called Beilis was put on his trial (after an
imprisonment of nearly three years) for the murder of a small Christian
boy named Yushinsky, in order that his blood might be used for ritual
purposes. Yushinsky, who was found dead under peculiar circumstances,
was probably a Jew himself, but that does not affect the point at issue.
Mr. Arthur Henderson, M.P., tried to arouse an agitation in order to
secure the freedom of Beilis, because it was perfectly evident from the
behaviour of certain parties that the prisoner's conviction would be the
signal for the outbreak of a series of massacres of the Jews, and
because a case which had taken nearly three years to prepare was
obviously a very thin case. Chesterton wrote a ribald article in The
Daily Herald on Mr. Henderson's attempt at intervention, saying in
effect, How do you know that Beilis isn't guilty? Now it is impossible
to hold the belief that Beilis might be guilty and at the same time
disbelieve that the Jews are capable of committing human sacrifice. When
a leading Russian critic named Rosanov, also an anti-Semite, issued a
pamphlet proclaiming that the Jews did, in fact, commit this loathsome
crime, he was ignominiously ejected from a prominent Russian literary
society. The comparison should appeal to Chesterton.

The nadir of these antipathies is reached in _The Flying Inn_, a novel
published a few months before the Great War broke out, and before we all
made the discovery that, hold what prejudices we will, we are all
immensely dependent on one another. In this book we are given a picture
of England of the future, conquered by the Turk. As a concession to
Islam, all intoxicating drink is prohibited in England. It is amusing to
note that a few months after the publication of this silly
prognostication, the greatest Empire in Christendom prohibited drink
within its frontiers in order to conquer the Turk--and his Allies. A
Patrick Dalroy, an Irishman (with red hair), and of course a giant, has
been performing Homeric feats against the conquering Turks. A Lord
Ivywood, an abstraction bloodless to the point of albinism, is at the
head of affairs in England. The Jews dominate everything. Dalroy and
Humphrey Pump, an evicted innkeeper, discovering that drinks may still
be sold where an inn-sign may be found, start journeying around England
loaded only with the sign-board of "The Green Man," a large cheese, and
a keg of rum. They are, in fact, a peripatetic public-house, an