AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

Notting Hill, we knew that the moral of the fable and the facts was the same;
and when I finished my Cockney fantasy, I dedicated it to him. It was from
that dingy little Soho cafe, as from a cave of witchcraft, that there emerged the
quadruped, the twiformed monster Mr. Shaw has nicknamed the
Chesterbelloc.
It would be grossly unjust to suggest that all or most of the antiwar party
were like the prigs I have mentioned; though few of them of course were
military in the Bellocian manner. And to one group of them I have a
permanent gratitude; the Oxford group which I have already mentioned; and
which included my own friends from Oxford. This group was just then
enabled to achieve a very important work; which will probably be not without
an ultimate effect on history. It managed to buy the old Radical weekly paper
The Speaker and run it with admirable spirit and courage in rather a new mood
of Radicalism; what some of its enemies might have called a romantic
Radicalism. Its editor was Mr. J. L. Hammond, who was afterwards, with his
wife, to do so great an historical service as the author of studies on the English
Labourer in the last few centuries. He certainly was the last man in the world
to be accused of a smug materialism or a merely tame love of peace. No
indignation could have been at once more fiery and more delicate, in the sense
of discriminating. And I knew that he also understood the truth, when I heard
him say the words which so many would have misunderstood; “Imperialism is
worse than Jingoism. A Jingo is a noisy fellow, who may happen to make a
noise on the right side. But the Imperialist is the direct enemy of liberty.” That
was exactly what I meant; the Boers might be making a noise (with Mauser
rifles) but I thought it was a noise on the right side. It was at about the same
time, and by the same connection, that I was able to begin making a very small
noise on the right side myself. As I note elsewhere, the very first articles of
mine to appear publicly were art reviews in the Bookman; and the original
responsibility of letting me loose in the literary world lies with my friend the
late Sir Ernest Hodder Williams. But the first connected series of articles, the
first regular job in support of a regular cause, was made possible for me by
Hammond and his friends of the new Speaker. It was there that I wrote, along
with many pugnacious political articles, a series of casual essays afterwards
republished as The Defendant. The name of Defendant is the only thing I
cannot defend. It was certainly a quite incorrect and illogical use of language.
The papers were in defence of various other things, such as Penny Dreadfuls
and Skeletons. But a defendant does not properly mean a person defending
other things. It means a person defending himself; and I should be the last to
defend anything so indefensible.
It was by the same political connection that I was drawn still further into
politics, as well as still further into journalism. The next turning-point of my
journalistic fate was the purchase of the Daily News by the Pro-Boer Liberals;