explanation and lucid exposition in so marked a degree as does Mr. Belloc's weekly commentary in _Land and Water_. Were there any necessity to adduce proof of this it would be sufficient to regard the great gulf fixed between the circulation of _Land and Water_ and any other weekly journal of the same price. It is of greater service, however, to realize how and why Mr. Belloc surpasses his contemporaries than to waste space and time in proving what is already an admitted fact. The two outstanding features of Mr. Belloc's work in _Land and Water_--two of the most conspicuous features, indeed, as will be seen in the course of this book, of all his work--are his fierce sincerity and amazing lucidity. In this first characteristic we are willing to believe that his respectable contemporaries equal though they cannot surpass him. We will suppose, though we can find no signs of it, that they equal him in that extraordinary combination of qualifications acquired by study, travel and experience which he has been seen to possess. Even then, all other things being supposed equal, they fall far short of him in this quality of lucidity. This is not merely the gift of the journalist to state things plainly. It is the gift of the Latin races which Mr. Belloc was given at his birth: it is the furnace of thought in which Mr. Belloc has forged his prose style into a finely-tempered instrument. Two of life's chief difficulties, it has often been said, are, first, to think exactly, and, second, to give your thought exact expression. It is the lot of the majority of men to know what they want to say but to be unable to say it. Many men are shy of expressing their thoughts because of the very present but indefinite feeling they have that their thoughts, though real and sound in their minds, become in some extraordinary way unreal and unsound when expressed. That this curious transformation takes place we all know; newspaper reporters carry incontestable evidence of it in their notebooks. Few public speakers, indeed, realize how deeply in debt they are to reporters, who are trained in the art of reproducing in their reports and conveying to the public, not what the speaker said, but what he intended to say. And this curious transformation of our thoughts in the process of expression from reality to unreality, from sense to nonsense; this divergence between thought and language; this disability under which we all labour, but which so few of us overcome, which is so common among men as almost to justify the jibe that "language was given to men to conceal their thought," is due entirely, of course, to the insufficiency of our power of expression. A speaker or writer is great in proportion as his power of expression nears perfection. According as we are satisfied to read in print what a writer says, and do not find it necessary to read between the lines what he intended to say, we may regard him as possessed of lucidity of thought and lucidity of style.