sizing his Napoleonic chin. He was talking about
King John, who, he positively assured me, was _not_ (as was often
asserted) the best king that ever reigned in England. Still, there were
allowances to be made for him; I mean King John, not Belloc. "He had
been Regent," said Belloc with forbearance, "and in all the Middle Ages
there is no example of a successful Regent." I, for one, had not come
provided with any successful Regents with whom to counter this
generalization; and when I came to think of it, it was quite true. I
have noticed the same thing about many other sweeping remarks coming
from the same source.
The little restaurant to which we went had already become a haunt for
three or four of us who held strong but unfashionable views about the
South African War, which was then in its earliest prestige. Most of us
were writing on the _Speaker_, edited by Mr. J. L. Hammond with an
independence of idealism to which I shall always think that we owe much
of the cleaner political criticism of to-day; and Belloc himself was
writing in it studies of what proved to be the most baffling irony. To
understand how his Latin mastery, especially of historic and foreign
things, made him a leader, it is necessary to appreciate something of
the peculiar position of that isolated group of "Pro-Boers." We were a
minority in a minority. Those who honestly disapproved of the Transvaal
adventure were few in England; but even of these few a great number,
probably the majority, opposed it for reasons not only different but
almost contrary to ours. Many were Pacifists, most were Cobdenites; the
wisest were healthy but hazy Liberals who rightly felt the tradition of
Gladstone to be a safer thing than the opportunism of the Liberal
Imperialist. But we might, in one very real sense, be more strictly
described as Pro-Boers. That is, we were much more insistent that the
Boers were right in fighting than that the English were wrong in
fighting. We disliked cosmopolitan peace almost as much as cosmopolitan
war; and it was hard to say whether we more despised those who praised
war for the gain of money, or those who blamed war for the loss of it.
Not a few men then young were already predisposed to this attitude; Mr.
F. Y. Eccles, a French scholar and critic of an authority perhaps too
fine for fame, was in possession of the whole classical case against
such piratical Prussianism; Mr. Hammond himself, with a careful
magnanimity, always attacked
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