A Chair of The Philosophy of History

Extract

It was a widow’s worm-eaten, tottering chair. And it was set up in a basement in N.W.3. In saying this I have unveiled the mystery lying behind what once I wrote under the title—her title, T00 Much for One. For that undying story which, thank God, I had the wit to write, had been written post haste after the widow R-----, R.I.P., had trudged from her basement to tell me of my mistake in giving her as a Christmas dinner what was ‘too much for one.’

My readers will remember how in that quivering phrase from the bowed, half-blind, four-score year widow I had seen more political and economic wisdom than was being vouchsafed by any university, or avouched by any Government Report. Moreover, when I recalled how high finance and big business were based on the horse-leech cry, ‘it is never enough,’ I saw, and perhaps said that England’s Saviour, if ever found, would be found not in a bank or in a manager’s office, but in a hut or in a basement.

As I honoured myself and my priestly profession by burying the widow R-----in Kensal Green some twelve months ago, I will set down some of the notes I wrote after having speech with her one afternoon in the half-light of her cave-dwelling.

To-day, August 6th, 1927, Widow R-----gave me a complete dramatic Philosophy of History. In other words she showed me the right way of looking at things that happen, and even of things that seem to happen wrong.