significant:

In change, eclipse, and peril
Under the whole world's scorn,
By blood and death and darkness
The Saxon peace is sworn;
That all our fruit be gathered
And all our race take hands,
And the sea be a Saxon river
That runs through Saxon lands.

But in the Note to the second edition, he says:

In the matter of the "Anglo-American Alliance" I have come to see
that our hopes of brotherhood with America are the same in kind as
our hopes of brotherhood with any other of the great independent
nations of Christendom. And a very small study of history was
sufficient to show me that the American Nation, which is a hundred
years old, is at least fifty years older than the Anglo-Saxon race.*

[* Collected Poems, p. 318.]

The poem was of course only a boyish expression of a boyish dream;
like all dreams, like all boyhood dreams especially, it omitted too
much; yet it contained a thought that might well have borne rich
fruit in Gilbert's Catholic life.

My mother told me once that when after three years' study of Queen
Elizabeth's character she came to a different conclusion from Belloc,
she found it almost impossible to resist his power and hold on to her
own view. It must be realised that Chesterton actually preferred the
attitude of a disciple. A mutual friend has told me that Chesterton
listened to Belloc all the time and said very little himself. In
matters historical where he felt his own ignorance, Gilbert's
tendency was simply to make an act of faith in Belloc.

On nothing were the two men more healthily in accord than on the Boer
War. In an interesting study of Belloc, prefixed to a French
translation of _Contemporary England_, F. Y. Eccles explains how he
and most of the _Speaker_ group differed from the pacifist pro-Boers,
who hated the South African war because they hated all wars. The
young Liberals on the _Speaker_ were not pacifists. They hated the
war because they thought it would harm England--harm her morally--to
be fighting for an unjust cause, and even materially to be shedding
the blood of her sons and pouring out her wealth at the bidding of a
handful of alien financiers. Thus far Gilbert was among one group
with whom he was in fullest sympathy. But I think he went further.
Mr. Eccles told me that most of the _Speaker_ group had no sympathy
with the Boers. Gilbert had. He thought of them as human beings who
might well have been farmers of Sussex or