At the present time Mr. Hilaire Belloc to his largest public is quite simply and solely the war expert. To those people, thousands in number, who have become acquainted with Mr. Belloc through the columns of _Land and Water_, the _Illustrated Sunday Herald_, and other journals and periodicals, or have swelled the audiences at his lectures in London and the various provincial centres, his name promises escape from the bewilderment engendered by an irritated Press and an approximation, at least, to a clear conception of the progress of the war. Those who realize, as Mr. Belloc himself points out somewhere, that there has never been a great public occasion in regard to which it is more necessary that men should have a sound judgment than it is in regard to this war, gladly turn to him for guidance. His _General Sketch of the European War_ is read by the educated man who finds himself hampered in forming an opinion of the progress of events by an ignorance of military science, while the mass of public opinion, which is less well-informed and less able to distinguish between the essential and the non-essential, finds in the series of articles, reprinted in book-form under the title _The Two Maps_, a rock-basis of general principles on which it may rest secure from the hurling waves of sensationalism, ignorance, misrepresentation and foolishness which are striving perpetually to engulf it. So intense and so widespread, indeed, is the vogue of Mr. Belloc to-day as a writer on the war, that one is almost compelled into forgetfulness of his earlier work and of the reputation he had established for himself in many provinces of literature and thought before, in the eyes of the world, he made this new province his own. The colossal monument of unstinted public approbation, which records his work since the outbreak of the great war, overshadows, as it were, the temples of less magnitude, though of equally solid foundation and often of more precious design, in which his former achievements in art and thought were enshrined. That there existed, however, before the war, a large and increasing public, which was gradually awakening to a realization of Mr. Belloc's importance, there can be no question. There can be equally little question, that only a very small percentage of his readers were in a position even to attempt an appreciation of Mr. Belloc's full importance. This was due, chiefly, to the diversity of Mr. Belloc's writings. For example, many thinking men, who saw no reason why the common sense, which served them so well in their business affairs, should be banished from their consideration of matters political, felt themselves in sympathy with his analysis and denunciation of the evils of our parliamentary machinery, thoroughly enjoying the vigorous lucidity of _The Party System_ and applauding the clear historical reasoning of _The Servile State_.