From the Editor

Perils of Success

“Nothing fails like success,” said G. K. Chesterton, and unlike Wilde’s inverted clichés (“her hair has turned quite gold with grief”), this epigram contains a good deal of truth. Success can fail in a number of ways. It can unite a coalition of the envious against itself. It can be the climax of some great enterprise which then starts to decline—for instance, Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, from which the British Empire never recovered. Or by wholly securing its objective, it can put itself out of a job. This last is widely thought to be the fate of antiCommunism, allegedly suffering from the mortal blow of its great opponent’s suicide (during a lucid interval).

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Perils of Success

“Nothing fails like success,” said G. K. Chesterton, and unlike Wilde’s inverted clichés (“her hair has turned quite gold with grief”), this epigram contains a good deal of truth. Success can fail in a number of ways. It can unite a coalition of the envious against itself. It can be the climax of some great enterprise which then starts to decline—for instance, Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, from which the British Empire never recovered. Or by wholly securing its objective, it can put itself out of a job. This last is widely thought to be the fate of antiCommunism, allegedly suffering from the mortal blow of its great opponent’s suicide (during a lucid interval).