Opposing the war as an act of patriotism
that is only patriotism speaking plainly
The exemption has a concrete precedent in Chesterton’s wartime journalism. Reviewing John Godard’s Patriotism and Ethics in The Speaker on 18 May 1901, he agreed with Godard’s opposition to the Transvaal war and attacks on peace meetings, while rejecting Godard’s rejection of patriotism. He defended Boer resistance on precisely the national loyalty that Godard wished to discredit. In a follow-up letter on 1 June, he placed national loyalty within ethics and compared excessive patriotism with family loyalty corrupted into assisting a mother’s wrongdoing. The inspected witness is Mike Miles’s modern online transcription, not the original newspaper. Review and letter, under their dated headings.
The mother approaching a cliff therefore makes an established distinction vivid: love can demand opposition to a national policy. Reading the military metaphors as a demand for obedience would miss this explicit protection of dissent. His further distinction concerns the critic’s motive, which facts alone cannot establish; the paragraph supplies a moral test, not a reliable procedure for identifying another person’s concealed pleasure.
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