Open Letter : On the Collapse of the Cosmo[po]litan Club : autograph manuscript signed, undated [1912-1913].

An essay written in the form of a letter to "My dear MacWhittlesey" (an apparently imaginary American correspondent), commenting first on the elections of Woodrow Wilson and Raymond Poincaré in the United States and France respectively, and on the events of the First Balkan War; then proceeding to argue that these developments represented the "collapse of the Cosmopolitan Club," a group of individuals including Kaiser Wilhelm, Cecil Rhodes, Theodore Roosevelt, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Edison and the newspaper editor W.T. Stead, who Chesterton describes as a "ring of celebrities, known all over the world, and more important all over the world than any of them are at home"; referring also to the Dreyfus Affair, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire and crusading forms of Christianity; commenting on Tolstoy and Zola: "Well, just as Russia & the Slavs meant for us Tolstoy, so France & French literature meant for many of us Zola. I don't for an instant put the two men on one level. Zola was a sulky pornographer. Tolstoy was a high-minded, but partly insane aristocrat. But the real point is that Poincaré's election represents a France that hates Zola; more than the Balkans hate the Turk. The old, definite, domestic, patriotic Frenchman has come to the top. I can't help fancying that with you the old serious, self-governing, idealistic & really republican American has come to the top too."