Wemyss Reid, who had been editing it, was not "of the
same calibre" as Hutton, a distinguished writer still remembered for such
works as Essays Philosophical and Literary (1871) and Criticism on Con-
temporary Thought (1894). Wemyss Reid, by contrast, was simply an
amiable businessman: "He had not much philosophy outside party poli-
tics, nor had he any scholarship or wide knowledge or literature." This
comment is interesting for the light it throws on the kind of periodical
Hirst and Hammond were hoping to produce. What they envisaged was a
magazine of serious intellectual ambitions and of a high cultural level.
Their hopes would be groundless, however, without adequate funding;
and Sir John Brunner who had been baling The Speaker out "though a
wealthy and generous man, had become tired of supplying the large
deficit." 37
Such was the situation on the morning of June 20, 1899 when Hirst
made his way to McEwan's house at 16 Charles Street, Berkeley Square.
Fortunately, Morley had prepared the ground for his visit well, as Hirst
gratefully acknowledged:
"J.M."so I wrote to my father that evening"had given me an
excellent character as a Cobdenite who believes in the things we
too care about."
Discovering Hirst came from Huddersfield, McEwan who received him
"in a beautiful room hung with valuable paintings" reminisced about the
misery of the working classes there half a century before. With his "white
39
beard and fine features," McEwan proved to be representative of those

sound old Liberal values which Belloc later enribodied in Emmanuel Bur-
den's friend Mr. Abbott. After he had drawn out Hirst's opinions on for-
eign policy and had found him "generally satisfactory," McEwan gave the
young man a cheque for a thousand pounds: "It seemed a prodigious sum
to me and I had some difficulty in concealing my e m o t i o n s . " T h i s
"providential accretion" to their resources enabled Hirst and Hammond to
take over The Speaker. As Hirst later wrote home, "Hammond almost
wept for joy when I told him."
Hirst's tact eased the transition. Sir Wemyss Reid, with whom he had
already had dealings over Essays in Liberalism "thought well" of him.
Luckily, too. Sir John Brunner had "an affectionate regard" for Ham-
mond who had been acting as his Political Secretary. This meant that the
previous Editor and previous owner of The Speaker could be detached
from the paper without unpleasantness. Reid's incompetence and failure
were camouflaged in the new management's first Editorial to the way in
which he had "carried on the struggle with a loyalty to friends and a cour-
tesy to opponents which have earned the respect of both."
Preparations were carried on energetically throughout the summer

and on Saturday afternoon, September 30, 1899, the first Editorial Com-
mittee of the new Speaker met. In August, the Boers, under pressure
agreed to the five-year-residence qualification for the franchise which the
British had been demanding on behalf of the Uitlanders. The Boers asked
in return that Britain should refrain from further interference in the affairs
of the Transvaal: "The British refused to do this and negotiations broke
down." This intransigence underlined the fact that since the Jameson
Raid, the British government had been intent on gaining control of the
Transvaal. At this time, there was increasing suspicion in political circles
of British bad faith. On September 25, Morley remarked to Hirst that he
had had "a private letter from Sir William Harcourt who said that, i f the
government and Milner really want peace, Milner's diplomacy is impossi-
bly bad.'"^^ At the same time, Henry Labouchere in Truth had been expos-
ing the profits, realised by Cecil Rhodes and his friends when they had
unloaded Chartered Shares on credulous investors between July, 1895 and
March, 1896. Labouchere's estimate of Rhodes's profit was 546,376 and
of Alfred Beit's as 459,520colossal sums in the money values of the
time.42 Such activities provide a context for Belloc's and Chesterton's at-
tacks on South African financiers and help to explain the tone of bitter
40
contempt adopted by some opponents of the Boer War. They saw the War
as having been brought about by sordid profit-seeking manipulations.
Such revelations made the first meeting of The Speaker's new Edito-
rial Board an exciting one. By Hirst's account, Belloc dominated the oc-
casion and inspired his friends:
Belloc was in great form, very eloquent. We decided on an

amended trumpet blast. The best part of it is his. It is abstract but
forcible, with a refreshing note of idealism which will, I hope,
mark the paper.
It is worth noting some features of this new Speaker team with which
Chesterton was to make contact through his school friends Bentley and
Oldershaw who had "figured prominently" ^4 in the group connected with
Hirst at Oxford. The most obvious and significant point about the group
was their youth. As Chesterton's friend, E.C. Bentley remarked of his
time on The Speaker: "Some of our elders, at a loss for something more
intelligent to say in the way of criticism, had the idea of calling it The
Boy's Own Paper."Perhaps the most obvious practical result of this
youthfulness was a noticeable high-spiritedness in The Speaker's material.
Hirst's comment on his University circle that "it was in the province of
wit and humour that Oxford shot ahead of its rivals" is supported by the
striking number of skits and lampoons that the magazine contains. At
times, The Speaker's attitude to leading Imperialists is one of school-boy
derision. The issue of October 7, for example, contains a spoof interview
widi Kiphng. The supposed interviewer finds himself in "a richly fur-
nished room surrounded by curious relics of travel." The "skulls which
adorned the walls" are probably a reference to Lord Kitchener's recent
barbarous treatment of the Mahdi's skull after Omdurman. The "inter-
viewer"
observed that any natural emotion they might cause was height-
ened by a few tasteful hues such as actors paint upon their faces.
Thus one appeared to grin beyond the ordinary, another was fit-
ted with false eyes and that peculiarly devilish expression upon
which genius loves to repose in moments of leisure.
The laureate of Imperialism is, in fact, a somewhat unpleasant school-boy

whose crude jokes recall those of his Stalky and Co reviewed in The
Speaker a week later (October 14). "Kipling" reads his visitor some of his
own verses and comments on them:
41
In a deep voice he intoned the foUowing with a shghtly nasal ac-

cent which lent it a pecuharly individual quahty:
"I'm sorry for Mister Naboth

I'm sorry to make him squeak
But the Lord above made me strong
In order to pummel the weak.
That chorus which appHes to one of the most important problems

of the Empire, contains nearly all the points that illustrate 'How
it is done'. . . . For so, it seems to me. Heaven (here he reverently
raised the billy-cock hat he is in the habit of wearing in his draw-
ing room) 'governs the world and we who are Heaven's lieu-
tenants can only follow upon the same hues. I will not insist upon
the extent to which the religious training I enjoyed in early youth
helped to cast me in that great mould.'"
A squib like this should be seen in context. Above all, perhaps. Liberals in
1899 needed cheering up. They needed to be shown that they could see
the dominant ideology as ridiculous. Apart from the serious intellectual
objections to Imperialism, there was something grotesque and fantastical
in its characteristic discourses, the appeals to manifest destiny or Divine
Plans for the Anglo-Saxon Race, the worship of force, the jaunty sleazi-
ness. ("Where you get the true lilt is in the music-hall," as "Kiphng" tells
his "interviewer" in this skit).
The Speaker contains plenty of cogent argument and polemic of polit-

ical and economic analysis, not to speak of its coverage of the arts. Above
all, however, its contributors enjoyed themselves. They were happy war-
riors. E.C. Bentley catches The Speaker atmosphere, recalling how, when
reviewing books for the paper, he picked out that "triumph of original hu-
mour" Ernest Bramah's The Wallet of Kai Lung, and presented Chesterton
with a copy. Bentley writes: "The sharing of new enthusiasms was a large
part of the pleasure of lie for us in those days. For some time afterwards
the letters we exchanged were written in the style of Kai Lung."^^ A letter
Hirst's sister wrote home in 1901 catches some of the same high-spirited-
ness. In a "spirited account" of a tea-party at her brother's flat she writes:
" I found G.K. Chesterton quite delightful and we talked more nonsense in
a quarter of an hour than I ever heard before."Some of The Speaker's
comic material, however, is mordant and sophisticated, making a serious
intellectual point, as well as a joke. After the Boer War had broken out
(October 11, 1899), British journalists, reporting from the various battle-
42
fields, attempted to convey their impressions to the public by what

Chesterton called
that extraordinary art of "word painting" which has poisoned the
work of so many war-correspondents, the literary lunacy which
hunts the wrong word as simple people hunt the right and avoids
the vulgarity of speaking of crafty generals and bursting shells by
the simple expedient of speaking of crafty shells and bursting
generals ("Our Reasonable Imperialist," November 10, 1900).
The Imperialist journalistic prose of the day of which Chesterton writes

was probably an effort, by less talented men, to imitate Kipling's extreme
meticulousness and his constant labouring after the fresh and the surpris-
ing. As one critic aptly put it, "in virtually all Kipling's productions, there
is a guaranteed minimum of interest deriving from the sheer written-ness
of the artefact." 49
The Speaker contributions, in some of their spoofs and parodies,

showed an awareness of the connotations of language, of the relation of
style of discourse to the moral and emotional life of individuals and soci-
eties. It would be easy to connect such an awareness to some current criti-
cal preoccupations and to describe it in some recent critical terminology.
Belloc's parody of contemporary war-correspondents' sub-Kiplingesque
prose ("Napoleon at Austerlitz," September 7, 1901) amounts, in such ter-
minology to a "deconstruction of the discourse of Imperialist ideology."
The parody, "Napoleon at Austerlitz," supposedly taken from a recent
academic work The Divine Mandate of the Ruling Race by Thomas
Meale, begins:
The Emperor stood by a little knot of withered grass which
danced and snickered in the faint dawn and the cold, for a slight
wind was shuffling along the metallic frost of the hill. He looked
over the rolling dip at the great masses of Austrian and Russian
humanity that patched the indeterminate landscape beyond like
ploughed fields in a plain. His eyes seized their cavalry and shut
upon them like a gin, capturing them even before the ranks
closed. Had you found him standing there silent and reverent in
the growing morning, you would have known yourself in the
aureole and splendour of the most terrible force that heaven has
yet devised for the accomplishment of its justice, the Practical
Ideahst.
The failed attempts at mots justes (grass that "snickers" or wind that
"shuffles") cannot disguise the lack of actuality ("great masses of human-
43
ity" and "indeterminate landscape") in what seems, i f anything, a South

African plain with little knots of withered grass. There is a contrast be-
tween the "European's" superficial energy and masterfulness (eyes that
"seized "shuf and "capture'') and the emptiness of an egotism wrapped
up in cloudy, would-be metaphysical rhetoric ("aureole and splendour"
"terrible force" "Heaven . . . for the accomplishment of its justice")
The phrase "Practical Idealist" resonates against the cult, at that time, of
"Efficiency" and the historicist ambitions of Hegelianism, fashionable in
the University circles that "Thomas Meales" presumably frequents. It is
perhaps worth noting parenthetically that several members of The Speaker
group expressed contempt for the prevailing Hegelianism. Belloc lam-
pooned Caird in Lambkin's Remains, while Hirst remarked that one of
Caird's lectures "cured" him of the "obscurity and verbiage of the Oxford
Hegelianism." 50 These young mens' reaction against their elders' (and
sometimes teachers') fashionable philosophy with its talk of entities and
opposites blending and merging and losing their individuality in "higher"
synthesis, language repellent to Chesterton's deepest instincts and prefer-
ences. It was a reaction against ideas which, although they may have been
"more in keeping with the perceived needs of the time" seemed to these
young Oxford men to be marked by vagueness, illogicality and antinomi-
anism. Their attitude is typified by Belloc's comment in a review of a col-
lection of childrens' stories (The Education of Heroes, November 11,
1899):
To every child, I had almost said to every honest man, extremes
are pleasing, and are the symbols of that rude difference between
right and wrong which it is our fashion to slur over in the great
modem club we have made of life.
Belloc's parody "Napoleon at Austerlitz" is interesting, however, for
another reason besides its capturing of the war-correspondents' styhstic
ineptitudes. Austerlitz was a great military exploit, a triumph of strategic
and tactical skills, of courage and intelhgence of the highest order against
considerable odds. This point remains valid, whatever one's general view
of war. To juxtapose Austerlitz with the "exploits" of British generals
whose much larger and better equipped armies were unable, at this stage,
to defeat the Boers is intrinsically ludicrous. On a more serious level, the
juxtaposition raises questions which are among the chief preoccupations
of The Speaker, questions about the tme nature of, and the justifications
for, war, and for heroism and patriotism. In Belloc's view. Napoleon was
fighting for France and for the principles of the French Revolution against
44
the larger armies of the continental despots. By contrast, Imperialism or

"the ruling mandate of the master-race" is an immoral sham. "Napoleon at
Austerhtz" distinguishes between just and unjust wars, between true and
false heroics.
Shortly after the beginning of the Boer War, H.A.L. Fisher, a young
New College Don, later an eminent historian (in fact, the only non-
Catholic historian that Belloc respected produced an article which
marked out The Speaker's distinctive position on patriotism and the war.
Fisher's piece ("Patriotism," November 11, 1899) reviews a pacifist book.
Patriotism and Empire by J.M. Robertson. For Robertson, Fisher says,
"patriotism is a pestilential microbe which should be scorched and killed
by rational morality." By seeing in patriotism only a "rationalisation of
self-exaltation," however, Robertson is agreeing with "some Tory prints"
that "patriotism is identical with militant Imperialism." Authentic patrio-
tism is not a "perverse pleasure in thinking that the mass of mankind will
forever be inferior in wit, wisdom and well-being to one particular na-
tion." Rather it is a natural, healthy instinct. Fisher writes:
Nature teaches us in Burke's language to "love the small pla-

toon" in which chance has placed us. We can act best by loving
that which is nearest and by believing in it.
The article is important because it marks out distincdy the particular posi-
tion that most of The Speaker's contributors were to take regarding the
Boer War. The Speaker's position was non-pacifist. It did not oppose war
in general. It challenged the rightness and necessity of a particular war.
An article by the Reverend A . M . Fairbairn, Principal of Mansfield Col-
lege, Oxford ("The Religious Conscience and the War," November 11,
1899) opposes the conflict on the basis of the long-standing widely held
Christian belief in the "just war." He writes:
Now I have no abstract hatred of war. It is not good but there are
worse things. . . . There are occasions when the wise man would
prove himself a fool or a knave if he shunned it.
Clearly, however, this is not such an occasion, for he continues: "Now

was the war a moral and mortal necessity for our English state?" Only
such a necessity could have justified the fighting. In his view, we have
tumbled into a needless, foolish and discreditable conflict. He concludes:
One thing is obvious: the men who are responsible for the blun-
ders which have so sullied our good name and for the loss of the
45
lives that have so impoverished our people have proved them-

selves without competence to see this thing through.
The Speaker's patriotic, non-pacifist, anti-War stance was crucial to

Chesterton's involvement with the paper. A t the time, he felt that "the
Boers were right i n f i g h t i n g : not that anybody must be wrong i n
fighting." 53 As a result, he found that he "belonged to a minority within a
minority." He writes: "Indeed I do not know whether the Jingo or the
Pacifist found us more offensive and objectionable." E.C. Bentley re-
called that his friends on The Speaker were heartily ashamed of the state
of majority British public opinion at the start of the Boer War:
It was an impatient, an intolerant, a contemptuous, an arrogant
and overbearing temper, such as we should never have dreamed
of entertaining towards a people we believed capable of standing
up to us. 54
The Speaker's team felt this shame about their country precisely because
they loved their country so much. As Bentley put it, "To be a patriot is not
in itself a passport to happiness." ^5 He singles out Chesterton especially
as being "deeply unhappy" about the war: "He loved the Enghsh people
with a more deep and understanding love than is within the compass of
most of us." 56 For Chesterton, the intellectual significance of working on
The Speaker lay in his being both enabled and forced to define and to de-
fend his position, that of a "minority within a minority." For a time
eclipsed, it was nevertheless a view with a long intellectual and theologi-
cal pedigree. It must undeniably have helped, also, that the other colum-
nists on The Speaker had been articulating such a view from the outset.
" A Denunciation of Patriotism" (May 18, 1901) is one of Chester-
ton's most important articles on the War and on the love of country. The
piece, a masterly moral disquisition, elaborates points made by Fisher and
Fairbairn. Interesting as an early example of Chesterton's intellectual
strengths and of his style, it is interesting, too, as revealing what he shared
with other writers for The Speaker, "A Denunciation of Patriotism" is a
review of Patriotism and Ethics by John Goddard. Like the Robertson
column that Fisher had noted earlier, Goddard's book, in Chesterton's
words a "proposal for the dethronement of the whole virtue of patrio-
tism," is typical of a whole body of pacifist or near-pacifist response to
the South African War. Chesterton welcomes the "shock of a logical chal-
lenge," declaring that "there is considerable value in the man who says
even the wrong thing at the right time." In " A Denunciation of Patriotism"
46
he has the air of a man candidly working out his own attitude, delighted
for the opportunity to look at first principles. Courteously but firmly,
Chesterton points out that Goddard's attitude to patriotism is a provincial
one. In order to examine the love of country, it would have been neces-
sary for him to take some great theory of patriotism and to explore it sys-
tematically. When men of the calibre of "Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Milton"
and others have written on the subject, it looks perverse to select one of
Chamberlain's speeches for "detailed study." In answer to the question
"What has Imperialism to do with patriotism?" Chesterton says that "pal-
try colonial squabble" like the South African War is not a "great trial of
English patriotism," but "a vulgar and dirty experiment in a comer." This
opening point, "the primary and superficial objection to Mr. Goddard" is a
small instance of one of the most notable and long-standing characteris-
tics of Chesterton's mind. Above all, perhaps, he had the habit of wide
and fruitful generalisation across broad stretches of human history and ex-
periencea readiness and an ability to set the local and temporary phe-
nomenon or fad in a much wider philosophical and intellectual context. It
is likely that such a habit of generalisation was an innate intellectual char-
acteristic, but it was a characteristic shared with other members of the
Speaker group. It may indeed have been this similarity of intellectual tem-
per which prompted "Hammond and his friends of the new Speaker" to
offer Chesterton his "first regular job." I.E. Allen recalled an incident
which catches this particular quality of The Speaker's columnists:
I remember Gilbert Murray and J.L. Hammond dining with us

when they were writing a small book of essays on Imperialism.
Murray borrowed my Thucydides to show us a sentence which
he suggested as a text for the book: "The cause of all these evils
(civil war in the Greek cities) was empire pursued through cov-
etousness and ambition."
The young men who ran and contributed to The Speaker were highly
cultivated as well as highly intelligent. They were particularly well-read
in the fields of literature and history. Such qualities show most obviously,
of course, in the magazine's coverage of the arts. To choose one example:
"Quo Musa TendisT by F.Y. Eccles (October 21, 1899) might deserve a
place in any anthology of critical extracts on the beginnings of Modernist
poetry. Surveying the tendencies of poetry at the time, Eccles, whom
Chesterton recalled as "largely the literary advisor "of The Speaker,
shrewdly notes such features as "The wilful perpetration of doggerel," and
"the enfranchisement of unaccepted topics," as well as
47
the return to rehgious symbohsm, a new aloofness, a passion for

the impalpable, sometimes associated with a (perhaps con-
sciously) indiscriminate predilection for tradition and arbitrary
magic.
Eccles's piece, with its awareness of the populism of Kipling and Henley,
of the symbolisme practised by Yeats in his earlier work and theorised by
Symons, and of the advent, before the name, of Georgian poetry ("a re-
handling of humble and especially rural life with a franker grasp than
Tennyson's") is typical of much of The Speaker's alert and discriminating
commentary on the arts.
The paper's high cultural level had another more specific effect. As
troubled patriots. The Speaker's contributors were aware that the cause of
the South African adventure was a cultural and intellectual malaise as
well as a political and financial intrigue. In order to be fully understood.
Imperialism needed to be considered on every level and in its widest bear-
ings. Accordingly, we find The Speaker making room for a prolonged dis-
cussion in a number of articles, of the defects of British education. For ex-
ample, an article by G.F. Bradby, "The Neglect of Modem History and
English Literature at the Public Schools" (October 11, 1902) traces "most
of the blundering cmelty that has stultified our South African policy" to a
death of imagination. It was want of imagination that made it possible to
"talk calmly about a policy of devastation that has had no parallel since
the Thirty Year's War," about the buming of Boer farms and about the
concentration camps. Imagination is a "natural gift," but the germ might
be nurtured under a system which encouraged the study of "English
thought and English literature." Bradby goes on to say:
At all events, we might be spared the ludicrous spectacle of an
intelligent nation largely unfamiliar with the ideas of its greatest
writers and thinkers, and denouncing as un-English the thoughts
of Milton, Byron, Wordsworth and Burke.
This criticism of a society accepting the shoddy goods of Imperialism be-

cause it is ignorant of the true sources of its national greatness is the
theme of an article that readers of Chesterton are likely to know in his col-
lection of essays. The Defendant under the title of "In Defence of Patrio-
tism." The piece first appeared in The Speaker as " A Gap in English Edu-
cation" (May 4, 1901). Substantially, Chesterton's article makes the same
point as Bradby's piece. However, Chesterton argues cheerfully and tren-
chantly, with homely examples rather than with a fretful eamestness. He
48
offers short, pungent sentences instead of the long-winded, unmemorable,

standard "educated" English of the day:
But all this vast heritage of intellectual glory is kept from our
schoolboys like a heresy; and they are left to live and die in the
dull and infantile type of patriotism which they learnt from a box
of tin soldiers.
Many articles in The Speaker return to this subject of true national
pride, contrasting real identity and achievements with the sham greatness
of power and empire. An unsigned piece, "The Moral Value of an Oppo-
sition" (May 3, 1902) is typical of many such laments for an authentic pa-
triotism:
Whereas from the days of Voltaire's dialogue with the Thames
bargee, Englishmen were chiefly proud of their country because
they thought, righdy or wrongly, that she was a free country; they
are proud of it on many grounds, but rarely on this. They have a
great EmpireThey rule the seas. . . . They represent all that is
most finished in administrative science. . . . We admire England
because it produced such types as Lord Milner whose idea of
strength is vicarious violence or Mr. Balfour to whom all truth is
equally error and all conviction equally stupid.
The majority of those contributing to The Speaker share a conviction that

that appeal of Imperialism, to power, grandeur, efficiency, modernity, his-
toric missions and exotic landscapes can be countered only by another
kind of appeal. This appeal would evoke the particular and precious tradi-
tions of Englishness, of the spiritual riches of English literature, of the
freedoms and decencies evolved in a specific community. This conviction
forms the basis of one of The Speaker's most persistent and strongest
lines of argument. The argument gains much of its force by demonstrating
that it is possible to defend another community without denigrating one's
own. In fact, it is only possible to admire, to respect or to support the le-
gitimate rights of another nation (or for that matter, of another religion,
philosophy or cultural tradition) because one admires, respects and sup-
ports one's own. One must love oneself in order to understand what such
love means. Such an authentic patriotism dissipates any supposed duty of
self-hatred, an emotion which may be powerfully felt but which, in the
normal course of affairs, is felt by very few. In this respect. The Speaker s
achievement contrasts with some intellectual developments in Britain and
in the United States. As an interesting book recently suggests,the only
way to champion other cultures is through a chronic, loquacious reviling
49
of European traditions and by presenting the rich, contradictory language

of European literature as a mere repressive Eurocentric monolith.
Chesterton's " A Denunciation of Patriotism" argues, surely rightly,

that it is only through a love of one's own country that one can understand
the anguish of others when their country is threatened: " I f Mr. Goddard
does not think patriotism a precious thing, his sympathy with Boer resis-
tance is inexplicable. . . . I f patriotism has no value a foreign yoke has no
injustice." I f national frontiers are meaningless and arbitrary, then it is no
worse to take a Boer farm from the Transvaal than it would be to "transfer
a particular street from Fulham to Hammersmith." Anticipating The
Napoleon of NOtting Hill, published three years later, Chesterton adds that
i f "there was a passionate patriotic feeling in Hammersmith. . . . I myself
should thoroughly sympathise with Hammersmith, entertaining as I prob-
ably should, similar convictions about South Kensington." This essay, " A
Denunciation of Patriotism," differs from other and later developments of
the same arguments, such as "The Flag of the World" chapter in Ortho-
doxy. In the Speaker piece, Chesterton treats Christianity as a "dim and
shifting symbol" of spiritual aspirations to which "we all rise in our high-
est moments." As such, it has nothing to do with "practical politics or ma-
terial privileges." He continues: "It does not and cannot have anything to
do with those working loyalties which we have to preserve in order to pre-
serve our mode of life." In "The Flag of the World," he emphatically re-
jects such a division between high spiritual aspiration and practical day-
to-day concerns. Men "gained their morality by guarding their religion.
They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the shrine and became
courageous." ^9 Both the earlier article and the later chapter stress the
value of the nearest and most local attachments. " A Denunciation of Patri-
otism" declares "we assert our family against our fellow-countrymen, our
country against humanity, humanity against nature."
For Chesterton, there is little force in the argument that patriotism has
produced wars and suffering: "Mankind have always been ready to pay a
great price for what they really thought necessary; catalogues of the dead
and wounded only show how necessary they thought it." In his view, man
has been prepared to suffer and to inflict suffering for the sake of Liberty
or of Christianity. I f an abstract love of humanity ever became popular,
that love too would produce bloodshed. Indeed, as the activities of anar-
chists and "dynamiters" prove, it already has. The cruelties done in the
name of various human ideals "do not arise either from love of country or
50
love of men, but simply from folly, intemperance, vagueness and the heart
of man deceitful above all things."
Like other human ideals and instincts, patriotism must be judged

against a common human standard of ethics, whose universality, across
ages and civilisations gives it the status of Natural Law. Many contribu-
tors to The Speaker assert the existence and importance of these recog-
nised ethical norms which they see as threatened by the intellectual ten-
dencies of the time. For instance, the well-known economist, L . T .
Hobhouse, in "The Ethical Reaction" (February 8, 1902) detects an unfor-
tunate influence in "the stream of German idealism" which has been dif-
fused from Oxford "over the academical world of Great Britain." Oxford
Hegelianism is "one expression of the general reaction against the plain
human, rationahstic way of looking at life and its problems." Fashionable
Idealism always has some "derogatory epithet" for the "humble, prosaic
inductions and deductions of the plain man," yet such inductions and de-
ductions express "fundamental decencies". They sustain the "philosophy
of humanitarianism." Dangerously, Hegelianism tends to "soften the
edges of all hard contrasts between right and wrong, truth and falsity, to
weaken the bases of reason." Witii a subtle intellectual snobbery, Oxford
Idealists always assume that "for everything there is an inner and more
spiritual interpretation" understood by the elite: "Hence, vulgar and stupid
beliefs can be held with a refined and enlightened meaning."
There is a strong similarity between Hobhouse's misgivings and

those which Chesterton expressed elsewhere, with far greater wit, point
and energy. This similarity is additional evidence that Chesterton's
thought and style were developed in and through sympathetic company.
Both thought and style expressed, or more properly extrapolated, the val-
ues of a group with which, for a while, he was associated. It is interesting
to compare Hobhouse's article with Chesterton's "Shevolution" (Septem-
ber 7, 1901): Chesterton's piece derives its odd title from its argument,
which anticipates the point made three years later in The Napoleon ofNot-
ting Hill, that since human history is characterised by "inscrutable sud-
denness and vivacity," therefore "Man is a woman." His "Shevolution"
robustly asserts that moral values are universal: "Civilisations which have
never crossed each other's path . . . have not differed greatly in morahty."
He goes on to say that: " I f we could penetrate to the most faded scripture
and forgotten god, we should find. . . that they inculcate the truisms of
judgement and mercy." Such a confidence that "there neyer was a cult of
51
tyranny" or a civilisation "where men were canonised for destroying hfe"

forms a basis for condemning current Imperialist admiration, often arm-
chair of vicarious, for ruthless force.
Such a position had several controversial and political advantages.

Although honourable, consistent and articulate, the purely pacifist view of
the Boer War was bound, like Pacifism at almost all times, to have only a
very limited appeal. Although impressive within its own field, the attack
that some leading economists were making on the South African adven-
ture was perhaps too specialised for a wider pubhc. It is tme that Lenin
took over most of the analyses and conclusions of J.A. Hobson's Imperi-
alism (1902), giving them a wide i f disastrous effect. It is also true that
the New Liberal economists are represented in The Speaker. For example,
J.A. Hobson asks "What are we fighting for?" (January 6, 1900) and an-
swers the question raised in his title, "For a small confederacy of intema-
tional finances operating through a kept press." In "The Political Methods
of the Outlanders" (December 2, 1899), he speaks of the "unscmpulous
ingenuity" of a political pressure group of which "all the really active
members are closely connected with the mining industry." Unfortunately,
Hobson's arguments are partly vitiated by his tone of bitter contempt for
the gullible masses, stupid victims of the financiers' frauds. His comment
in a pamphlet The Psychology of Jingoism (1901) is typical: "Vain glory
is a characteristic which a jingo-ridden people shares with the child and
the savage." The Hobson of his articles in The Speaker is recognisably
the Hobson of Chesterton's vivid pen-portrait in his Autobiography with
"gaunt figure and keen and bitter countenance." What "did faintly irri-
tate" Chesterton about Hobson and other New Liberal economists was
their "negative" and "nagging" tone. They seemed narrow-minded and
lacking in imagination. He contrasts Hobson's carping at one anti-War
meeting with Cunningham-Graham's vision of the tragedy of empire in
which "brave and brilliant men had often served with double and doubtful
result."
There is something of this sense of human grandeur and tragedy in

Chesterton's " A Book of War Songs" in The Speaker (June 1, 1901). Re-
viewing a recent anthology, Chesterton argues that to class the poetry of
battle and "the patriot falling with his country's fall" as horrible and fool-
ish glorification of bmtality is to lack an essential "brotherly understand-
ing of the enthusiasms of men." He continues: "It is better even to respect
men's souls and despise their bodies than, after the manner of some hu-
52
manitarians, to respect their bodies and despise their souls." Nevertheless,

a collection of war-songs demands "the most serious and fastidious exam-
ination." War is "a sacred thing," an "ultimate" or last resort, never to be
mentioned, "except in an atmosphere purified from every breath of
frivolity or mahce." It is a profanity to mix it with the "fatuous jingles"
which amuse a people's "imperial leisure." He goes on to say: "The worst
infamy of Jingoism is that it has encouraged man's idle theatrical way of
looking at this sacrifice."
Given The Speaker's conviction that Britain's South African policy

was fundamentally unjust, such a view of war might have been expected
to have prompted contributions to idealise the Boers. As E.C. Bentley
later pointed out, the idealisation of "peoples who were struggling to be
free" was a long-standing Liberal habit: "These Liberals used all to pro-
claim that those to whose cause they were devoted were people to be ad-
mired and loved as well as supported in their fight for liberty. In fact, of
course, the question was one of justice and "the loveable qualities of the
oppressed had nothing to do with the case." Most contributors to The
Speaker, however, do not, in fact, sentimentalise the Boers. It might be
possible, by selective quotation to suggest that the paper did present them
in a romantic light. "The Revival of Liberalism" (May 17, 1902), for ex-
ample, speaks of De Wet as having "kept up a struggle against an over-
whelmingly superior force [and] won for himself the admiration of the
civilised world," in whose eyes he "appears as Garibaldi appeared at one
time to Englishmen." Later, Chesterton remembered how De Wet's ex-
ploits "swelled up within" him "into vague images of a modem resurrec-
tion of Marathon and Thermopylae." Such images provided the inspira-
tion for his "little romance of London," The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
Yet such "vague images" do not colour writing in The Speaker to any ap-
preciable extent. Often, comments on the Boers are of a low-key, hard-
bitten character, almost as i f writers were seeking to avoid a charge of
sentimentality. Chesterton himself remarks, in such a vein, ("A Book of
War Songs," June 1, 1901) that "to the Enghsh of the Middle Ages the
Scots presented an appearance very similar to that of the Boers: they were
poor, obstinate, often cruel, sometimes accused of treachery." He goes on
to make the point that the English ballads treat the Scots with a mag-
naminity "no jingo could reach" rather than to deny the cmelties of which
either Scots or Boers may have been guilty. Another comment in his " A
Gap in English Education" is suggestive. Speaking of the neglect of En-
53
glish literature, that great "heritage of high national sentiment" in our

schools, he remarks that
we have had our punishment in this strange and perverted fact
that, while a unifying vision of patriotism can ennoble bands of
brutal savages and dingy burghers and be the best thing in their
lives we . . . have a patriotism that is the worst in ours.
If, as seems possible, the Boers are the "dingy burghers" mentioned here,
the reference is hardly complimentary. In any case, the point is that patri-
otism can ennoble even relatively unpromising material. The comments
on the Boer leader, Cronje ("Our Reasonable Imperialist," November 10,
1900) are equally unsentimental. Chesterton suggests that it is odd that
Kipling and his "muscular school" do not defend the Boers since Cronje
has committed all Kiphng's "favourite crimes":
Cronje is not filled with moral delicacies and he is by no means a
favourable specimen of the Boer. But comparing . . . the hero of
the tremendous Thermopylae of Paarderberg with Mr. Beit or the
late Mr. Bamato, what can any thinking person say of the transfer
of influence in that country?
Boers like Cronje are not beyond reproach, but whatever their undeniable
faults and limitations, they are vastly preferable "in the broadest human
and anthropological view" to the unscmpulous financiers who mined the
Boer Republics: "Have we realised that these ragged folk are the real
riches of the Transvaal? Can we work the mines of the human gold?"
There is a far more fundamental defect in The Speaker's writing on
South Africa, however, a defect shared with almost all commentators
upon, and parties to, the conflict. Arguably, almost everyone who took
part in the South African War or who wrote about it at the time, was en-
gaged in propagating myths, which ignored the central reality of the situa-
tion. The Imperialists had their Grand Strategy, frustrated for a time by
petty obstinate opponents, but soon to unfold the benevolent history of the
Anglo-Saxon race. The Boers had their own mythos of themselves as a
New Israel holding onto the Promised Land that they had established after
their journey under God's protection through the wilderness. The British
Liberals saw an opportunity to revive the heroic days of their creed, to re-
capture the spirit that led Byron to Missolonghi, that had thrilled at Kos-
suth and at the exploits of Garibaldi, or grieved at the sufferings of Bul-
garia or Armenia. Now, after so many years of doubt and despondency,
they had a cause which needed no false rhetorical colouring. It was self-
54
evident that Cronje was better than Beit or Bamato. The South African
conflict was a superb opportunity to reverse the long-lasting Imperialist
trend and to challenge the Tories. None of these various schemes or myths
touched upon the economic exploitation and political oppression of the
black population who formed the great majority of the inhabitants of
South Africa. A recent instance of such oppression was the introduction
of a hut levy which, from 1887 onwards, forced a man to work, generally
in the mines, in order to get enough money to pay the tax for himself, his
family and his parents. In Cecil Rhodes's view, such measures "removed
Natives from that life of sloth and laziness, teaching them the dignity of
labour."
It is interesting to compare The Speaker's treatment of the concentra-
tion camps with the paper's strikingly few references to the black popula-
tion of South Africa. "The Refuge of Death" (June 15, 1901) is a short, re-
strained but effective article based on the mortality returns for May 6 to
13 in 1901 at the Johannesburg camp "given in order that our readers may
be brought face to face with the facts." This imprisonment of Boer non-
combatants and the "special and barbarous practice of farm-buming are
hideous crimes against the honour of England." The King, because of his
constitutional position, "poor man," is kept busy decorating those who
have been the agents of this "irreparable wrong":
A King may give titles but honour he cannot give.
When the full truth is known,
"Every woman in the land
Will point at them as they stand
They will hardly dare to greet
Their acquaintance in the street."
This firm moral statement ("It is simply an atrocity") contrasts with J.X.
Merriman's comments on "Black South Africa" (September 7, 1901):
*In working up the case against the Boer Govemment which pre-
ceded and led up to the present war, the most was made of the
harsh treatment of coloured men by the police and others, and the
ill-timed vigour of these officials played no small part in influ-
encing public opinion. It is therefore not without some feeling of
cynical amusement that one notices the general consensus of
opinion in the press on the part of these Uitiander philanthropists
as to the excellence of the Transvaal management of natives and
the necessity for its continuance. Beyond question, the contact of
the two races at the mines presents some of the worst evils of the
problem. On the one hand, the large supply of relatively cheap
55
labour prevents the growth of a wholesome European working

class; and, on the other, the native, with wages that for him are
high and no sort of moral control, becomes a brutalised savage
with just enough enlightenment to acquire a few of the white
man's vices in addition to his own.
It is true that many newspaper writers of the period were unable to see the
black population of South Africa as fully human, or to react to cruelties
that the blacks were suffering, as the author of "The Refuge of Death"
very properly responded to the horror of the concentration camps in which
Boer non-combatants were dying. There was very little mention, at the
time, of the concentration camps for black labourers from the Boer farms.
If anything, conditions in these camps were even worse. They were no-
ticed by a few members of religious organisations. A comment by a mis-
sionary, the Reverend W.H.R. Brown, on the Dryharts Camp for blacks is
worth noting: "Between the Dutch and the English they have lost every-
thing and there being no political party interested in their destiny, they
"go to the wall" as the weakest are bound to do." The Speaker was not
at all unusual for its period in the limitation of its vision and awareness.
Yet limitation it undoubtedly was. One feels it even in Chesterton when
he spoils an excellent point with what is, for him, an exceedingly rare
touch of verbal brutality:
What have we done, and where have we wondered, we that have

produced sages that could have spoken with Socrates . . . that we
should talk as i f we had never done anything more intelligent
than found colonies and kick niggers? ("A Gap in English Educa-
tion," May 4, 1901).
The gaps in perception and understanding that writers for The

Speaker shared with the overwhelming majority of their contemporaries
severely restrict, but do not vitiate, the journal's view of the Boer War.
What the Speaker team saw, they saw clearly. They denounced the finan-
cial manipulations of the "Kaffir comer" of the Stock Exchange, manipu-
lation which had been hidden by the romance of Imperialism. They paro-
died and ridiculed the language and demolished the moral and intellectual
pretensions of Empire. They won back from their opponents the claim to
patriotism and cleansed the word and the concept. They defended the
right of a community of small farmers to build States on Bible-based
Calvinism and on seventeenth-century moral values and to defend those
States against those for whom they were merely an obstacle to History,
Progress or Profit. In doing all this, they helped to re-vitalise Liberalism.
56
Sincere as it undeniably was in itself, The Speaker's crusade on be-

half of the Boers was a means to renew Liberalism in Britain. Chesterton
himself contributed "many pugnacious political articles." He wrote also
on a wide variety of topics not immediately connected with pohtics. The
energy, freshness, joie de vivre, the capacity for incisive argument, sharp
distinctions, and for fruitful generalisation that these pieces show are ob-
vious enough. The political or ideological slant of the writing is equally
worth noting. In fresh and arresting terms, the articles re-state Liberal be-
liefs in the freedom, rights and value of each and every individual. For ex-
ample, "The Man in the Street" (April 12, 1902) denies that any general
"Pubhc Opinion" exists: "Opinion is nothing i f it is not an individual mat-
ter, and to talk of the public forming its opinion is like talking of the pub-
lic lighting its pipe." The "Man in the Street" does not exist and the proof
of this is simple: "No one ever met anyone who believed himself to be the
Man in the Street. No one believed anyone else whom he knew intimately
to be the Man in the Street." Articles even less related to politics have
some political subtext. "Mysticism: Its Use and Abuse" (May 31, 1902), a
review of a book by the occultist A.E. Waite, protests against Waite's "ce-
lestial snobbishness" which, "always insisting that only a few can enter
into his feelings, that he writes for a select circle of the initiated," deval-
ues those outside this arbitrary circle, tuming them from unique individu-
als into an anonymous mass. A review of Arthur Machen's Hieroglyphics
(May 3, 1902) invites the reader to "compare the reality of a man's criti-
cism when praising anything with its reality when excluding anything and
we shall all feel how much more we agree with the former than the latter."
Again, the point is the Liberal one of the unique value of the individual
being, person, experience or work of art. " A Sermon on Cheapness"
(March 29, 1902) denies that economy (or as Gladstonian Liberals called
it "Retrenchment") is "a merit for cowards and greasy burgesses." In fact,
there is no quality so tmly romantic as economy: "For our very word for
God means Economy: is not improvidence the opposite of Providence?"
One might argue that Chesterton's views are drawn from the central
doctrines of Christianity rather than from Liberalism. As " A Denunciation
of Patriotism" suggests, however, Chesterton's position, at this very early
stage in his career may not have been, in all particulars, an orthodox
Christian one. In any case, he clearly sees no contradiction between Chris-
tianity and Liberalism. Rather, they bear testimony to the same moral val-
ues, in different languages. "Bacon and G.G.G." (February 22, 1902) is
part of a running battie with a hostile critic on the question of whether Ba-
57
con wrote Shakespeare's works. Chesterton defends his own style which
"G.G.G." had fiercely attacked, in particular the use of paradox. "G.G.G."
deplored Chesterton's statement that "we are the better for every delusion,
the better for every he." Chesterton's response is to hnk Christianity and
Liberalism:
It is the doctrine of Christian holiness that we are the better for
every temptation of the devil. It is the doctrine of Liberalism and
free speech that we are the better for every delusion, the better
for every lie.
Chesterton's writing in The Speaker turns Liberahsm, which might have

seemed a set of antiquated economic dogmas or a posture of ossified rec-
titude like that of John Morley, into a lively philosophy with a point of
view on any topic, however trivial or temporary. It is a political creed
which can answer Toryism or Imperialism effectively. The Liberahsm of
The Speaker can challenge Sociahsm effectively and entertainingly too. A
leading article of September 7, 1901, " A New Alliance" strongly suggests
Chesterton's hand. The piece is a spirited attack on the Fabian dream of
centralised administration by civil servants. This is the kind of administra-
tion against which London was to revolt in The Napoleon of Notting Hill:
We should all sleep more soundly i f Spain had a municipal wash-
house in every village, if Russia had a complete service of public
telephones, i f England had a faultless system of secondary
schools, but we think it better for civilisation that Spaniards
should govern Spain, Russians Russia and Englishmen England,
than that all these several boons should be thrust on these several
countries by a foreign tyranny. . . . Mr. Webb may reply that
these things are a matter of taste and temperament. He may argue
that the man whose eyes glisten and whose heart thumps at the
spectacle of a great Empire tearing down the flags of small na-
tions and tlimsting new wash-houses on them has reached a more
advanced point in the march of civilisation. . . . Human nature
has not moved so fast as Mr. Webb.
Chesterton in The Speaker shows that Liberalism can be fun.

After its moment of influence and even glory, the little paper, always
financially insecure, soon declined. As Hirst recalled:
The Boer War brought us much support and many new readers.
But when the war was over. . . it became more and more difficult
to keep our craft afloat. Much to my regret, the company was liq-
uidated. 67
58
Nevertheless, The Speaker had been able to report the signs of the tuming
of the electoral tide to which the joumal itself had contributed. "The Re-
vival of Liberahsm" (May 17, 1902) hails the end of the "languor and
somnolence of Liberal feeling" and points to the winning back at a by-
election, of Bury, lost since the spht over Home Rule in 1886. Soon their
divisions over free-trade and protection and the controversy over imported
Chinese labour in South Africa were to seal the Tories' fate and to pro-
duce the last great Liberal general-election victory in British history, the
landshde of 1906.
The Speaker might also have taken pride in having helped to launch a
new literary reputation. Earlier in the year, an anonymous writer had
hailed Chesterton's articles in The Speaker repubhshed as The Defendant,
{The Whitehall Review, Febmary 27, 1902) as "so fresh and vigorous, so
original in tiiought and so admirable in conception", and added: " I f it does
not mn through two or three editions rapidly then there is no virtue of hu-
mour left in these decadent days."
1 Donald Read, England 1868-1914 (London, 1979), p. 322.

2 Donald Read, England 1868-1914, p. 323.
^ G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (1913; rpt. London, 1947), p.
128.
^ J.E. Wrench, Alfred, Lord Milner: The Man of No Illusions (London, 1958), p.
41.
^ J.E. Wrench, Alfred, Lord Milner, p. 40.
6 J.E. Wrench, Alfred, Lord Milner, p. 41.
Charles Carrington, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work (1955; rpt. 1970), p.
361.
8 J.E. Wrench, Alfred, Lord Milner, p. 386.
^ John Flint, Cecil Rhodes (London, 1976), p. 31.
Charles Carrington, Kipling, p. 361.
John Flint, Cecil Rhodes, p. 30.
12 John Flint, Cecil Rhodes, p. 44.
13 John Flint, Cecil Rhodes, p. 250.
G.K. Chesterton, "The Sultan" in A Miscellany of Men (1912; rpt. London,
1927), p. 207.
15 Quoted in John Read, England 1868-1914, p. 361.
16 G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography (London, 1937), p. 112.
1'^ Francis W. Hirst, In the Golden Days (London, 1947), p. 155.
1^ Francis W. Hirst, In the Golden Days, p. 207.
59
21 A.N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc (London, 1984), p. 49.

22 Quoted in A.N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc, p. 49.
23 Francis W. Hirst, In the Golden Days, pp. 158-159.
24 F.W. Hirst By His Friends (London, 1958), p. 4.
25 F. W. Hirst By His Friends, p. 16.
26 F. W. Hirst By His Friends, p. 3.
27 F.W. Hirst By His Friends, p. 35.
28 G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 109.
30 Francis W. Hirst, In the Golden Days, p. 160.
32 John Wilson, C.B.: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London, 1973),
p. 122.
33 John Wilson, C.B.: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, p. 462.
34 Lady Cynthia Asquith, Diaries 1915-1918 (London, 1968), p. 211.
3"^ Francis W. Hirst, In the Golden Days, p. 203.
45 B.C. Bentley, Those Days (London, 1940), p. 216.
47 E.C. BQUtley, Those Days, p. 217.
48 F. W. Hirst By His Friends, pp. 8-9.
49 Rudyard Kipling, A Diversity of Creatures, ed. Paul Driver (Hammondsworth,
1987), p. 9.
51 Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Vol. V I I I (New York,
1967), p. 173.
52 A.N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc, p. 75.
54 E.C. Bentley, Those Days, p. 176.
58 Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (London, 1993).
59 G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908; rpt. London, 1961), p. 67.
60 Quoted in John Read, England 1868-1914, p. 366.
62 E.C. Bendey, Those Days, p. 172.
60

64 John Pampallis, Foundations of the New South Africa (London, 1991), p. 24.
65 John Pampallis, Foundations of the New South Africa, p. 44.
67 Francis W. Hirst, In the Golden Days, pp. 204-205.
68
G.K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgments, Part I, 1900-1937, ed. D.J. Conlon
(Antwerp, 1976), p. 38.
A homeless and destitute woman.
61

Chesterton and The Speaker. John Coates (Liberalism)

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Chesterton and The Speaker

At first sight, an article about The Speaker may seem a relatively

A Transkei woman who is a farm labourer.

Anyone examining The Speaker of September 23, 1899 and compar-

The issue of October 7 marks a dramatic change. The alteration of the

mercial and material considerations." Britain has acquired the "dangerous

deluding notions of inevitable development, evolution, progress or of the

Electoral misfortunes and the miscalculations and failures of individ-

Mafeking night, Imperiahsm, as an intellectual concept and as an ideal,

There are hints of something sinister in the generally guarded and

It is hard to imagine any reader of the Confession of Faith disputing

In the mid-1890s, before the Speaker began its crusade, what

But nothing in my heart or my imagination went with these wide

rarely drank anything but champagne at meals, Morley's air of relentless

beard and fine features," McEwan proved to be representative of those

Preparations were carried on energetically throughout the summer

Belloc was in great form, very eloquent. We decided on an

The laureate of Imperialism is, in fact, a somewhat unpleasant school-boy

In a deep voice he intoned the foUowing with a shghtly nasal ac-

"I'm sorry for Mister Naboth

That chorus which appHes to one of the most important problems

The Speaker contains plenty of cogent argument and polemic of polit-

fields, attempted to convey their impressions to the public by what

The Imperialist journalistic prose of the day of which Chesterton writes

The Speaker contributions, in some of their spoofs and parodies,

ity" and "indeterminate landscape") in what seems, i f anything, a South

the larger armies of the continental despots. By contrast, Imperialism or

Nature teaches us in Burke's language to "love the small pla-

Clearly, however, this is not such an occasion, for he continues: "Now

lives that have so impoverished our people have proved them-

The Speaker's patriotic, non-pacifist, anti-War stance was crucial to

I remember Gilbert Murray and J.L. Hammond dining with us

the return to rehgious symbohsm, a new aloofness, a passion for

This criticism of a society accepting the shoddy goods of Imperialism be-

offers short, pungent sentences instead of the long-winded, unmemorable,

The majority of those contributing to The Speaker share a conviction that

of European traditions and by presenting the rich, contradictory language

Chesterton's " A Denunciation of Patriotism" argues, surely rightly,

Like other human ideals and instincts, patriotism must be judged

There is a strong similarity between Hobhouse's misgivings and

tyranny" or a civilisation "where men were canonised for destroying hfe"

Such a position had several controversial and political advantages.

There is something of this sense of human grandeur and tragedy in

manitarians, to respect their bodies and despise their souls." Nevertheless,

Given The Speaker's conviction that Britain's South African policy

glish literature, that great "heritage of high national sentiment" in our

labour prevents the growth of a wholesome European working

What have we done, and where have we wondered, we that have

The gaps in perception and understanding that writers for The

Sincere as it undeniably was in itself, The Speaker's crusade on be-

Chesterton's writing in The Speaker turns Liberahsm, which might have

Chesterton in The Speaker shows that Liberalism can be fun.

1 Donald Read, England 1868-1914 (London, 1979), p. 322.

21 A.N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc (London, 1984), p. 49.

63 G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 104.

A homeless and destitute woman.

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