The Distributist League and Distributism
_To say we must have Socialism or Capitalism is like saying we must
choose between all men going into monasteries and a few men having
harems. If I denied such a sexual alternative I should not need to
call myself a monogamist; I should be content to call myself a man_.
Advance number of _G.K.'s Weekly_, Nov. 1924
FROM _G.K.'s Weekly_ grew THE DISTRIBUTIST LEAGUE. Its start in 1926
was marked by intense enthusiasm, and its progress was recorded week
by week in the paper. The inaugural meeting took place in Essex Hall,
Essex Street, Strand, on September 17, 1926. G.K. summed up their aim
in the words: "Their simple idea was to restore possession." He added
that Francis Bacon had long ago said: "Property is like muck, it is
good only if it be spread." The following week the first committee
meeting took place. Chesterton was elected President; Captain Went,
Secretary, and Maurice Reckitt, Treasurer. It was planned to form a
branch in Birmingham. Alternative names were discussed: The Cobbett
Club, the Luddite League, the League of Small Property:
The Cow and Acres, however suitable as the name of a public house at
which we could assemble, is too limited as an economic statement. . . .
The League of the Little People (President, Mr. G. K. Chesterton)
may seem at first too suggestive of the fairies; but it has been
strongly supported among us:
And again: Suppose we call our movement, "The Lost Property
League" . . . the idea of the restoration of lost property is far
more essential to our whole conception than even the idea of liberty,
as now commonly understood. The Liberty and Property Defense League
implies that property is there to be defended. "The Lost Property
League" describes the exact state of the case.*
[* From an article called, "Name This Child" and another later
article.]
In October another meeting of the central branch was held in Essex
Hall to debate "Have We Lost Liberty?" The Croydon and Birmingham
branches were arranging meetings, G.K. conferred with the members of
the Manchester branch, and Glasgow announced that it was only
awaiting the christening to form a branch. Bath held its first public
meeting, with the Mayor in the chair, and the meeting had to overflow
into a very large hall.
It was decided to reduce the price of the paper to twopence--
Twopenny Trash* was the title of the leading article--in order to
give the League an opportunity of extending the paper's radius of
action as an organ of the League's principles. . . . _"Every reader
who has been buying one copy at sixpence, must take three copies at
twopence_ until his two surplus copies have secured two new
readers. . . . The League would have to make itself responsible for
the success of this experiment and save the paper which gave it
birth, or die of inanition, for it is certainly not yet strong
enough to leave its mother."**
[* This was the name given to Cobbett's _Weekly Register_ by his
enemies.]
[** _G.K.'s Weekly_, November 6, 1926.]
It is clear that Gilbert's hopes at this stage ran high. He had not
dreamed that the initial success of the League would be so great.
Recording a sensational increase in the sale of the paper, he wrote
on November 13, 1926: "It was when we faced defeat that we were
surprised by victory; and we are quite serious in believing that this
is part of a practical philosophy that may yet outlast the philosophy
of bluff."
Recording a meeting of the League: he wrote:
We find it difficult to express the effect the meeting had upon us.
We were astonished, we were overwhelmed. Had we anything to do with
the making of this ardent, eager, indefatigable creature? The answer
is, of course, that though we had something to do with the shaping of
the body, we had nothing to do with the birth of the soul. That was a
miracle, a miracle we had hoped for, and which yet, when it happened,
overwhelmed us. We have the happy feeling that we have helped to
shape something which will go far above and beyond us. . . . There
were well over 100 members present, many of them spoke, and nearly
all the others would have spoken if there had been time to hear them.
It was a great night.*
[* November 13, 1926.]
Father Vincent McNabb has said truly that there are no words for the
real things. Thus Distributism is not only a rather ugly word but
also a word holding less than half the content of the idea they were
aiming at. Belloc covered more of it in the title of his book: the
_Restoration of Property_, while perhaps a better name still was _The
Outline of Sanity_. This Chesterton had chosen for a series of
articles that became a book. He was asking for a return to the sanity
of field and workshop, of craftsman and peasant, from the insanity of
trusts and machinery, of unemployment, over-production and
starvation. "We are destroying food because we do not need it. We are
starving men because we do not need them."
After the first meeting of the League, the notes of the week recorded
that the printing order for the paper based on actual demand had
risen in two weeks from 4,650 to 7,000. "Of course we owe everything
to the League which in Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Croydon,
Chatham, Worthing, Chorley, Cambridge, Oxford, Bath and London has
made the newsagents aware of the paper." By November 27, the sales
had risen to over 8,000. Then was held the first formal meeting of
the central branch of the League, at which it was agreed: "that
members should make a habit of dealing at small shops." They should
avoid even small shops which sweat their employees, each branch
should prepare a list of small shops for the use of its members.
And that is only a beginning. We hope to enlist the support of the
small farmer and the small master craftsman. We hope, little by
little, to put the small producer in touch with the small retailer.
We hope in the end to establish within the state a community, almost
self-supporting, of men and women pledged to Distributism, and to a
large extent practising it. Less and less, then, will the juggling of
finance have power over us; for it does not matter what they call the
counters when you are exchanging hams for handkerchiefs, or pigs for
pianos.
The Cockpit is worth reading during the months that follow, for here
were voiced any criticisms that the readers had to make of the paper
and of the League--any criticism that the League had to make of
itself. There was plenty. Many leaguers and readers felt for instance
that the spirit of criticism of others was too fully developed in the
paper, so that when attempts were made to act on distributive
principles by people not in league with the League they were given
short shrift instead of meeting even modified encouragement. The
League was begged to spend more time clarifying its principles, less
time in criticism. But much more fundamental was the constantly
recurrent question: When is the League going to begin to do
something? To this the answer, given often by G.K. himself was that,
while the League hoped in time to create that community of which he
had written, its own work was only that of Propaganda--of a wider and
wider dissemination of the principles of Distributism. Their work,
they said, was to talk.
Outdoor propaganda started in Glasgow and came thence to London. In
October 1931 the Secretary said they must "convince men there is a
practical alternative to Capitalism and Socialism, _by showing them
how to set about achieving it."_ And in November he subscribed to
opinions voiced in the Cockpit for the last two years by saying that
the London Branch acted in the spirit of "a pleasant Friday evening
debating society, which regarded discussion as an end in itself." One
would imagine that all this meant a call to action, but the action
was merely the establishment of a Research Department and the start
of a new paper _The Distributist_ for the discussion of the League's
domestic business. The Research Secretary will explain his plans,
enroll volunteers and allot tasks, thus "equipping the League with
the information for lack of which it is as yet unable to agree on
practical measures." The effectiveness of its Propaganda would,
members were told, depend on its research.
"The pious appointment of investigators," wrote a Leader in _G.K.'s
Weekly_ in reference to a Government commission, "to report what is
already common knowledge is nothing less than a face-saving,
time-marking, shifty expedient." I don't think this article was one
of Gilbert's, but I do wonder whether as time went on he did not
recall his own old comparison between the early Christian and the
modern Socialist. For Distributists far more than Socialists should
have been vowed to action. There was a grave danger both of making
their propaganda ineffective by lack of example and of weakening
themselves as Distributists. Yet there were many difficulties in
their path, some of which may best be seen if we go back a little and
recall the way in which the Encyclical _Rerum Novarum_ was received
by Catholics at the end of the last century. Written in Europe where
the remains of the mediaeval social structure still lingered on far
more than in industrial England or America, it was taken by the more
conservative Catholics as a general confirmation of the established
order. I well remember people like my own father and Father Bernard
Vaughan quoting it in this sense. And if they tended to advert to
only one half of it, the more radical Catholics readily obliged by
appearing conscious solely of the other half and thus enabling
themselves to be dismissed as one-sided.
Unfortunately they were worse than one-sided: they were curiously
blind, with rare exceptions, to those true implications of the
document which spelt Distributism--for which the word had not then
been coined--or the _Restoration of Property_. _"The law, therefore,
should favour ownership and its policy should be to induce as many
people as possible to become owners._ Many excellent results will
follow from this; and first of all, property will certainly become
more equitably divided. For the effect of social change and
revolution has been to divide society into two widely different
castes. . . . _If workpeople can be encouraged to look forward to
obtaining a share in the land, the result will be that the the gulf
between vast wealth and deep poverty will be bridged over, and the
two orders will be brought nearer together."_* Yet the Pope's words
were treated almost as an acceptance of the existing conditions of
property by the more conservative, while the more radical simply
tried to evade them. The question of my youth undoubtedly was: how
far can a Catholic go on the road to Socialism?
[* _Rerum Novarum_ (translation in Husslein's _The Christian Social
Manifesto_). Italics mine.]
Distributism would seem today to have cut like a sword the knot of
this mental confusion, but it did not do so for many people. I
suppose the leading Distributist among the clergy was Father Vincent
McNabb and I have heard him called a Socialist a hundred times. And
even among those who had accepted the Distributist ideal and had now
had fifteen years of the _New Witness_ and _G.K.'s Weekly_ to
meditate upon--to say nothing of the Belloc and Chesterton
books--there was still a good deal of confusion of mind to be cleared
up. The Chesterbelloc had begun a mental revolution, but even the
mind cannot be turned upside down in a moment of time; and then there
is the will to be considered.
Gilbert often claimed that the Society he advocated was the norm,
that the modern world was abnormal, was insane. But to achieve the
normal in an abnormal world calls for high courage and a high degree
of energy. It is much easier to sit and drink beer while planning the
world that one wishes was there--the world of simplicity, hard work
and independence. And about the details of this new world there was
room for a variety of opinion. The Distributists soon began to argue
and even to quarrel--about the admission of machinery into the
Distributist state, about the nature of one another's Distributism
and what was necessary to constitute a Distributist. The effect on
Gilbert is interesting, for it showed his belief in the importance of
the League. He hoped, he said, that the quarrel would not "turn into
a dispute"--that it would remain a personal quarrel. "For impersonal
quarrel is schism." He urged again and again that the dogmas of their
creed should be defined.
Heaven forbid that we should ever be True Distributists: as a
substitute for being Distributists. It would be a dismal thing to
join the long and wavering procession of True Christians, True
Socialists, True Imperialists; who are now progressing drearily into
a featureless future; ready to change anything whatever except their
names. These people escape endlessly by refusing definition which
they call dogma. . . .
Practical politics are necessary, but they are in a sense narrow;
and by themselves they do tend to split the world up into small
sects. Only dogma is sufficiently universal to include us all.
Of the world surrounding him which refused definitions he said,
"because there is no image there is nothing except imaginaries."* But
I think there must have been some blushes on Distributists' cheeks as
they read his apology for some slight absence of mind. He explained
his own "ghastly ignorance" of the details of the dispute, "which is
bound up with the economic facts of the position," with the fact
especially of
[* October 12, 1929.]
my own highly inadequate rendering of the part of the Financier. I
am the thin and shadowy approximation to a Capitalist. . . . I could
only manage until very lately to keep this paper in existence at all,
by earning the money in the open market; and more especially in that
busy and happy market where corpses are sold in batches; I mean the
mart of Murder and Mystery, the booth of the Detective Story. Many a
squire has died in a dank, garden arbour, transfixed by a mysterious
dagger, many a millionaire has perished silently though surrounded by
a ring of private secretaries, in order that Mr. Belloc may have a
paper in which he is allowed to point out that a great Empire does
not default because it is growing richer. Many a shot has rung out in
the silent night, many a constable has hurled himself through a
crashing door, from under which there crawled a crimson stain, in
order that there might be a page somewhere for Mr. Kenrick's virile
and logical exposition of the principles of Distributism. Many an
imperial jewel has vanished from its golden setting, many a detective
crawled about on the carpet for clues, before some of those little
printers' bills could be settled which enabled the most distinguished
and intelligent of Distributists to denounce each other as
Capitalists and Communists, in the columns of the Cockpit and
elsewhere. This being my humble and even highly irrelevant
contribution to the common team-work, it is obvious that it could not
be done at the same time as a close following of the varying shades
of thought in the Distributist debates. And, this ignorance of mine,
though naturally very irritating to people better informed, has at
least the advantage of giving some genuineness to my impartiality. I
have never belonged distinctively to any of the different
Distributist groups. I have never had time.
As time went on however and the disputes continued, he wrote a series
of articles* which have in them that note so special to him, so
embarrassing to some of his admirers, of deep and genuine respect for
every person and every opinion. The small numbers of the
Distributists, the greatness of the work to be done by them, would
make any split in their ranks "a tremendous tragedy." The difficulty
in keeping any movement in being was that of holding together the
ardent pioneers and the rank and file.
[* September 10, 17, 24, October 1, 1932.]
Men who really have common convictions tend to break up. It is only
those who have no convictions who always hang together. . . . Roughly
the position is that there is a moderate body which regards
extremists as visionary; a more extreme body which regards moderates
as ineffective; and lastly a catastrophic simplification in the
social scene, which makes the simple enthusiast seem more fitted to
the simple disaster.
There were two approaches that should be made to these differences.
The first was to state the fundamental principles of Distributism.
The crux of the quarrel was the question of machinery. But even those
who held that machinery should be abolished in the Distributist State
held it, he claimed, not as a first principle, but as a deduction
from their first principles. Chesterton himself felt that machinery
should be limited but not abolished; the order of things had been
historically that men had been deprived of property and enslaved on
the land before the machine-slavery of industrialism had become
possible. The whole history of the machine might have been reversed
in a state of free men. If a machine were used on a farm employing
fifty men that would do the work of forty, it means forty men become
unemployed, "but it is only because they were employed that they are
unemployed. Now you and I, I hope to heaven, are not trying to
increase employment. It is almost the only thing that is as bad as
unemployment." In other words, he did not want men to be employees.
Men working for themselves, men their own employers, their own
employees--that was the objective of Distributism. A wide
distribution of property was its primary aim. And he did not want the
League to consist entirely of extremists lest it should be thought to
consist entirely of cranks, especially at a moment when "intelligent
people are beginning to like Distributism _because_ Distributism is
normal."
The other approach was heralded in the final article of the series
(October 1, 1932) by a reference to the excitement over the Buckfast
Benedictines who had just built their Abbey Church with their own
hands--an adventure
to which, if I understand it as completely as I share it, the
English blood will never be entirely cold. But about these new heroes
of architecture there is one note that is not new; that comes from a
very ancient tradition of psychology and morals. And that is that the
adventurer has a right to his adventure; and the amateur has a right
to his hobby; or rather to his love. But neither has any right to a
general judgment of coldness or contempt for those whose hobby is
human living; and whose chief adventures are at home. You will never
hear the builders of Buckfast shouting aloud, "Down with Downside;
for it was designed by a careful Gothic architect!" You will never
hear them say, "How contemptible are these Catholics who pray in
common churches; tawdry with waxwork imagery and Repository Art." Of
the great adventurers who advance out of the Christian past, in
search of Christian future, you could never say that the pioneers
despise the army.
What seemed to Chesterton the oddest feature in the opposition to his
idea of sanity was the apparent assumption that he was offering an
impossible ideal to a world that was already working quite well. With
bland disregard of the breakdown of their own system, the orthodox
economists were challenging him to establish the flawlessness of his.
They laughed at the Distributist desire if not to abolish at least to
limit machinery. They adjured him to be more practical. Chesterton
had replied in an earlier article:
There may be, and we ourselves believe there are, a certain number
of things that had better be always done by machinery. . . .
Machinery is now being used to produce numberless things that nobody
needs. Machinery is being used to produce more machinery, to be used
merely for the production of things that nobody needs. Machinery is
being used to produce very badly things that everybody wants produced
very well.
Machinery is being used for enormously expensive transport of
things that might just as well be used where they are. Machinery is
being used to take things thousands of miles in order to sell them
and bring them back again because they are not sold. Machinery is
being used to produce ornament that nobody ever looks at and
architecture that nobody wants to look at. Machinery is taking
suicides to Monte Carlo and coals to Newcastle, and all normal human
purpose and intelligence to Bedlam; and our critics gaze at it
reverently and ask us how we expect ever to be so practical as that.*
[* June 13, 1925.]
This desperate situation must be met by strengthening the home,
re-establishing the small workshop, re-creating the English
peasantry. But first the ground might have to be cleared.
One phrase used in his articles--the "catastrophic simplification of
the social scene"--reminds us once more how keenly aware Gilbert was
of something that had not yet happened, the present war with its
break-up of the social order. In the article, from which I have been
quoting, he compares the urgency of the hour to the period of the
French Revolution; in his _Outline of Sanity_ seven years earlier he
had stressed the Distributist ideal as the last chance to
do deliberately and well what nemesis will do wastefully and
without pity; whether we cannot build a bridge from these slippery
downward slopes to freer and firmer land beyond, without consenting
yet that our most noble nation must descend into that valley of
humiliation in which nations disappear from history.*
[* _Outline of Sanity_, p. 34.]
In this book which he had tried in vain, he tells us, to make "a
grammar of Distributism," he touches on the enormous changes that had
made such a grammar of far greater urgency. When _Rerum Novarum_ was
issued, or even eighteen years later when G.K. wrote _What's Wrong
With the World_, individualist competition had not yet given place to
the Trust, Combine or Merger. "The American Trust is not private
enterprise. It would be truer to call the Spanish Inquisition private
judgment." The decline of trade had hardly begun at the turn of the
Century, liberty was still fairly widespread. But today we had lost
liberty as well as property and were living under the worst features
of a Socialist State. "I am one of those who believe that the cure
for centralisation is decentralisation."
Both in the book and in the paper he urged constantly a double line
of escape towards the restoration of freedom, initiative, property
and the free family: the one line was the comparatively negative one
of winning such concessions from the State as would make action
possible, the other was personal action to be taken without any State
aid or even encouragement. The germ of recovery lay in human nature.
If you get poison out of a man's system "the time will come when he
himself will think he would like a little ordinary food. If things
even begin to be released they will begin to recover." To the
question did Chesterton believe Distributism would save England, he
answered, "No, I think Englishmen will save England, if they begin to
have half a chance. I am therefore in this sense hopeful. I believe
that the breakdown has been a breakdown of machinery and not of men."
A most difficult question to answer is the degree of the League's
success. Its stated aim was propaganda, the spreading of ideas.
"There is a danger that the tendency to regard talking as negligible
may invade our little movement . . . our main business is to talk."
One sees the point, of course; yet I cannot help feeling that it
would have been better if the majority of Leaguers had done some bit
of constructive work towards a Distributist world and sweated out of
their system the irritability that found vent in some of their
quarrels. After all the fight for freedom as far as it concerned
attacking government was carried on week by week by the small group
running the paper. "The main body of Distributists would have learnt
their own principles better by trying to act them, and been far more
effective in conveying them to others."
Some members saw the need of individual action. Father Vincent set
out in one number of the paper Fifteen Things that men could do for
themselves as a step to the practice of a Distributist philosophy.
Father Vincent, indeed, must be put beside Chesterton and Belloc as a
really great Distributist writer. Useful books were written too by
Mr. Heseltine and Mr. Blyton, who both also set to work to grow their
own food. Mr. Blyton is still writing and still growing food. A
workshop was started at Glasgow (probably the most active of the
Branches), Father Vincent came to a League meeting clad in home-spun
and home-woven garments, Mr. Blyton urged the example of what had
been done by the Society of Friends in creating real wealth in the
hands of the poor by their allotment schemes. (A weakness was
visible, I think, in the very different and contemptuous treatment of
Ford's effort to promote part-time farming among his workers during
the depression because it was made by Ford, who was certainly no
Distributist.)
But the most inspiring article in the paper in many a year was
written by a man who, having tried in vain to get his writings
printed, decided to start practising Distributism. He had pondered
long, he says, on how the Rank and File of the Movement who were
neither writers nor speakers should help, and the answer came to him
"Do it yourself." After a fascinating description of how he built
"the nucleus of a dwelling house against the time that a small plot
of land could be secured" he ends:
By responsible work a man can best realise the dignity of his human
personality. But most of us are caught in the net of industry and the
best way out would seem to be to create, that is to employ one's
leisure in conscious creative effort. This usually means the use of
hand as well as head, and the concentration on some familiar craft.
The aim also should be to acquire ownership in a small way; that is
to acquire the means of production. If we are not at all events
partly independent, how is it possible to urge on others the
principles of small ownership.
In saying this he spoke from experience, for he had found that before
he began his experiment his friends were exasperated by references to
the principles of Distributism, while the sight of the building in
progress began to convert them.
I have found many letters striking the note of gratitude to Gilbert
for his goodness and the inspiration he has given. One of these,
written by a sailor from H.M.S. _Hood_, is pure Distributism: "Your
articles are so interesting tho' so hard to understand. . . . Why not
come down a bit and educate the working class who are always in
trouble because they don't know what they want. You see, sir, your
use of words and phrases are so complicated, personally that's why
I'm so fascinated when I read them, but really us average Council
School educated people can't learn from you as we should . . . but
what I do understand helps me to live. . . ."
The sailor goes on to tell the story of his life: a workhouse child,
a farm boy: a seaman on a submarine who spent his "danger money" on a
bit of land in Cornwall, married now and with two boys. "What a thrill
of pleasure we have when we gaze over our land. . . . To be reared in
a workhouse and then to leave a freehold home and land to one's
children may not seem much to most people but still out of that my
sons can build again. . . . I feel you understand this letter, what
is in my heart, and I want to thank you very much for what you have
done for me."
Towards the end of September 1932 the League held a meeting to which
Gilbert came "as peacemaker." In the course of his speech he remarked
that he had often said harsh things of America in the days of her
prosperity but that in these days of adversity we might learn much
from that country. He instanced the saying he had heard from a
business man on his recent visit, "There's nothing for it but to go
back to the farm," and noted the fact that America still had this
large element of family farms as a basis for recovery. The suggestion
that Distributists wanted to turn everybody into peasants had been
another point answered in _The Outline_--"What we offer is
proportion. We wish to correct the proportions of the modern state."*
A considerable return to the family farm would greatly improve this
proportion.
[* _Outline of Sanity_, p. 56.]
But if he had spoken "harshly" of the United States it was nothing to
the way he had talked of the British Empire. Although at moments he
saw in imagination the romance of the fact that England had acquired
an Empire "absentmindedly" through Englishmen with the solitary
spirit of adventure and discovery, yet he had an unfortunate habit of
abusing the Dominions. They were the "suburbs" of England (a curious
phrase from the man who found suburbs "intoxicating"); we could not
learn from them as we could from Europe for they were inferior to us;
these and many other hard things he would throw out again and again
in his articles. One letter in the _Cockpit_ reproached him; from a
New Zealander of English descent it asked him whether he really meant
that those of his own race were so utterly indifferent to him;
whether he really preferred Bohemians and Norwegians to Britons. The
letter received no answer.
My husband and I used to wonder with secret smiles whether he was the
Australian from whom Gilbert derived the idea of that country as a
"raw and remote colony." Belloc also, in a letter extolling the
Faith, asked "what else would print civilised stuff in Australasia?"
Many years earlier Gilbert had written, in reviewing a book on the
Cottages of England, of the inconsistency of the English upper
classes who exalt the achievement of the national character in
creating the Empire and disparage it concerning the possibility of
re-creating the rural life of England. "Their creed contains two
great articles: first that the common Englishman can get on anywhere,
and second that the common Englishman cannot get on in England."
Surely Chesterton had this same inconsistency, as it were, in
reverse? The common Englishman was great in England, the common
Irishman was great in Ireland, the common Scot was a figure of
romance in Scotland, but when these common men created a new country
that new country became contemptible.
The Empire took a magnificent revenge, for it was in the "Suburbs of
England" that Distributism was first taken seriously and used as
practical politics. A far more effectively distributist paper than
_The Distributist_ appeared in Ceylon under the able editorship of
J. P. de Fonseka, in which action was recorded and the movements of
Government watched and sometimes affected from the Distributist
angle, and Catholic Social thinking formed on Distributist lines.
This paper has a considerable effect also in India. But of course the
main Distributist impact has been felt in the States, in Canada and
in Australia.
There is a double-edged difficulty in talking about the influence of
anyone on his times. On the one hand, as Mgr. Knox pointed out, all
our generation has grown up under Chesterton's influence so
completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton.
One sees unacknowledged (and unconscious) quotations from him in
books and articles, one hears them in speeches and sermons. On the
other hand into the making of a movement there flow so many streams
that it is possible to claim too much for a single influence however
powerful. An American Distributist said to me lately that the movement
set on foot by Chesterton had reached incredible proportions for one
generation. I think this is true but we have also to render thanks
(for example) to the suicide of the commercial-capitalist-combine
which created the void for our philosophy. That the Distributist
League has had much influence I doubt: in the United States the
Chesterton spirit is better represented by that admirable paper
_Free America_ than by the American Distributists--for _Free
America_ is offering us precisely what the League has for the most
part failed to offer--the laboratory test of the Distributist ideal.
Every number carries stories of men who have in part-time or
whole-time farming, in small shops, in backyard industries tried out
Distributism and can tell us how it has worked and _how to work it_.
Its editors Herbert Agar, Ralph Borsodi, Canon Ligutti and others,
all foremost in the Ruralist movement, acknowledge debt to Chesterton
and are carrying on the torch. Monsignor Ligutti's own work in the
field of part-time farming, his own periodical and the thoughts that
inspire the Catholic Rural Life Movement of America are among the
most important manifestations of that universal religious and rural
awakening for which Chesterton worked so hard and longed so ardently.
In Canada the Antigonish movement has shown a happy blending of
theory and practise. For the University itself has in its Extension
Movement and by its organ _The Maritime Co-operator_ provided the
theory, while up and down the country co-operative groups have built
their own houses and canneries, started their own co-operative stores
and savings banks, and made the Maritime Provinces a hopeful and
property-owning community of small farmers and fisher folk. Several
important books have grown out of this movement and at its basis lies
the insistence on adult education which shall make ordinary men
"Masters of their Destiny." Surely it is the authentic voice of
Chesterton when Dr. Tompkins says "Trust the little fellow" or Dr.
Coady declares "The people are great and powerful and can do
everything."
In Australia Distributism has given a fresh slant to both Labour and
Catholic leadership. The direct debt to Chesterton of the _Australian
Catholic Worker_ is immense, and while the paper also owes much to
_The Catholic Worker_ of America and to the Jocistes of France and
Belgium, we find too that in America, France, and Belgium, Chesterton
himself is studied more than any other Catholic Englishman. The
Campion Society founded in Melbourne in 1931, the Catholic Guild of
Social Studies in Adelaide, the Aquinas Society in Brisbane, the
Chesterton Club in Perth and the Campion Society in Sydney have all
based their thinking and their action on the Chesterbelloc
philosophy. These groups have closely analysed Belloc's _Servile
State_ and _Restoration of Property_ and have applied its principles
in their social action in a most interesting fashion. Thus they
opposed--and helped to defeat--a scheme for compulsory national
insurance chiefly on the ground that "the social services in a modern
State were the insurance premiums which Capitalism paid on its life
policy." With wages high enough to keep families in reasonable
comfort and save a little, with well distributed property, national
insurance would be rendered unnecessary. Yet on the other hand they
supported--and won--national "child endowment" because although
fundamentally only a palliative this at least strengthened the family
by supplementing wages and helping parents towards ownership and
property.
Most important however of all the Australian developments has been
the approval of the main Distributist ideal by the Australasian
Hierarchy as the aim of Catholic Social Action. This was especially
set out in their Statement on Social Justice, issued on occasion of
the first Social Justice Sunday in 1940.* The Hierarchy of New
Zealand joined with that of Australia in establishing this
celebration for the third Sunday after Easter. Indeed, the social
policy of Australian Catholicism has produced the slogan "Property
for the People," while the policy has been brought into action both
by many scattered individuals in that huge but thinly populated
country and in organised fashion by the Rural Life movements with
their own organs of expression.
[* Published by the Australian C.T.S.]
If it is difficult to estimate the impact of mind upon mind it
becomes bewilderingly impossible to weigh, in such a movement as
Distributism, the actual practical effects. Partly because, while
Distributism leads naturally to co-operation (an individual, says
Chesterton, is only the Latin word for an atom and to reduce society
to individuals is to smash it to atoms), still the movement is
essentially local, the groups usually small.
For my own part I have travelled a good deal, always with a primary
interest in social developments, and everywhere I have found
Chesterton or his derivatives. The numbers in America alone--both in
the States and Canada--who are trying out these ideas in big and
small communities is amazing. I did begin to make a list of vital
movements beginning with the Jocistes and the American Catholic
Worker, roving over the world and trying to estimate in each movement
I had met the proportion of Chesterton's influence, and again the
extent to which one movement is in debt to another--but I gave it up
in despair. One can only say that certainly there has been a great
stirring of the waters in every country: each has taken and has given
to the other: and most of those thus co-operating have been the
"little" men whom G.K. loved and in whom Dr. Tompkins tells us to
trust. To utter nobly the thoughts of that little man was, Chesterton
held, the highest aim that poet or prophet could set before him.
Distributism is that little man's philosophy. Chesterton gave it
large utterance.
And he could do it the more richly because--as he said many years ago
of the religious philosophy that was the basis of his social
outlook--"I did not make it. God and humanity made it and it made me."
Meanwhile he himself distributed royally. He gave help to the
Catholic Land Movement, to Cecil Houses, to all who asked him for
help. He educated several nieces and nephews of Frances and gave
money or lent it in considerable sums to old friends in difficulties.
If some event--perhaps Judgment Day--should call together all those
helped financially by Gilbert and Frances, I think they will be
surprised to meet one another and to discover what a lot of them
there are. They gave too to the Catholic Church at Beaconsfield,
which later became Gilbert's monument, and to which Top Meadow was
left after Frances's death. But even Top Meadow was distributed, a
small piece being cut off the garden and left to Dorothy Collins. And
I think even in a Distributist heaven it must add to Gilbert's
happiness to see the seventeen rabbits, the chickens and the
beehives--to say nothing of the huge quantities of vegetables
produced on this fragment of his property.
For this war like the last, with all its suffering, will, if the
Bureaucracy permit it, again energise the people of England into that
creative action which is the only soil for the seed of Distributism.
It began by distributing the people. And London was no place for a
Distributist movement. It is no chance that the growth of this
philosophy is among small groups and in the countryside. "On the
land," as Father Vincent often says, "you need not waste a moment of
time or a scrap of material." This is the fierce and pious thrift
that Gilbert saw in his youth as so poetical and in his age as a part
of the philosophy of Distributism.