AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

for it had belonged up to this moment, like practically every Liberal daily
paper, to the Liberal Imperialists. A group of Liberals, of whom Mr. George
Cadbury was the principal capitalist and the late Mr. R. C. Lehmann the
principal practical journalist, appointed as literary editor my friend Mr.
Archibald Marshall, who in his turn had the rashness to appoint me as a
regular weekly contributor. Here I wrote an article every Saturday for many
years; I was described, in the phrase of the time, as having a Saturday pulpit,
rather like a Sunday pulpit. Whatever were the merits of the sermon, it is
probable that I had a larger congregation than I have ever had before or since.
And I occupied it until I gave it up long afterwards, at another political crisis,
the story of which I shall have to tell on a later page.
I began to see a little of the leading politicians, though they seldom talked
politics; and I imagine that politicians seldom do. I had already interviewed
Lord Morley, when I was given the commission in the English Men of Letters
which he edited; and I had been struck by something indescribable which has
marked most public men of his profession. He was quite friendly and simple,
and I am sure quite sincere; but he was in a manner cautious; and conscious of
the possibility that his followers might lead him further than he wished to go.
He spoke with a certain fatherly admiration of my friends of the Pro-Boer
party, Hammond and Hirst and the rest; but he seemed to warn me that they
were too fiery; and I did not want to be warned, being myself on fire. In short,
he was a wise and good man; but he was not what numberless and nameless
admirers would have thought him; he was not a clear intellectual fanatic; a foe
of compromise; a sheer democrat called Honest John. He was a Front-Bench
man, though a good one. The same applied to most of the Front-Bench men I
have known; and I am glad to say I knew mostly the good ones. I had great joy
out of the hearty humours of old Asquith, the late Lord Oxford; and though
our conversations were light and even flippant, he was one who rose
gloriously to flippancy. Once when he appeared in Court dress, on some
superbly important occasion, an uncontrollable impulse of impertinence led
me to ask whether the Court sword would really come out of its sheath. “Oh,
yes,” he said, shaking a shaggily frowning head at me, “Do not provoke me.”
But he also had about the fundamentals of politics and ethics this curious
quality of vagueness, which I have found so often in men holding high
responsibilities. He did not mind answering a silly question about a sword; but
if it had been a sensible question about a super-tax, he would have adopted,
however genially, a fencing sort of swordsmanship. He would have faintly felt
that he was being heckled, and almost been disposed to ask for notice of that
question. I have a difficulty in not darkening the fine shade that I intended; he
was very public, as public men go; but they all seem to become hazier as they
mount higher. It is the young and unknown who have decisive doctrines and
sharply declared intentions. I once expressed it by saying, I think with some