Distributist Perspectives (Vol I)

Arthur Joseph Penty was born in York, in England, in 1875. His first practical and professional experience was in his father’s drawing office, and by 1902 his skill as an architect was rather widely acknowledged; his work received public commendation and was the subject of at least one work published in Germany. Intellectually Penty’s development was marked initially by association with the Fabian Society in London, whose members, including Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Philip Snowden and George Bernard Shaw, advocated a moderate form of State Socialism. Though routinely referring to himself as a Socialist, he was a vigorous opponent of bureaucracy, centralization, and collectivism; as Fr. Kiernan noted in his 1941 thesis on Penty for the Catholic University, “in those days [‘Socialism’] had a rather loose significance, and anyone who was not in agreement with the prevailing social and economic philosophy was liable to term himself or be called a Socialist.”

Penty’s association with the Fabians broke in 1916, by which time his vision had been further formed by thinkers such as John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and William Morris, who looked to the Middle Ages as the quintessential example of a period in which sound principles governed society, and which principles could be applied to remedy modern social ills. As a result of his acquaintance with A. R. Orage, a onetime fellow Fabian, and part owner of the weekly newspaper The New Age, Penty became involved with various thinkers like Orage who were questioning — from various perspectives — the industrial and wage-earning nature of the modern economy; these included the Distributist thinkers Chesterton and Belloc, who were also working out their own theory in the pages of The New Age, among other places. Penty’s thought developed greatly during the period of his association with the paper, and he began to concentrate upon two problems which he thought fundamental to the economic ills of society: the unrestricted use of machinery, and the unrestricted use of money. Both problems, he believed, could be addressed by the formation of Guilds modeled — but in updated form — upon their medieval predecessors. From then on Penty was the champion and chief spokesman of the Guild System, and became the most profound thinker of the Distributist and related Guild movements. Penty’s thought was also significant in that it reacted upon other thinkers such as A. R. Orage, G. D. H. Cole, M. B. Reckitt, and S. G. Hobson to produce the movement known as Guild Socialism. This latter was, again according to Fr. Kiernan (paraphrasing H. G. Wells), “the result of the impact of guilds and Mr. Penty on the uneasy conscience of Mr. Orage.”

Penty expressed and defended his vision in numerous different forums. His published works on the economic question include The Restoration of the Guild System, Old Worlds for New, Guilds and the Social Crisis, A Guildsman’s Interpretation of History, Guilds, Trade and Agriculture, Post Industrialism, Towards a Christian Sociology, Agriculture and the Unemployed, Protection and the Social Problem, Means and Ends, Communism and the Alternative, Tradition and Modernism in Politics, and Distributism: A Manifesto. Of these titles several were translated variously into German, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese. His works received considerable attention in his day, being reviewed by organs of the Catholic, Anglican, and secular press with remarkable regularity. His articles appeared in various journals such as The New Age, The New Witness, New Standards, G. K.’s Weekly, The American Review, The Criterion, The Daily News, the Daily Herald, A Journal of Workers’ Control, The Church Socialist, The Crusader, The Guildsman, The Guild Socialist, the Architect’s Journal, and the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. He was a member of various organizations advocating the Guild System and/or a moral and spiritual solution to the economic problem, such as (for a time) the Fabian Society, the Church Socialist League, the Crusader League, and the Rural Reconstruction Association (which he helped to found); he also served as President of the Architects’ and Surveyors’ Assistants’ Professional Union.

Herbert Shove was a Distributist, journalist, and Catholic Land Association Secretary. Born in Faversham, Kent, England, in the Canterbury parish, he lived as a child with his farming family on Queen Court Farm, in Ospringe. Shove joined the British Navy and served, as a Lieutenant Commander, as commander of Royal Navy Submarines C-2 (1915–1916) and E-29 (1915–1922) during World War I. During the latter assignment he was received into the Catholic Church by a Dominican Naval Chaplain. He was called up again during World War II for service organizing the defenses of the Port of London, and was promoted to Captain. He was later transferred to the Gold Coast where he suffered severely from the climate, such that he had to return to England where, shortly thereafter he died. He was recipient of the Distinguished Service Order and the Order of the British Empire.

During the inter-war years, Shove lived at Hallett’s Farm at Ditchling, where he worked alongside the others in the village community of craftsmen and artisans effectively founded by Hilary Pepler and Eric Gill. There, Shove was especially well-known for his “illicit still”! Somewhat of an ideal Distributist, he was considered an authority on such varied arts as silversmithing – which he learned from fellow Ditchling resident craftsman Dunstan Prudan – beekeeping, farming, and distilling. After the foundation of the Distributist League (specifically entitled the “League for the Defense of Liberty Through the Distribution of Property”), Shove collaborated with other well-known Distributists such as Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton.

He devoted much of his mental energy to economic theory, the best expression of which can be found in his excellent book on the history of trade and manufacturing, The Fairy Ring of Commerce, which was published in 1930 by the Birmingham Branch of the Distributist League. According to Robbins, he and George Maxwell, a fellow Ditchling craftsman and Distributist persuaded Shove to commit to paper his engaging thesis on “the close and inevitable association between Industrialism and soil erosion with general exhaustion.” The book also discusses the rise of the wage system out of the cottage industries of rural England, stemming from the changes in England, going back to the Reformation, for the profit of the textile industries. It is by far the most thorough and scholarly treatment of the subject to come out of the Distributist circle, and the 1,000 copies printed were sold out, with a modest return coming back to author, financial guarantors, and the Birmingham branch: a modest success for the first and only foray by the English Distributists into full-length book publishing.

As an amateur farmer, Shove also collaborated with land-movement activists and Distributists like K. L. Kenrick, Fr. Vincent McNabb, and Harold Robbins; he served as Chairman of the South of England Catholic Land Association. As a senior spokesman for the aims of the land movement, he contributed an essay to its “manifesto,” Flee to the Fields, entitled “The Rise and Fall of Industrialism,” which was later printed in the American Review in the United States.

Fr. Brocard Sewell said that because of his beard Shove looked very much like William Morris. Records suggest that he died in hospital in 1950, at Mayday Hospital, Surrey.

Arthur Eric Rowton Gill was an engraver, sculptor, typographer, and writer. He was trained as an architect in London and also took classes in writing and illumination at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Inspired by well-known calligrapher Edward Johnston, who was himself an admirer of William Morris and later a member of the Ditchling community, Gill acquired a passion for lettering that remained with him for life.

His professional career thus began with carving letterforms in stone for numerous tombstones and memorials in and around London. This work further led to a series of stone sculptures exhibited in galleries, as well as others executed for the BBC Headquarters (such as Prospero and Ariel), the London Underground, numerous churches, and various war memorials, among which is the WWI memorial at the University of Leeds which depicts a powerful Christ driving modern-day money lenders from the Temple. He also produced the magnificent Stations of the Cross that are still to be seen in Westminster Cathedral in London, and designed St. Peter the Apostle (Catholic) Church, located in Gorleston-on-Sea, Great Yarmouth.

As a type designer Gill produced Perpetua and the companion italic Felicity, Gill Sans, and Joanna, the latter named after his daughter. The majority of his type designs were done for Monotype Typography, a company still in existence. In 1931 Gill produced his influential Essay on Typography.

As an engraver and illustrator, much of Gill’s notable work was produced for the Golden Cockerel Press, established in 1920 and owned and directed from 1924 to 1933 by engraver Robert Gibbings. The Press was one of the most renowned English private presses of the early 20th century, and its books served as outlets for the wood engravings of numerous well-known engravers, including Gill, Gibbings, David Jones, and John Buckland Wright. The most famous work to result from the Gibbings-Gill collaboration is the 1931 book, The Four Gospels. Along with Gibbings, Gill was a founding member of the Society of Wood Engravers, which was formed in 1920.

Among the many engravings and illustrations that he produced are The Song of Songs, The Passion of the Lord Jesus Christ, and Troilus and Criseyde. He also produced numerous wood engravings for bookplates and posters.

Gill was also the founder (with Hilary Pepler) in 1921 of the Guild of Saint Joseph and Saint Dominic at Ditchling, a village in Sussex, England, where Gill lived from 1907 to 1924. His apprentice Joseph Cribb went with him to Ditchling; fellow craftsmen and their families followed later on, including Edward Johnston (1912) and Hilary Pepler (1915), and their families. Another early member of the Guild was the painter and poet David Jones. Some consider Pepler’s Saint Dominic’s Press to have been in some respects the heart of the Guild.

Even after Gill left Ditchling for Pigott’s farm, he continued to train pupils and assistants, and his legacy inspired a generation of stone carvers and letter cutters. His apprentice remained at Ditchling, taking over the stone carver’s workshop, and the Guild numbered among its members in the 1920s craftsmen such as carpenter George Maxwell, weavers Valentine KilBride and Bernard Brocklehurst, and wood-engraver Philip Hagreen. In 1932 the silversmith Dunstan Pruden (who taught Capt. Herbert Shove the trade) joined, followed by artist and engraver Edgar Holloway. The affairs of the Guild were not wound up until 1989.

As a thinker, social critic, and art philosopher, Gill expressed the life that he had attempted to lead at Ditchling and thereafter. His ideas on art and philosophy were influenced by the work of French Thomist Jacques Maritain, whose work Art and Scholasticism was published by Gill in 1923 as the first-ever translation of Maritain in England. Gill’s works of philosophy and social criticism include Art and Love, Art and Prudence, Art and Manufacture, Clothes, Money and Morals, Beauty Looks After Itself, Work and Leisure, Work and Property, Christianity and the Machine Age, and It All Goes Together. His faithfulness to the Catholic social vision is best illustrated by noting a remark that Pope Pius XII made when he happened upon one of Gill’s books: “This man has understood our encyclicals.”

Gill was a remarkable man, himself a convert to the Catholic Faith in 1913, who combined theoretical erudition with manual dexterity to a high degree, thereby influencing an enormous range of people that included Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Not a few of his contemporaries considered him to be remarkable for his holiness; Fr. Brocard Sewell, the English Carmelite, in fact remarked of him that “he represents my ideal of the holy man. . . . [For] the saint. . . is the man who loves God and his neighbor with all his heart, and Eric did that to a degree I have seldom encountered.”

Born in London, Chesterton was educated at St. Paul’s and studied for a time at both University College and the Slade School. A fellow-student whose family controlled the publishing firm of Hodder & Stoughton gave him some art books to review in the firm’s monthly, The Bookman. During this period Chesterton formed friendships (that were to last a lifetime) with the future writer Edmund C. Bentley and with Lucian Oldershaw, which latter individual introduced, in 1900, the twenty-six-year old Gilbert to the thirty-year-old Belloc. The reciprocal influence and friendship of Belloc and G.K.C. lasted a lifetime.

In 1899 Gilbert began writing for The Speaker, a Liberal weekly. His first book, a volume of comic verse which he also illustrated, Greybeards at Play, was successfully published in 1900; later that year, his father financed publication of his second book, The Wild Knight and Other Poems. But it was his brilliant though unpopular pro-Boer stand on the Boer War which first brought him to public attention, and by 1901 he also was writing regularly for The Daily News. From this time on there was an almost constant stream of lecture engagements far and wide and to almost every type of organization – religious, literary, social, and even political. (Later of these engagements included speaking tours to Palestine – which became a determining factor in his conversion – in 1919, to Italy in 1920, which included an interview with Mussolini and an audience with the Holy Father, and to the United States in 1921–22 and again in 1930–31.) And from this beginning he went on to become one of the most prolific writers of all time. He wrote a hundred books, contributions to two hundred others, hundreds of poems, including the epic Ballad of the White Horse, five plays, five novels, and some two hundred short stories, including a popular series featuring the priest-detective, Father Brown. At one time he had thirty books contracted for with various publishers. In spite of his literary accomplishments, he considered himself primarily a journalist. He wrote over 4000 newspaper essays, including 30 years worth of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News, and 13 years worth of weekly columns for the Daily News.

Chesterton was equally at ease with literary and social criticism, history, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology. His style is unmistakable, always marked by humility, consistency, paradox, wit, and wonder. His writing remains as timely and as timeless today as when it first appeared, even though much of it was published in throwaway papers.

This man who composed such profound and perfect lines as “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried,” stood 6’4” and weighed about 300 pounds, usually had a cigar in his mouth, and walked around wearing a cape and a crumpled hat, tiny glasses pinched to the end of his nose, swordstick in hand, laughter blowing through his moustache. And he usually had no idea where or when his next appointment was.

This absent-minded, overgrown elf of a man, who laughed at his own jokes and amused children at birthday parties by catching buns in his mouth, was the man who wrote a book called The Everlasting Man, which led a young atheist named C.S. Lewis to become a Christian. This was the man who wrote a novel called The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which inspired Michael Collins to lead a movement for Irish Independence. This was the man who wrote an essay in the Illustrated London News that inspired Mohandas Gandhi to lead a movement to end British colonial rule in India. This was the man who, when commissioned to write a book on St. Thomas Aquinas, had his secretary check out a stack of books on the Saint from the library, opened the top book on the stack, thumbed through it, closed it, and proceeded to dictate a book on St. Thomas. But not just any book. The renowned Thomistic scholar, Ettienne Gilson, had this to say about it: “I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement.” And the Master General of the Dominican Order, Pere Gillet, O.P., lectured on and from it to large meetings of Dominicans.

His interest in politics, which he had had from boyhood, grew over time. He began by fighting the sale of peerages as a means of secretly raising party funds, and continued blasting every other form of political corruption. Of necessity this interest included social reform, public education, a free press, etc. He resigned from the Liberal-owned Daily News (a property of the Cadbury of Cadbury’s Chocolate) to write for the Daily Herald.

With his brother Cecil and Belloc, reacting against what they believed wrong with the English social-economic condition, they formulated their own program: Distributism. One of their principal points of controversy was over private ownership, chiefly ownership of the land, which was tragically curtailed by the English law of enclosure by which some five million acres ceased in effect to be the common property of the poor and became the private property of the rich. In books and articles they carried on their fight for the liberty of Englishmen against increasing enslavement to a plutocracy, and to expose and combat corruption in public life. In support of this cause Chesterton contributed to the paper which was for many years, though under different names, effectively their common patrimony: The Eye Witness (1911–12), The New Witness (1912–23), which Chesterton edited from 1916 on, and G.K.’s Weekly (1925–36), which he edited until his death.

The time between the death of The New Witness in 1923 – a year after his conversion to Catholicism – and the birth of G.K.’s Weekly in 1925, gave him sufficient leisure to write two of his most important books: St. Francis of Assisi and The Everlasting Man. But to the paper which he took over following his brother Cecil’s enlistment and untimely death, and which enshrined Cecil’s memory though it now bore his own initials, Chesterton devoted a tremendous amount of his time as editor from 1925 to 1930. Most of those who knew him regarded it as a sacrifice. Besides Belloc and himself, a steady contributor was Eric Gill; out of friendship for Gilbert, Shaw and Wells contributed occasionally.

In 1926 the social and economic program of the paper became incarnate in the Distributist League, of which Gilbert was elected president, and the “simple idea” of which, according to G.K.C., ‘‘was to restore possession.” Branches were soon established throughout England and the circulation of its organ, G.K.’s Weekly, rose from 4,650 to 8,000 copies. The influence of the movement far exceeded its numbers; men like Father McNabb, O.P., in England (who was instrumental in helping to formulate its doctrine), Msgr. Ligutti in the United States, Dr. Coady and Dr. Tompkins in Canada, as well as others in Australia and New Zealand, acknowledged its influence upon their labors.

From 1932 until his death, Chesterton engaged increasingly in radio lectures, delivering as many as forty a year over the B.B.C. These talks were so well received that a B.B.C. official remarked after his death that “G.K.C. in another year or so would have become the dominating voice from Broadcasting House.”

Chesterton debated many of the celebrated intellectuals of his time: George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow. According to contemporary accounts, Chesterton usually emerged as the winner of these contests, though the world has immortalized his opponents and forgotten Chesterton, and now we hear only one side of the argument, as we endure the legacies of socialism, relativism, materialism, and skepticism. Ironically, all of his opponents regarded Chesterton with the greatest affection, with George Bernard Shaw saying: “The world is not thankful enough for Chesterton.”

His writing has been praised by an incredible number of well-known figures, including Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Karel Capek, Marshall McLuhan, Paul Claudel, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Sigrid Undset, Ronald Knox, Kingsley Amis, W.H. Auden, Anthony Burgess, E. F. Schumacher, Neil Gaiman, and Orson Welles.

In 1934 he was elected, honoris causa, to the Athenaeum Club. He was invested as Papal Knight Commander of the Order of St. Gregory with Star.

At his death in 1936 the Holy See cabled Cardinal Hinsley: “Holy Father deeply grieved death Mr. Gilbert Keith Chesterton devoted son of Holy Church gifted Defender of the Catholic Faith. His Holiness offers paternal sympathy people of England, assures prayers dear departed, bestows Apostolic Benediction.”

His monument was designed by Eric Gill, and he was buried at Beaconsfield. T.S. Eliot said that Chesterton “deserves a permanent claim on our loyalty.”

George Maxwell was a Catholic layman, Third Order Dominican, Distributist, peasant proprietor, and carpenter who embodied in his lifestyle the ideals and attitudes that the Distributist League and the Catholic land movement were attempting to propagate. Originally a coach-builder from Birmingham, England, he was induced by Fr. Vincent McNabb to join the community of craftsmen and Distributists in Ditchling, a village in Sussex, England, in 1922. Ditchling was “founded” by Eric Gill, Hilary Pepler, and Edward Johnston, originally from Hammersmith, who moved to the village from 1913 to 1916 for various reasons, but soon found themselves united in an effort of rural craftsmanship and communal life. Maxwell was a handy man, skilled as a carpenter, wheelwright, and loom-builder. When he came to Ditchling, he became a member of the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic, established by Eric Gill and Hilary Pepler to foster Catholic craftsmanship in theory and especially in pratice; for the Guild, “the principle of individual human responsibility being a fundamental of Catholic doctrine, and this principle involving the principles of ownership, workmen should own their tools, their workshops, and the product of their work.” As one of the village’s most skilled carpenters, Maxwell built his own carpenter’s shop, in order to provide furniture and other objects for the community, as well as his own furniture for his home, the Ferrers.

During the 1930s he built his first loom, and in the aftermath of WWII he expanded this craft immensely, supplying art schools and workshops throughout England with looms. As an accomplished amateur builder, Maxwell built his own home at Ditchling and, along with the workshop for St. Dominic’s Press, several houses that belonged either to the Guild – incorporated for business purposes as the Spoil Bank Association, Ltd. – or members or supporters living at Ditchling. A good friend of Harold Robbins, whom he had known since 1919, he lived the Distributist ideal, working in his company while managing the land and livestock on his smallholding.

Guildsmen such as Maxwell were required to be Third Order Dominicans; guild members met twice a day to recite the psalms and hymns of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary according to the Dominican rite, in the small chapel built near the workshops on the commons.

Maxwell was an extremely knowledgeable Thomist, and he knew many other major philosophers well, both ancient and modern. He was therefore considered to be Ditchling’s “resident philosopher” and one of the deepest thinkers among the Distributists. His house was in fact the “principal port of call” for the men of the Guild to argue and talk over their ideas. He held rigidly to what Michael Sewell (later Fr. Brocard Sewell) calls the “stricter” school of Distributism, thinking even Belloc and Chesterton heterodox on certain points. As an illustration of his intransigence it may be pointed out that later in his life he began to disapprove of some of Maritain’s philosophies, though the bulk of Distributist League members saw Maritain in the light in which St. Thomas saw Aristotle: as the philosopher.

Fr. Sewell relates in his memoirs that many of the younger Distributists who were faced with conscription for World War II consulted Maxwell for his assessment on a book on just war doctrine – which effectively implied the injustice of England’s participation in the war – by the well-known German Thomist, Fr. Francis Stratmann. Maxwell’s verdict was that he found Stratmann’s position unimpeachable; as an illustration of Maxwell’s sound grasp of the philosophy, others who shared his assessment of Stratmann’s work were the English Dominican Fr. Gerald Vann, O.P., Fr. Francis Drinkwater, and the well-known English Catholic writers Donald Attwater, E. I. Watkin, and Eric Gill.

Maxwell contributed frequently to G.K.’s Weekly and Cross and Plough, the English Catholic Land Association journal. As a supporter of the land movement he contributed an essay on craftsmanship to the important anthology Flee to the Fields. He died in 1957, leaving his son, John, to continue the work at his shop.

Son of the well-known newspaper editor, H. W. Massingham (1860–1924), H. J. was a journalist, author, and one of England’s leading natural historians and ruralists. During a rich life of activity, he contributed to papers such as The Field, The Spectator, Country Life, The New Age, The Adelphi, The New English Review, and The Weekly Review. In addition, he wrote some 40 books which covered the cultural, agricultural, and religious patrimony of England and made him the “Englishman’s Englishman.”

Beginning his career as an agnostic, working for his father on The Nation and for the guild-socialist New Age, he eventually came to affiliate with the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England, probably under the influence of Philip Mairet and Maurice Reckitt. This move towards a specifically Christian view of life and society became evermore accentuated in his later writings, and eventually led to his conversion to Catholicism ca. 1940. For a time he was on the staff of the anthropology department at the University of London, working with its professor, Grafton Elliot Smith. In his later work on the craftsmanship of the English countryside, he accumulated an impressive collection of rural tools, now held by the Rural History Centre at the University of Reading.

A declared Distributist, he was involved in a number of bodies which propounded his view of the world: the Right Book Club, founded by Captain Jock Ramsey, MP; the Council for Church and Countryside; and the Soil Association, of which he was a Founding Member. He was also heavily involved in the Kinship in Husbandry group, which was active from 1941 to 1950, and was composed of agriculturalists and writers who together attempted to both formulate and propagate a vision of organic farming and a philosophy of husbandry. Its first clerk was Lord Northbourne, the author of Look to the Land; other members included the poet Edmund Blunden, the journalist Philip Mairet, the soil expert Sir Alfred Howard, the nutritionist Sir Robert McCarrison, and the historian Arthur Bryant.

Apart from his autobiography, Remembrance, written in 1941, Massingham’s important works include A Treasury of Seventeenth Century English Verse, Cotswold Country, Rural England, The Tree of Life, Wisdom of the Fields, Where Man Belongs, and Faith of a Fieldsman. In writing the Tree of Life, he enjoyed the assistance of M. B. Reckitt, whom Massingham met through their mutual association with the Council for Church and Countryside. His leadership of the field in which he labored is illustrated by his having edited several volumes of essays, such as England and the Farmer and The Natural Order, which included contributions from important figures such as Viscount Lymington and Sir Albert Howard.

The significance of Massingham’s love for English agriculture and its fine traditions of husbandry and craftsmanship are happily becoming more and more appreciated. Dr. Hilda Kean of Ruskin College at the University of Oxford has referred to Massingham as “the forerunner of the modern ecological movement, who looked to organic farming and the benign treatment of animals to create a new way of life.” And Richard Moore-Colyer, a leading researcher of English Ruralism and Professor at the Rural Studies Institute of the University of Wales, wrote recently that &ldquotaken overall, the Massingham œuvre is characterised by a profound sincerity, a deep love of England and Englishness, and an omnipresent fear that the traditions which lay at the root of all he believed to be good about the English were under threat from a mechanistic economo-centric world in which the individual played but a minor role. Lyrical in description and pungent in criticism, Massingham’s writing is refreshingly free of pedantry; the considerable learning is worn lightly and he manages to enthuse profusely without resorting to overindulgence. At his best he bears comparison with the very finest ruralist writers, and in the literary celebration of the English countryside and its culture he probably has no twentieth-century rival. As a polemicist, meanwhile, he stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Cobbett (many of whose ideals he shared) although as a mild-tempered and gentle man he was entirely without the former’s trenchancy and bombast.”

A Distributist, Catholic land movement activist, journalist, and editor, Harold Robbins (1888-1954) was born in Birmingham to a Protestant family, and converted to Catholicism in the early 1900s, after briefly declaring himself a socialist, as many non-Catholic social thinkers did who were attempting to find a way to distance themselves from the prevailing Manchester liberalism. His conversion is most likely due to, among other things, his having discovered the two most prominent English Catholic writers of his time – Belloc and Chesterton – and their appealing critique of both socialism, about which he was having doubts, and capitalism.

Robbins jumped into the Distributist movement early, attempting unsuccessfully to write for the two weeklies then espousing it, the Eye Witness and its successor the New Witness. After military service in the first world war he became involved in the “New Witness League,” founded in 1918 around the weekly for opposing corruption in politics. Robbins was made Chairman of the Birmingham branch, the most active branch of the league. The group’s work focused ideologically on Distributism and the opposition to the eugenicist policies then being pursued by the British Ministry of Health. Some of Robbins’s thinking on this topic is found in his An Examination of Eugenics (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, Ltd., 1930). In the spring of 1921 the league wound up its activities, and two years later the paper of the same name ceased publication.

In 1925 those collaborating on the New Witness gathered around a new paper, G.K.’s Weekly (to which Robbins contributed), begun in order to “promote and ensure the discussion of the real economic forces of the age under their real names,” as Chesterton put it. Partly as a natural outgrowth and partly due to its financial straits (which it was in until the demise of its founder in 1936), and the need for subscribers, a league was also formed around this weekly, “for the restoration of liberty by the distribution of property”; or, the Distributist League. Robbins led, as Chairman, the Birmingham Branch of the league from 1926 to 1933, the most active and aggressive branch among some two dozen extant around 1927. He was chiefly instrumental in founding, with Msgr. James Dey, Rector of Oscott College and later Ordinary to the British Armed Forces, the Midlands Catholic Land Association; Robbins was its Honorary Secretary during the years that it was active, 1931 to 1936. This effort translated into practice what Robbins felt was somewhat of an overemphasis on mere talk: it was, he said, a “working model of practical distributism.” He also edited the journal of the Catholic Land Associations of England and Wales, The Cross and the Plough, from 1934 to 1946, published by the Catholic Land Federation of England and Wales.

He co-authored with K. L. Kenrick in 1928 what came to be known as “the Birmingham Scheme,” a pamphlet entitled Unemployment: A Distributist Solution; his friendship with Kenrick, who was the other chief mover of the Birmingham branch of the league, spanned many years. Kenrick called Robbins the “real power house” of the movement in their area. In 1946 he wrote a short biography of GKC – and also a history of Distributist activism from 1920 to 1940 – dedicated to Kenrick and entitled The Last of the Realists, though it was not published until 1948, and then only serialized in The Cross and the Plough because of wartime restrictions on paper.

Robbins’s short but powerful magnum opus was published in 1938 as The Sun of Justice: An Essay on the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church; he expressed its thesis thus: “Social Justice is crucial to the future of the Faith. There are many ways to the Faith, but it is certain that the concept of Our Lord as the Sun of Justice is not only valid, but is the only way by which our disillusioned and despairing world will return to Him” (pp. 10–11). Dorothy Day (1897–1980) noted in a 1954 issue of her paper, The Catholic Worker, that Robbins’s Sun of Justice “contains the best thinking ever done on Distributism.”

One of the true lords of the English language, Belloc was not an Englishman by birth. His father was French, his mother was Irish; and when he married, his bride was an American. But he looked more like the traditional figure of John Bull than any Englishman could. He was born at La Celle, near Paris, on July 20, 1870. His father, Louis Swanton Belloc, was a well-known barrister in France. Bessie Rayner, his mother, was of Irish extraction.

Belloc studied at the Oratory School at Edgebaston, England, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1893. In his third year he was the Blackenbury History Scholar and an honor student in the history schools. Between the Oratory School and Oxford, Belloc served in the French Army, where as a driver in the Eighth Regiment of Artillery he was stationed at Toul. It was from this spot that, years later, he was to set forth on the pilgrimage to St. Peter’s that furnished material for The Path to Rome, the book that many critics consider his best.

At Oxford Belloc became President of the debating society, the Oxford Union, and was known for his brilliance and high energy. His literary career followed his Oxford period immediately. He rapidly achieved success as a newspaper and magazine writer and as a light versifier. From then on a torrent of books, pamphlets, letters, etc., poured from his pen. It astonishes, not only in its bulk but in its diversity: French and British history, military strategy, satire, comic and serious verse, literary criticism, topography and travel, translations, religious, social, and political commentary, long-running controversies with such opponents as H. G. Wells and Dr. G. G. Coulton. His published books number one hundred and fifty-three. It is little wonder that A. P. Herbert described him as “the man who wrote a library.”

In 1903 Belloc became a British subject, and in 1906 was sent to Parliament by the South Salford constituency. His maiden speech in the House early in 1906 won him an immediate reputation as a brilliant orator. The same year he was the nominee of the British Bishops to the Catholic Education Council. Belloc remained in the House of Commons until 1910, but refused to serve a second term because, in his own words, he was “weary of the party system,” and thought he could attack politics better from without than from within. From that time on he devoted his entire efforts to writing and lecturing.

In 1911 Belloc founded the Eye Witness, which he edited with Cecil Chesterton (1879–1918), who with Belloc wrote their rousing condemnation of Parliamentary politics, The Party System. Together they scooped the notorious Marconi scandal in England in 1912. In the same year Chesterton took over the editorship of the Eye Witness, transforming it into the New Witness and editing it until his enlistment in 1916. At that point his brother G. K. assumed the editorial role for the paper, which he renamed G.K.’s Weekly in 1925. A year after G.K. died, in 1936, Belloc was persuaded by Hilary Pepler (1878–1951) to edit what was the successor to G. K.’s Weekly, called simply the Weekly Review. As was typical, Belloc soon found the editorship tedious, and passed it on to his son-in-law, Reginald Jebb (1884–1977).

Belloc was largely responsible for the conversion to the Faith of G. K. Chesterton. They went on to become numbered among England’s greatest writers and considered to be two of the most brilliant lay expounders of Catholic doctrine. The two were close friends and frequent collaborators, especially on G. K’s. Weekly, in which they waged many a valiant crusade together. Their journalistic collaboration also produced corresponding political movements, small but intense. The New Witness inspired and guided the Clean Government League, founded to unmask, combat, and eliminate government corruption. That League was also the inspiration for the later effort in 1926 to establish a New Witness League of sorts, which would take its inspiration from G. K.’s Weekly; it was this vision that flowered into the Distributist League that endured for some 13 years.

During World War I Belloc wrote detailed and authoritative war commentaries, each week filling much of the journal Land and Water, which was dedicated to covering the war. The Times paid high tribute to Belloc’s amazing powers in the field, drawing attention to his article that had appeared in London Magazine over two and a half years before the start of the war, “in which he predicted, with the most extraordinary accuracy, the proceedings of the Germans at Liege as they have happened at the opening of the present war.” The Times described his prediction as “one of the most astonishingly accurate prophecies of a great war in the history of journalism.”

Mr. Belloc visited the United States on many occasions. In 1937 he served as a visiting Professor of History at the Graduate School of Fordham University in New York; from these lectures came his book The Crisis of Civilization. He was decorated by Pope Pius XI with the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Gregory the Great in 1934 for his services to Catholicism as a writer. In the same year Oxford conferred upon him the honorary degree of Master of Arts. Later he shared with the then British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, the distinction of being the only persons to have their portraits hung in the National Portrait Gallery while they were alive.

Just four days before his eighty-third birthday, while dozing before the fireplace in his daughter’s home, he fell into the flames and was so badly burned that he died soon afterward in a hospital at Guildford, Surrey, on July 16, 1953.

Because of his antagonism to many British sacred cows and his free and caustic criticism of them, he was not a wholly popular man in England. Nor did his espousal of the Nationalist cause against the Communists during the Spanish civil war add to his popularity there. His refusal to tone down his views, and his contempt for the political, literary, and social establishments of the day, militated against recognition of him as a major writer and thinker. Neither was he helped by the range of his work; critics like to pigeon-hole a writer as poet, historian, playwright, or novelist, and they could not cope with his diversity, huge output, and overwhelming ebullience. They resented him. Even today, that fear and resentment is to be seen in the dismissive little articles and reviews, and the obsession with his alleged “fascism” which stems from his willingness to speak the truth as he saw it on topics which today are “untouchable.” But slowly the truth is emerging that Hilaire Belloc is among the great writers of English prose and that the best of his verse is of equally high quality. More importantly, he was a thinker of power, significance and – how rare these days – integrity. Where are the people today who would sacrifice the material rewards of public life and office as did Belloc when he demanded, in Parliament in 1908 and repeatedly thereafter, that the funds of political parties should be subject to audit?

Contrary to the lack of recognition which he received in some quarters during his lifetime, and despite his own prediction to the contrary, his place in English letters is secure.

Dr. Naylor is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University where he taught economics, management science, and computer science for 30 years. He also taught at Middlebury College and acted as an international management consultant, serving governments and major corporations in over 30 countries. His articles have been published in such journals as The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, the Nation, and Business Week. Downsizing the U.S. A. and Affluenza are the most recent of his 29 books. With Kirkpatrick Sale, Dr. Naylor co-directs the Middlebury Institute for the study of separatism, secession, and self-determination.

Fr. Smith was educated at DePaul University and Kenrick School of Theology where he received his Masters of Divinity. He has taught students from kindergarten to post graduate levels, lectured in Theology at Franciscan University, and preached retreats at parishes and seminaries in Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. He has been involved in parochial ministry since the early 1990s, recently serving as Parochial Vicar of Sacred Heart Parish (Newton, Iowa) and Immaculate Conception Parish (Colfax, Iowa). His writings have appeared in Gilbert! Magazine, The Catholic Yearbook, Lyrical Iowa, The Press-Citizen (Iowa City), and The Clinton Herald.