Trigger warning because GKC was a brilliant poet and also a pretty major racist in the way of British dudes of his day and you can see it here.
Excerpt from Book VI of The Ballad of the White Horse, which I was reading in hospital:
(Dunno why the highlighting came out two different colours)
That's quite an image in itself, but then the next day while researching germ theory I came across this:
The title? Cholera tramples the victors & the vanquished both by Robert Seymour, 1831. (source)
Cholera has a long history in South Asia, but only spread to Europe in the 1830s. There's a whole lesson there on exploiting one's own and other peoples, because cholera outbreaks were strongly linked to slum conditions (when too many people live in too small an area to keep the poo out of the drinking water, you have a problem), and England was in peak Exploitation Mode around 1830.
The last major cholera outbreak in England was in London in 1866, and Chesterton was born 8 years later [updated because I messed up the dates before]. I imagine this image sort of haunting him like dude...stop being weird about Asia...stop...
But he didn't hear it and instead put it in a poem three decades later. Sigh.
