In this tragic and confused world it has been my undeserved lot to lead an amused life. All sorts of bright and entertaining and likeable things have been given me and paraded before me. And among others is my friend, Mr. Winston Churchill: not the American Winston but the British Winston. Our relations are relations of intermittent but I trust affectionate controversy. We had a great slanging match some years ago about Russia, and if I remember rightly Mr. Churchill took the count. That is my pleasant impression of the affair. His may be different, of course. Then, in a little book called _Men Like Gods_, one of the characters got out of my control and began to speak and act in a way so like Mr. Churchill’s that even I could see the resemblance. I was shocked and alarmed. I had to stun that character and hustle it out of the way, but not before it had made a long characteristic speech and started a war.... Now Mr. Churchill has taken the opportunity afforded by an article I wrote about the British Empire for the British _Empire Review_ to open up a fight again. My article, more or less abbreviated, in some cases shorn of its chief arguments, and adorned with the unsolicited crossheads so dear to editors of spirit, has been extensively syndicated in America, and will no doubt be followed round the earth by flying fragments of his reply. It is a spirited and amusing reply. He calls me Citizen Hoopdriver, which is a fair return for the misbehaviour of my fictitious character, and he laments my discursiveness because I will not stick to my proper occupation of imaginative fiction--which from a gentleman much younger than myself who has danced in turn through Admiralty, War Office, Munitions Ministry, Air Ministry, Colonies and Board of Trade, who has been a brilliant cavalry officer and a still more brilliant newspaper correspondent, who has written eight or nine large but entertaining books and painted some excellent pictures, is pretty considerable cheek. But let that pass.