 Chapter 26 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Dick Bourgeois Doyle. Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward. Chapter 26, The Distributist League and Distributism. To say we must have socialism or capitalism is like saying we must choose between all men going to 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. Advanced number of GK's Weekly, November 1924. From GK'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. GK 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 Morris Wreckett Treasurer. It was planned to form a branch in Birmingham. Alternative names were discussed, the Cobbett Club, the Luddite League and the League of Small Property. The Cow and Acres, however suitable as a name of a public house at which we could assemble, is too limited as an economic statement. The League of Little People, President Mr. GK 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 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, GK 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 and the chair, and the meeting had to overflow into a very large hall. It was decided to reduce the price of the paper to two pence. Two Penny 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 six pence must take three copies at two pence until his 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 inhibition for it is certainly not yet strong enough to leave its mother. GK'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 13th, 1926. Father Vincent McNabb had 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 we were aiming at. Belick 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 Chester didn't 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 craftsmen and peasant, from the insanity of trusts and machinery, of unemployment, overproduction 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 news agents aware of the paper. By November 27th, the sales had risen 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 the 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 practicing it. Less and less than 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 the 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 GK himself was that while the league hoped in time to create a 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 a fence 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 and role volunteers and a lot 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 GK'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 be best 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 medieval social structure still lingered on far more than in industrial England and 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 Vaughn quoting it in this sense and if they tended to avert 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 yet been coined, to the restoration of property. The law therefore should favor ownership and its policies 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 work people can be encouraged to look forward to obtaining a share in the land the result will be that 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 in my youth undoubtedly was how far can a Catholic go on the road to socialism? The rarum novarum translation in Hustlain's The Christian Social Manifesto was used here. 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. Even among those who had accepted the distributist ideal and had now had fifteen years of the new witness and GK's weekly to meditate upon to say nothing of the bellock and chesterton books there was still a good deal of confusion of mind to be cleared up. The chester bellock 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's much easier to sit and drink beer while planning the world than 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 distributist soon began to argue and even 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 distributist's 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 my own highly inadequate rendering of the part of the financier. I am the thin and shadowy approximation to a capitalist. I can 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 harbor transfixed by mysterious dagger. Many a millionaire has perished silently though surrounded by a ring of private secretaries in order that Mr. Bellock 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 wrung out in the silent night. Many a constable has hurled himself through a crashing door from under which they're 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 teamwork 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, 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 in 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 in the rank and file. September 10th, 17th, and 24th, and October 1st, 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 of 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 50 men that would do the work of 40, it means 40 men become unemployed. But it is only because they were unemployed that they were unemployed. Now you and 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 was the objective of distributism. A wide distribution of property was its primary aim. And he did not want the leak 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 1st, 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, todry with waxwork imagery and repository art. Of the great adventurers who advance out of the Christian past in search of Christian future, you can never say that the pioneers despise the army. What seemed to chestered in 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 plenty of 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's desire, if not to abolish, at least to limit machinery. They adjured him to be more practical. Chestern 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 an 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 is that. June 13th, 1925. This desperate situation must be met by strengthening the home, re-establishing the small workshop, recreating the English peasantry. But first, the ground might have to be cleared. One phrase used in his articles, a 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 breakup 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, page 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 18 years later, when GK wrote What's Wrong with the World, individualist competition had not yet given place to trust, combine, and 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 social estate. I am one of those who believe that the cure for centralization is decentralization. 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 poisoned 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, not of men. The 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 on 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 15 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 Bellach 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 homespun 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 practicing distributism. It 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 realize 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, before he had found that before he began his experiment, his friends were exasperated by references to the principles of distributism, while the site of the building and 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 HMS Hood, is pure distributism. Your articles are so interesting though 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 and 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 in these days of adversity, we might learn much from that country. He instanced the saying he had heard from a businessman on his recent visit. There's nothing for it but to go back to the farm and note 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, page 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 an 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 that 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 we 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. Belich also, in a letter extolling the faith, what else would print civilized stuff in Australasia? Many years earlier Gilbert had written and 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 recreating 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. Shirley 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 Scott 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 where socialism 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. Defonseca in which action was recorded in the movements of the 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. The 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 Monsignor Knox pointed out, all of 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 them 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. The capitalist 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. A laboratory test of the Distributist ideal. Every number carries stories of men who have in part-time or whole-time jobs 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 Bersody, Cannon Liguti, and others, all foremost in the Ruralist movement acknowledged debt to Chesterton and are carrying on the torch. Monsignor Liguti'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 practice. For the University itself has in its extension movement in Bites, Oregon, the Maritime Cooperator provided the theory while up and down the country cooperative groups have built their own houses and canneries started their own cooperative stores and saving banks and made the Maritime provinces a hopeful and property-owning community of small farmers and fisherfolk. 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. Cody 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 just seats 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 Chester Bellach philosophy. These groups have closely analyzed Bellach'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 is the approval of the main distributist ideal of the Australasian hierarchy as the aim of Catholic social action. This was especially set out in their statement of 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 and the policy has been brought into action both by many scattered individuals in that huge but thinly populated country and in organized fashion by the rural life movements with their own organs of expression, published by the Australian CTS. 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 cooperation, 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 and the groups usually small. For my own part, I have traveled a good deal always with a primary interest in social developments and everywhere I have found Chesterton and 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 Josets 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 is taken and each is given to the other and most of those, thus cooperating, have been the little men whom G.K. loved and in whom Dr. Tompkins tells us to trust. The utter nobility the thoughts of that little man was, Chesterton held, the highest aim that poet and 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 times 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 Francis 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 like Gilbert and Francis, I think they will be surprised to meet one another and discover what a lot of them there are. They gave two to the Catholic church at Beaconsfield which later became Gilbert's monument and to which top metal was left after Francis death. But even top metal 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 17 rabbits, the chickens and the beehives be 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 energize the people of England into that creative action which is the only soil for the seed of Distributism. It began 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 poetic and in his age as part of the philosophy of Distributism. End of chapter 26. Chapter 27 part 1 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Dick Bourgeois Doyle Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward. Chapter 27 part 1 Silver Wedding. The consideration of the Distributist League that flowed out of the foundation of GK's weekly in 1925 has carried us some years ahead of our story. Back then to 1926 when Francis and Gilbert have been married 25 years. One of the things taught to me long ago when I first visited them at Beaconsfield was that it was properly to be called Beaconsfield. That it was not named for Disraeli but that he impertinently had chosen to be named for it. Gilbert often spelt at Beaconsfield to impress his point. Both in theory and practice he had a lot of local patriotism and a little of that special pride taken by all men and houses built by themselves. But most of his pride went out to the fact that his home was intensely English. He courted a lover of Sussex who said, among the beech trees of Buckingham Shur, this is really the most English part of England. He felt at no accident that has called this particular stretch of England the home counties. Public life was so ugly just now. The decay of patriotism under the corroding influence of an evil and cowardly sort of pacifism was hateful to him. But England still remained to revitalize the English when the time should come. The oaks that had made our ships could still fill us with heroic memories of Nelson dying under the low Okan beams or calling woods scattering the acorns that they might grow into battleships. Yet, if he said I were choosing an entirely English emblem, I should choose the beech tree. Beckinsfield was, by one theory, named from these beech forests that surrounded it. And while the oaks suggested adventure and the British lion, the beechs suggested rather the pigs that feed upon their mast and villages that grow up in the hollows and slow curves of the hills. The return of the real England with real Englishmen would be a return to the beech woods which still make this town like a home. At least they did until recently. I shall probably be told tomorrow that several beech forests have been removed to enable a motorist temporarily deaf and blind to go from Birmingham to Brighton. It is at top metal whether they moved in 1922 that I always see Francis and Gilbert in a memory picture. They were to live there for the rest of their lives, and life there was the quiet background for all the vast mental activity and journeying over England and Ireland and Europe and America that marked the years that remained. The house began simply as a huge room or studio built in the field opposite overroads. At one end was a stage which became the dining room. At the other end of my newt study for Gilbert, the roof was high with great beams. At the study end was a musician's gallery. A wide open fireplace held two rush-bottom seats on one of which Francis sat in winter. They were the only warm corners. But Gilbert did not feel the cold and certainly could not have fitted into the inglenook. Opposite the fire was a long low window looking into the prettiest garden where St. Francis stood guardian and preached perpetually to the birds. A pool held water lilies and the flowers that surrounded the pool and the house were also cut and brought indoors in great quantities. Francis loved to have them in glowing glasses against the background of books. New shelves had to be added every year as the books accumulated. Big as the room was, the wall space was not enough and one large bookcase was built out from the wall near the fireplace into the middle of the room, as in a public library. It looked well there and it screened one from the bitterest blasts. For the place seemed full of air from the four winds of heaven. The rest built on this room and looked tiny beside it. Kitchen and servants quarters, two fair sized and one very small bedroom, a minute sitting room for Francis where she kept her collection of tiny things, toys and ornaments, mostly less than an inch, many far smaller that were the delight of children. She had not, Gilbert remarked, allowed her taste to guide her in choosing a husband. A mixture of Gilbert's strong and weak qualities affected his dealings with his parents. I'm not sure he felt certain that it was quite right that he should have a gardener. Anyhow, no man was ever paid so highly and allowed to idle so completely as was the gardener I remember there. An exceedingly able gardener when he chose to work. To such trifles as the disappearance of coal or tools, neither Gilbert nor Francis would dream of averting and they were entirely at the mercy of a hard case story at all times. One man used to call weekly to receive ten shillings. For what service no one was able to form the faintest conception. Should he fail to appear, Gilbert mailed the money. He was found one day fighting another man on the doorstep for daring to beg from Mr. Chesterton. From a conventional point of view, the maids were inconceivably casual. Neither Gilbert nor Francis would have thought it right to insist on caps or indeed on any sort of uniform. It is my impression that I've been seen someone garbed in a skirt, a sweater, and a pair of bedroom slippers. And the parlor maid took for granted her own presence beside Francis and Dorothy Collins as a chief mourner at Gilbert's funeral. According to Bernard Shaw, writing of Dickens, marriage between genius and an ordinary or normal woman could not succeed. The gap was too wide. Dickens had thought he could go through with it only because he had not measured the gap. In this theory, as in so much else, Gilbert stood violently opposed to Shaw. No doubt he must at times have realized that there was an intellectual gap between himself and the ordinary man or woman. But it was a thing utterly unimportant. Character, love, sanity. These things mattered infinitely more, and he more than once depicts the genius as painfully climbing to reach the ordinary. His views concerning the sexes were equally at variance with those of Shaw and of most of the moderns. He was quite frankly the old fashion man, and Francis was the old fashion woman. They both agreed that there is one side of life that belongs to man, the side of endless cigars smoked over endless discussions about the universe. Gilbert, in What's Wrong with the World tells us that the voice in which the working woman summons her husband from the tavern is the same voice as that of the hostess who, leaving the men in the dining room tells her husband not to stay too long over the cigars. Of this voice he entirely approved as long as it did not ask to stay on in the dining room. He often said that the important thing for a country was that the men should be manly. The women, womanly. The thing he hated was the modern hybrid. The woman who gate crashes the male side of life. No one, he said, had in a letter of his engagement time take such a fierce pleasure as I do in things being themselves. And both he and Francis found amusement in that eternal equality which Gilbert saw in the sexes so long as they kept their eternal separateness. If everything he said is trying to be red some things are redder than others but there is an eternal and unalternable equality between red and green. It so happens that in the matter of the wives of great men he had something to say more than once. He longed to hear the point of view of Mrs Cobbett who remains in the background of his life in a sort of powerful silence. He combated Shaw's notion that the young poet would repudiate domestic toils for his wife rather he would idolize them though this Gilbert admits might at times be hard on the wife but the matter is best expressed in the love seen in one of his later romances Tales of the Longbow that valley had a quality of repose with a stir of refreshment as if the west wind had been snared in it and tamed into a summer air. What would you say if I turned the world upside down and set my foot upon the sun and the moon? I should say replied Joan Hardie still smiling that you wanted someone to look after you. He stared at her for a moment in an almost abstract fashion as if he had not fully understood. Then he laughed quite suddenly and uncontrollably. Like a man who seems something very close to him that he knows he is a fool not to have seen before. So a man will fall over something in a game of hiding and seeking and get up shaken with laughter. What a bump your mother earth gives you when you fall out of an airplane he said what a thing is horse sense and how much finer really than the poetry of Pegasus and when there is everything else as well that makes the sky clean and kind. Beauty and bravery and the lifting of the head while you are right enough Joan will you take care of me from pages 89 and 119 Francis was not especially interesting intellectually although she had much more mind than Joan in the story but above all she carried with her a quality of her pose with a stir of refreshment will you take care of me neither of them really had measured at first all that care would mean only bit by bit with the full degree of his physical dependence as we have seen it through the years become clear to her. The strenuous campaign in the matter of appearances begun during the engagement might alter in direction but had rather to be intensified in degree as he grew older shaving bathing even dressing were daily problems to him heat the water an early secretary over roads heard Francis saying to the cook Mr. Chesterton is going to have a bath and oh need I came in tones of deepest depression from the study. The thought of that vast form climbing into and out of the bathtub does make one realize how a matter of easy everyday practice to the normal person became to him almost a heroic venture. His tie his boots were equally a problem I remember is appearing once at breakfast in two ties claiming I noticed it that it proved he paid too much not too little attention to dress doctors dentists occultists were all needed at times but Gilbert would never discover the need or achieve appointments or the keeping of them still more serious was the question of how the two were to live and do all the acts of generosity that to them both seemed almost more necessary than their own living hardest he worked Dorothy Collins has told me that when she came to them in the year 1926 they had almost nothing saved it may be remembered that Gilbert wrote to Francis during their engagement that his only quality as a shopper was the ability to get rid of money and that he was not good at such minor observances as bringing home what he had bought or even remembering what it was through boyhood and into manhood his parents as we have seen had never given him money to handle and he certainly never learned to handle it in later life he spent money like water Bellick told me realizing his own incapacity he arranged fairly early to have Francis look after their finances bank the money and draw checks when we set up a house darling he had said I think you will have to do the shopping all he handled was small sums by way of pocket money very playfully regarded by both father O'Connor writes for he had often witnessed the joke that he was made of it what could she do he continues when Gilbert went out with 5 pounds 18 6 or words to that effect and came back invariably without a copper not knowing where his money had gone at a hotel in Warsaw the manager and treated him not to bring every beggar in town around the door he could never refuse a beggar and the money not given away was probably dropped in the street or in a shop the solution he hit upon was a box and hotels or anything that could not simply be brought home by Francis and placed by his side father O'Connor wrote to Dorothy Collins of the loving care with which Francis anticipated all his wishes never was the cigar box out of date you know this and it was long before you came and his title to the railway hotel for port or a court according to climactic conditions she devised and built the studio to play at and play in it used to be crowded at receptions as on the night when Gilbert broke his arm he had been toying with the tankard that evening and to the detriment of social intercourse but not much I thought we were all in good fettle the ballot of the white horse was just going to the printers that was never penned in Fleet Street nor the everlasting man he wrote verbosely there in the office at Beckinsfield he was pulled together braced the studio become the house almost certainly cost more than they had planned building always does but the two great drains were the benefactions in the paper Francis signed as a matter of course every check Gilbert wanted but I imagine it was sometimes with a little sigh that she wrote the checks for the endless telephones telegrams printers bills and other expenses that poured out to support a paper which to her seemed chiefly a drain on Gilbert's energies that could not but diminish his creative writing in the six years 1927 to 1933 he paid over 3000 pounds into the paper 1931 to 1932 were the worst years in them the checks she had to sign total 1500 pounds the last sentences quoted from Father O'Connor touch upon the deepest perhaps the only deep problem for them both for far the hardest thing was the struggle against the real danger that he might again drink too much as he had before the illness that so nearly killed them in 1915 this struggle was rendered especially hard by two elements in her makeup Francis wanted always to give Gilbert exactly what he wanted and she hated to admit even to herself anything that could be called a fault in them she saw the overwork that she was powerless to stop she could not be aware how great it made the situation it was for her to remember the old illness to be vigilant without worrying him to help him against himself after the long illness Dr. Pocock had advised total abstinence for some years largely because as he told me Gilbert unless specially warned ate and drank absent mindedly anything that happened to be there he observed this prohibition faithfully until Dr. Pocock left the field in 1919 Dr. Bakewell who succeeded him advised moderation but only occasionally found it necessary to order total abstention it was the amount of liquid he feared rather than its nature when he forbade wine he did so because wine increased general tendency to absorb liquid for Gilbert was always unslakably thirsty daily he drank several bottles of Vichy water or also of claret at what may be called the open seasons and many cups of tea and coffee spirits he practically never touched nor such heavier wines as port and sherry but even two bottles of claret or burgundy although usually appearing to brighten his intellect might well be a serious strain on the digestion of a man who overworked the mind without exercising the body he loved to sip a glass of wine Monsignor O'Connor writes and a stroll between sips in and out of his study brooding and jotting and then the dictation was ready for the morning Dorothy Collins once kept a record for a few weeks of the number of words dictated of the book of the moment usually 13 to 14,000 about 21 hours weekly exclusively of journalism editing and lecturing the pressure was tremendous and increasing nor was it felt by Gilbert only in a letter to Morris Bering at the time of his conversion he writes for deeper reasons than I could ever explain my mind has to turn especially on the thought of my wife whose life has been in many ways a very heroic tragedy and to whom I am so much in debt of honour that I cannot bear to leave her even psychologically if it be possible by tact and sympathy to take her with me Francis would indeed have been amazed to find herself cast for such a part of her life had held two tragic events Gertrude's death and the much sadder death of her brother believed to have killed himself with her faith and her profound affections such an end had stabbed deep yet certainly Francis did not view herself as other than happy in fact I think she very seldom thought about herself at all there was something of heroism in this very self forgetfulness Francis never had good health arthritis of the spine yet intimate as I was I knew this only after her death my husband was saying lately that had he been asked to choose adjectives to describe Francis he would have chosen cheerful and well balanced of all the people we have known we felt she was one of the closest to the norm of sanity and mental health quite an achievement for a woman suffering from a really painful complaint yet I think when he used the strong phrase heroic tragedy he saw with his great insight that his frail wife beside her heavy cross of childlessness beside the burden of her own physical and spiritual sufferings was carrying the weight of his achievement and that it was not a light one heroic was the right word but tragedy the wrong for this life given to her keeping ended on the note of triumph the treatment of a situation of this kind can of course easily be made unreal in the sort of golden glow cast by the imagination on fleet street with its taverns and its drinks next morning's headache is always omitted and even the finer deeper glow of the domestic hearth has its ashy moments no finite beings can conduct their lives with complete absence of errors or regrets and any human relationship however perfect that people concern sometimes bore or annoy or even hurt one another that is one of the main things that sends Catholics week by week or month by month to the confessional which brings for every man something of the renewal and recreation of daily joy that the genius Gilbert saw when he wrote Man Alive in this story the hero is always eloping with his own wife and marrying her again Flora Finchings it was not ecstasy it was comfort is common enough and a reasonably successful marriage but Gilbert wanted to keep and did keep the flashes of ecstasy when he wrote Man Alive he had been married 11 years and used a thought that had inspired a poem to Francis while they were engaged the heroine in the story keeps changing her second name but the name is always a color in one town the hero runs away with her as Mary Gray in another as Mary Green thus as a girl Gilbert had seen Francis in green and had understood why green trees and fields are beautiful had seen her in gray and had learned a new love for gray winter days and the gray robes of palmers and in blue then saw I how the fashioner splashed reckless blue on sky and sea and there it was good enough for her he tried it on eternity when they came back from Jerusalem Gilbert dedicated to Francis the ballad of Saint Barbara and we find him again at his old trick seeing as her throne the great stones of the medieval walls seeing nature as her background with all apologies to cynics I'm afraid that the judgment of the biographer upon all the evidence must be that after 25 years Gilbert not only loved his wife tenderly but was still ardently in love with her a curious prayer of his youth was fulfilled as they celebrated this year a one new garment of young green touched as you turned your soft brown hair and in me surged the strangest prayer ever in lovers heart hath been that I who saw your youth's bright page a rainbow change from robe to robe might see you on this earthly globe crowned with a silver crown of age your dear hair powdered in strange guise your dear face touched with colors pale and gazing through the mask and veil the mirth of your immortal eyes the last masquerade collected poems pages 348-349 four years earlier Francis had aided Gilbert in making the decision for which she was not yet herself ready to do the act which he called the most difficult of all my acts of freedom and indeed much of that freedom of full manhood he owed to her now after four years of waiting almost ready to join him she wrote to Father O'Connor June 20th 1926 Dear Padre, I want now as soon as I can see a few days clear before me to place myself under instruction to enter the church the whole position is full of difficulties and I pray you Padre to tell me the first step to take. I don't want my instruction to be here. I don't want to be the talk of Beckinsfield and for people to say I've only followed Gilbert it isn't true to fight not to let my love for him lead me to the truth I knew you would not accept me for such motives but I'm very tired and very worried many things are difficult for me my health included which makes strenuous attention a bit of a strain I know you understand tell me what I shall do you're affectionately Francis Chesterton between this letter and the next Gilbert and Francis celebrated their silver wedding 12th of July Dear Padre, we've had such a week of times and excitements that I had not even time to thank you for the spoons they are just what I like and incidentally just what I wanted I feel so hopeless at getting out of this net of responsibilities in which I am at present and meshed and to find time for instruction I feel I have a lot to learn and I think after all I'd better go quietly to Father Walker and talk to him Gilbert is writing to you himself I know he thinks I've made myself rather unhappy about things and he is so involved with the paper I pray he gives it up we have not been able to talk over things sensibly please be very patient with me because it is so difficult to get clear my nephew Peter is very ill and I have to spend a lot of time with my poor sister the parish priest yours gratefully Francis Chesterton undated many grateful thanks did you receive your copy of the incredulity of Father Brown it was put aside for you but I do not know if it was sent off or appropriated by somebody else I've written to Father Walker and after having seen him and had a talk I shall know what I ought to do it is only the mass of work the paper my poor Peter and money worries that keep me on the edge from morning till night I feel the paper must go it is too much for Gilbert four days work always and consequently too much for me I have to attend everything else trying to settle an income tax dispute has nearly brought me to tears you will understand how difficult it is to get time to think and adjust my conclusions yours affectionately Francis Chesterton this group of letters is for Francis amazingly unreserved I have never known a happier Catholic than she was once the shivering on the bank was over and the plunge had been taken one would say she had been in the church all her life this was indeed a year of fulfillment the year of the completion of their home for they surprisingly acquired a daughter I sometimes wondered why Francis and Gilbert had never adopted a child they lavished much love on nieces nephews and God children but this was the only fulfillment to their longing until almost old age and even then their conscious act was merely that of engaging a secretary they had had many secretaries before some of whom came with a quite inadequate training they learned on Gilbert as a friend once put it it was difficult too for the secretary since neither Gilbert nor Francis had any idea of hours or of the arrangement of work it was quite probable that Gilbert would suddenly want to dictate late in the evening or again that Francis would ask the secretary of the moment to run into the village for the fish in the middle of the morning hence rather than general discomfort Gilbert dictated straight to the typewriter so the shorthand was not needed he went very slowly with many pauses but it is typical of this period that no carbons were kept of letters sent no files of letters received in 1926 came Dorothy Collins not only did she bring order out of chaos but she became first the very dear friend of both Francis and Gilbert and finally all that their own daughter could have been I remember how Francis talked to her to me and when she was hoping Dorothy would become a Catholic which she did some years later and again when she herself was left solitary by her husband's death and how I felt with inward thanksgiving that no child could mean more to her mother but long before this stage was reached came a great lightning of the burden of living no longer would Francis cry over income tax returns no longer would money worrier chauffeur as well as secretary Dorothy drove them both to London for engagements and through England and Europe on holidays or lecture tours she went with them to America and handled the business of their second tour there now when friends rang up to make arrangements Francis or Gilbert would say would you ring again when Dorothy comes in? I'm not quite sure she keeps the engagement book and while Dorothy sternly warded off the undesirables it worked out much better for friends as no engagement book had been kept before with any regularity now engagements were kept as well as an engagement book Francis would still deal with the clothing question but Dorothy handled it if she were unwell and in every case delivered him punctually and brought him home again a few of the lectures and debates of these years were is journalism justifiable an aspect of St. Francis of Assisi the problem of liberty is the House of Commons any use what Poland is culture and the coming peril progress and old books Americanization the Bonner novel if I were a dictator the excitement of Catholics everywhere had been intense when Gilbert came into the church in England it was almost as great over Francis her real wish to remain in the background her dislike of publicity were seldom believed in by those who did not know her I happened to be present at a conversation between the proprietor and the editor of a Catholic paper which had displayed a poster all over London announcing her conversion one of them had heard that she was annoyed and for a moment both seemed a little dashed then said one of course she was to pretend not to like it and this was at once accepted by the other for both took it for granted that such publicity could in reality have given her nothing but pleasure it was difficult at first for either Francis or Gilbert to see the wood for the trees in their new environment and it was the greatest good fortune that the year of Francis's reception was also that of the new simplification following upon Dorothy's arrival for the preceding few years had resembled the hectic period of the lionizing of the young Chesterton in 1904 requests poured in for lectures, for articles for introductions to books are there no other Catholics to do things Francis asked me rather plaintively of these years Monsignor Nock said later his health had begun to decline and he was overworked partly through our fault I dip into the post bag brings up some letters from Father Martindale to Gilbert and Francis passing on various requests but also realizing the difficulty I sympathize with all desperately busy men I have already protected him by advising small or fussy groups not to invite him down again the solitary recollection I have of any interest Gilbert showed in a review of his books is a remark he made to my husband when Father Martindale had said that the Queen of Seven Swords Francis Thompson is here out past Gilbert repeated the phrase and said eagerly he wouldn't say it unless he meant it would he CCM who has himself been caricatured talking on the radio typing and eating at the same time is different from GKC as possible in his pale slimness and almost transparent appearance was no less busy over a thousand activities it was interesting that he should ask Gilbert's help especially in the cementing of Catholics wrote the empire and that has always so passionately preoccupied him in the war he had discovered in military hospitals the ordinary Englishman and above all the ordinary Australian and New Zealander to them and to the apostolate of the sea he was a devote primarily all his later life writing therefore to counsel the Chesterton's as to which Catholic works should have precedence we find him wanting an article for a New Zealand paper the only one of its sort in NZ and you may say that it affects the entire Catholic community of the two islands an autographed book for a hulking devotee of yours and a member of the Australia Rugger team I think eight of them are Catholics this would give enormous joy to him and would be known in no time throughout Australia do try to from South Africa he wrote to Francis you'll be surprised to get a letter from me from a nameless place 50 miles inland from the Nyanga mountains which you will find variously spelt westward from say Bayra on the African East Coast this is the reason recently a boy in a prowl here was found cutting pious pictures from a newspaper that he had somehow got hold of he was a good little Catholic why are you cutting out that one because this is a great Makuru in the Catholic Church Makuru is a potentate and will serve from St. Joseph right along to the Pope not to mention the little flower the great Makuru in this case was yourself so there I hope you'll smile with pleasure but not try to answer as please God I sail on the 31st not to be back in London in early September a good deal better thank God please remember me affectionately to Gilbert this is the first time a tight machine has clicked just here it's accompaniment in an otherwise dead silence is a distant gurgling yodel so to say some native feeling happy in the brilliantly hot sunlight which all the same cannot make the thin air hot I sleep when possible under furs with the occasional insect dropping off the thatch over my head later planning a meeting for the late of the sea at Queens Hall he writes to Gilbert similarly Father McNabb must be given his head and I have told him he shall be given it I hope to be purely practical and possibly a little sentimental the seaman is everywhere yet for us nowhere carries everywhere his child's heart man's body hungry unfed soul unique power of feeding his goodness into others the all round the world man the limited man the man whose life is made up of storms and stars the most secretive and the most open-hearted man of any now I will do all the clumsy stuff you pull it all up into the human sublime divine humble air he has no privacy and is more lonely than anyone he has water and God and must find Christ walking over the waves towards him and no ghost Father Vincent McNabb who was to be given his head at this meeting was not a new friend of Catholic days but a very old one a friendly critic of my manuscript asks whether he even more than bellicor Chesterton does not merit the title of the father of distributism at least he brings into the movement something none other could bring he bases his social philosophy closely on the gospels of which his knowledge is almost unique and his articles bear such titles as the economics of Bethlehem or big scale agriculture in the past hatred of machinery has combined with love of poverty to thunder him from a typewriter and these articles are all hand written in most exquisite and legible script his letters have always come in old envelopes turned inside out and he walks whenever possible and wears a shabby white habit and broken boots both Francis and Gilbert loved him dearly and their rare meetings were red letter days for both besides the link to distributism then reunited and caring deeply for the reawakened interest in Saint Thomas and his philosophy the Benedictine as well as the Dominican outlook and history especially appealed to Gilbert and the friendship with father Ignatius Rice which had begun almost with the century grew steadily he assisted as we have seen at Gilbert's reception into the church and whenever they met after that Gilbert will remind him we were together on that great day. High Wycombe was the Chesterton's parish until largely by their help a church could be built at Beckinsfield at first this church was served by Father Walker parish priest of High Wycombe it was he who had prepared Gilbert for his first communion and he has sent me some of his recollections it certainly did not take long to prepare him for he evidently knew as much as I could tell him nevertheless he said I was to treat him as I would any child whom I was teaching this knowing the man whom I was instructing for I had at the time carefully waded through his orthodoxy twice was indeed an undertaking of magnitude however I went through the catechism he was importantate that I should use it as he said all the children made use of it very meticulously explaining all the details to which he lent a most vigilant and unswerving attention for instance he wanted me to explain the reason of the drop of water being put in the wine at the preparing of the chalice for the holy sacrifice Father Walker describes Gilbert opening a bazaar and spending lavishly at every stall afterwards being photographed in his company Father Walker himself weighs 245 pounds and the caption was giants in the faith on his departure Gilbert presided at the farewell meeting and made a speech which says Father Walker gave me no end of delight Father now on senior Smith became the first rector of Beckinsfield as a separate parish the Chesterton's love the little church there which later became Gilbert's memorial and which among other things they gave a very beautiful statue of our lady but when it had first been dedicated there had been for both Francis and Gilbert a deep disappointment curiously enough neither of them had any devotion to the little flower who was chosen as patron they had hope for a dedication to the English martyrs Gilbert used to tell Dorothy who loves Saint Therese that he could not care for her with all apologies to you Dorothy he did not go often to confession Dorothy says but when he did go you could hear him all over the church getting up in the morning was always a fearful effort for him and starting for early mass he would say to her what but religion could bring us to such an evil pass end of chapter 27 part 1 chapter 27 part 2 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Dick Bourgeois Doyle Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Macy Ward chapter 27 part 2 this silver wedding meanwhile the books went on in 1926 appeared the outline of Sanity the Catholic Church and conversion chiefly concerned with his own mental history the incredulity of Father Brown and the Queen of Seven Swords in 1927 for the first time his scattered poems were brought into the volume of collected poems Saint Augustine asks whether he praised God before we know him Gilbert answered that question when by praise and thanksgiving he came as a boy to the discovery of God beginning by a passionate desire to thank someone for the universe there is much praise in the collected poems there is the note of hope in an almost hopeless fight in the ballad of the white horse there are lovely poems to his wife since Browning none has understood the sacrament of marriage as well as Gilbert Chesterton in 1927 there also appeared beside a couple of pamphlets the return of Don Quixote Robert Louis Stevenson the secret of Father Brown the judgment of Dr. Johnson Robert Louis Stevenson took Gilbert back to his boyhood and is by general agreement among the best of his literary studies but the best thing he ever said apropos of Stevenson came but in his attack on the science of eugenics Keats died young but he had more pleasure in a minute than a eugenist gets in a month Stevenson had lung trouble and it may for all I know have been perceptible to the eugenic eye even a generation before but who would perform that illegal operation the stopping of Stevenson Intercepting a letter bursting with good news confiscating a hamper full of presents and prizes pouring torrents of intoxicating wine into the sea all this is a faint approximation for the eugenic inaction of the ancestors of Stevenson this however is not the essential point with Stevenson it is not merely a case of the pleasure we get but the pleasure he got if he had died without writing a line he would have had more red hot joy than is given to most men shall I say of him to whom I owe so much let the day perish wherein he was born shall I pray that the stars of the twilight thereof be dark and be not numbered among the days of the year because it shut not up the days of his mother's womb I respectfully decline like Job I will put my hand upon my mouth eugenics and other evils page 57 when the Stevenson itself appeared Sir Edmund Goss wrote I have just finished reading the book in which you smite the detractors of RLS hip and thigh I cannot express without a sort of hyperbole the sentiments which you have awakened of joy, of satisfaction, of relief of malicious and vindictive pleasure we are avenged at last it is and always since his death has been impossible for me to write anything which went I love him and still love him too tenderly to analyze him but you who have the privilege of not being dazzled by having known him have taken the task into your strong, competent hands you could not have done it better the latest survivor the only survivor of his little early circle of intimate friends thanks you from the bottom of his heart Don Quixote is a Fantasia about the future in which the study of heraldry leads to the discovery of England in the centuries of her happiness and of her faith increasingly Gilbert saw the only future for his country in a remarriage between those divorced 300 years ago England and the Catholic Church Don Quixote is among the less good of his books but like all the works of these years it is saturated with Catholicism I wondered whether I felt more admiration or amazement when a man once asked us to publish a book on Chesterton saying I am an atheist myself but that doesn't matter as I don't deal with his religion as a young man Gilbert had wanted to marry the religion of Dr. Johnson to the Republicanism of Wilkes and in his Catholic faith of today he saw simply the rounding out in the completing of the religion of Dr. Johnson the judgment of Dr. Johnson his play about the great man was like magic an immense success this theme but not a stage success it was brilliantly acted and appreciatively criticized but could not win a public Bernard Shaw was still constantly urging Gilbert toward the drama Bellic too believed he could write a successful play and he and Ann Stay author of vice versa suggested the dramatizing of a Bellic story but neither the scenario they jointly sketched for Bellic's emerald nor another made by Gilbert alone for his own flying in ever reached the stage I remember going with the Chesterton's to a preview of a Father Brown picture two of the stories have been cleverly combined the cast was first rate including Una O'Connor and Walter Conley and it came out feeling convinced that Father Brown would become another Charlie Chan the stories would adapt so well a bounding as they do in scenes impossible for the stage perfectly easy for the screen high walls windows ladders flying harlequins but the first picture failed possibly because it was too short and no more were made the drama remained the one field in which he had no success Shaw's name for Gilbert Bellic was the Chester Bellic had come by the public to be used for the novels in which they collaborated Bellic wrote the story Chesterton drew the pictures and the resulting product was known as the Chester Bellic a number of the letters from Mr. Bellic begged Gilbert to do the drawings early in order to help the story I've already written a number of situations which you might care to sketch I append a list your drawing makes all the difference to my thinking I see the people in action more clearly and again I can't write till I have the inspiration of your pencil for the comedy in me is ailing Bellic would come over to Beckinsfield for a day or a night and the two men retired to Gilbert's minute study whence hoots of laughter would be heard at the end of a couple of hours they would emerge with the drawings for a book complete indeed several more that were needed Father Rice asked Gilbert once what he was writing and he replied my publishers have demanded a fresh batch of corpses the little detective priest I am very fond said one reader in Chesterton of that vicious little loafer became a feature in crime anthologies and when Anthony Berkeley in 1929 wanted to found the detective club he wrote that it would be quite incomplete without the creator of Father Brown Gilbert soon became president needless to say writes Dorothy Sayers he read his part of the initiation ceremony with tremendous effect and enormous gusto in an article Gilbert wrote about the club he called it a very small and quiet conspiracy to which I am proud to belong meeting in various restaurants its members would discuss various plots and schemes of crime some results of these discussions may be seen in the initiation ceremonies which he made public in the article thereby setting a good example to the mafia the Ku Klux Klan the Illuminati and all the other secret societies which now conduct the greater part of public life in the age of publicity and public opinion the ruler shall say to the candidate MN is it your firm desire to become a member of the detection club then the candidate shall answer in a loud voice that is my desire ruler do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of divine revelation feminine intuition mumbo jumbo jiggery pokery coincidence or act of God candidate I do ruler do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader candidate I do ruler do you promise to observe a seemingly moderation in the use of gangs conspiracies death rays ghosts hypnotism trap doors Chinaman super criminals and lunatics and utterly and forever to force where mysterious poisons unknown to science candidate I do ruler will you honor the king's English candidate I will then the ruler shall ask MN is there anything you hold sacred then the candidate having named a thing which he holds of peculiar sanctity the ruler shall ask MN do you swear by here the ruler shall name the thing which the candidate has declared to be his peculiar sanctity to observe faithfully all these promises which you have made so long as you are a member of the club but if the candidate is not able to name a thing which he holds sacred then the ruler shall propose the oath in this manner following MN do you as you hope to increase your sales swear to observe faithfully all these promises which you have made so long as you are a member of the club a book called the floating admiral was brought out by the club jester and wrote the introduction and each member produced one chapter reading it without inside knowledge I conceived that the idea was for each to clear up the problems created by his predecessor and create fresh ones for his successor Gilbert tells of the subtler joke underlying the story perhaps the most characteristic thing that the detection club ever did was to publish a detective story which was quite a good detective story but the best things in which could not possibly be understood by anybody except the gang of criminals that had produced it it was called the floating admiral and was written somewhat uproariously in the manner of one of those paper games in which each writer in turn continues a story of which he knows neither head nor tail it turned out remarkably readable but the joke of it will never be discovered by the ordinary reader for the truth is that almost every chapter thus contributed by an amateur detective is a satire on the personal peculiarities of the last amateur detective this it will be sternly said is not the way to become a best seller it is a matter of taste but to my mind there is always a curious tingle of obscure excitement in the works of this kind which have remained here and there in literary history the sort of book that it is even more enjoyable to write than to read the floating admiral was a fair success financially we hired a sort of Garrett writes one senior Knox with the proceeds as club rooms and on the night after we all received our keys the premises were burglariously entered why or by whom is still a mystery but it was a good joke that it should happen to the detective club Lord Peter and Father Brown and Monsieur Poirot how were the mighty fallen there is a custom in both English and Scottish universities of electing a Lord rector with the accompaniment of much undergraduate ragging of the choicest kind the candidates usually each represent a political party but personal popularity has much to say in their success at the Scottish universities the contests are particularly spirited in his keen sense of fun made Gilbert ready to accept frequent invitations to stand at Glasgow in 1925 Austin Chamberlain got 1242 votes Chesterton 968 and Sydney Web 285 which swamped you wrote Jack Fillemore always critical of the gentler sex was the women who simple snobbery cannot get past the top hat and frock coat and right honourable boil was never kidnapped others were removed into the mountains the last sentence might have been lifted from Sir Walter it refers to a pleasing habit among Scott's undergraduates of kidnapping the supporters of their opponents and keeping them safely concealed till after the election whether or not it was through their simple snobbery is Professor Fillemore said it was certainly the women's vote that swamped him of the 374 votes by which Austin Chamberlain beat Chesterton the men only accounted for 20 the women 354 but it must have been some profounder passion that caused one of England's leading women novelists to write to the secretary of the Glasgow University Liberal Club I failed to see why you should desire to embarrass liberalism at one of its least happy moments by associating it with that village idiot on a large scale who was responsible for the muddled economics and disagreeable fantastics of GK's weekly this was the outlook of that official liberalism which had long made it so difficult for Gilbert to go on calling himself a liberal the servile state was in full swing and official liberalism asked nothing better than to be allowed to operate it whether Bellock and Cecil Chesterton had been right or wrong at an earlier date and seeing the political parties in collusion it is certain that by now an utter bankruptcy and statementship had reduced them all to saying the same things while they did nothing ten years later on the day of the last general election of his life Gilbert wrote the liberal has formed the opinion that peace is decidedly preferable to its alternative of the war and that this should be achieved through support of the League of Nations interfering with the ambitions of other nations the ministerialist on the other hand holds that we should if possible employ a machinery called the League of Nations with the object of securing peace to which he is much attached the ministerialist demands that such strong action should be taken to reduce unemployment but the liberal does not scruple to retort that unemployment is an evil against which strong action must be taken the liberal thinks that we ought to revive our trade thus thwarting and throwing himself across the path of the national Tory who still insists that our trade should be revived thus the two frowning cohorts confront each other and I hear the noise of battle even as I write in June 1928 he was invited to stand for Edinburgh University he replied I do hope you will forgive me if there has been any delay in acknowledging your exceedingly important communication I have been away from home and moving about a good deal and have only just returned from London certainly there is nothing which I should feel as so great an honour or once so exciting or so undeserved as to receive even the invitation to stand for such a position in the great university that has always been so generous to me if you really think it would be of any service to your cause I can hardly refuse such a compliment of course you understand that it is only a rather independent sense though as I think in the right sense that I shall always call myself a liberal indeed I find it difficult to imagine any real sort of liberal who is not really an independent liberal I am quite certain I'm not a Tory or a socialist he was defeated at this election by Winston Churchill who got 864 votes to 593 for GK and 332 for Mrs. Sidney Webb he was again defeated at Aberdeen in 1933 coming second to Major Elliott the other candidates being C.M. Grieve and Aldous Huxley at one stage of the contest the Daily Express writes the Huxley supporters are smarting under the surprise attack made by the Chester Tonians at the Huxley concert at the weekend and are preparing reprisals the following letter is GK's reply to the first proposal from the Aberdeen students 25th of October 1933 I can at least assure you that the delay in acknowledging properly the most flattering compliment which you have paid me was not due to any notion of neglecting it it was due to the practical necessity at the moment of discovering and deciding on a fact which may for all I know, save you the trouble of further consideration of the matter and it is for this reason that I mention the practical difficulty first I now find that I shall almost certainly be obliged to be out of England and Scotland for about three or four months or conceivably a little more beginning about the middle of January I did not know what preliminary formalities would be demanded of me as a candidate or when the demand for them would arise but I was so strongly impressed with the honour you have paid me that I thought at my duty to find out the facts on this particular point so that you might act on it in any way you think right in any case if the delay thus involved has placed you in any difficulty I need not say that I shall fully understand you're finding the project unworkable and I shall be quite content to remember the compliment of the request there is another consideration which would help the practical side of the cause and for that I fear I must make the practical inquiries of you as people understanding the circumstances you do not mention the party you represent and though I am like most of us long past attaching a horrid sanctity to the name I hope you will forgive that much curiosity in a poor bewildered journalist who has been exhibited in many lights and cross lights I was put up as a candidate at Glasgow as a liberal which is really quite true but I think I managed in my election pamphlet to give my own definition of liberalism I have also been more recently in a public platform in Glasgow supported by my friend Mr. Compton Mackenzie when he stood as a Scottish nationalist both these positions I am quite prepared to defend but in the latter you might naturally prefer a nationalist candidate who was not only a quarter of a Scotsman I may remark that as the quarter is called Keith and comes from Aberdeen I am rather thrilled at the name Marcelle College there is one other point I think at only right to mention for your sake as much as my own you know the local conditions do you think it likely that we should be left with one and a half votes looking a little ridiculous because the miserable quarter of a Scots happens to have the same religion as Bruce and Mary Stewart I only ask for information which you alone could supply but it may be that the considerations I have already mentioned have disposed of the matter believe me my gratitude is none the less Gilbert said of my father that he showed embarrassing respect for younger men surely Gilbert's own tone of respect must hear of embarrassed even undergraduates the uncertainty of success or failure only troubled him as it might affect his supporters the sporting element in the contest appealed to his undying boyishness perhaps this chapter may find its best conclusion in the vivid memories written down in answer to my request of one of Gilbert's younger friends Douglas Woodruff who came to know him in the year of that silver wedding which meant so much that I have chosen it for the title of a chapter covering much of Chesterton's Catholic life Chesterton devotes a long passage in the autobiography to the dinner given at the old Al Delphi Terrace Hotel to Belling on his 60th birthday in July 1930 I remember very well the high old fashion car the Chesterton's used to hire in Beckinsfield and I accompanied him with particular instructions to deliver him safely and on time as was very necessary for he was in the chair we might have lost him for we went first to the Times office where I was then working and as I had proofs to crack before disappearing for the rest of the evening and he was seized with the idea that it would be very good fun for him to enter printing house square and have it announced that it was Mr. Chesterton come to write the leaders and brought the thunder with him under his cloak quite early in the drive up he began speculating about who would be the party and when he had suggested various figures who were certainly not going to be there he said with a mixture of regret and acceptance there was always such a sundering quality about bellocks quarrels when he rose to propose the toast he said at once that if he or anybody else in the room was remembered at all in the future it would be because he was associated with the guest of the evening he meant that the evening stood out in his memory because it was so unlike the ordinary sort of dinners he knew where he was a principal figure himself it delighted him that without any program or premeditation all 30 diners in turn made speeches in the main parody speeches it was in short a party and not a performance in the decade when I had the good fortune of still paying the price of literary fame which he had sought in youth because it meant success in his calling and an income but which became a barrier he was always meeting and breaking through many literary men generally enough prefer company in which they are on just the same footing as everyone else to company in which they are little kings but chesterton was exceptional and liking to live in the fullest equality of intercourse with all sorts of men but with the lesser practitioners of his own calling he sought the affection and not the admiration of his fellow men or more precisely he sought neither what he sought was to do things like discovering the truth in their company no man more naturally distinguished between a man and his views or found easier the theological injunction to hate the sin but love the sinner one of the few occasions in which I recall him as rather hurt just after he met Stanley Baldwin at Taplow and had not been welcomed as a fellow Englishman sharing immense things like the love of the English country or English letters but with a cold correctitude from a politician who seemed chiefly conscious he was meeting in G.K. a man who week by week sought to bring political life into hatred, ridicule and contempt he was not made by nature for the kind of journalistic tradition Cecil Chesterton established and as loyal affection for them made him adopt I recall him expounding to the lawyers of the Thomas Moore Society the absurdity of the legal definition of libel arguing that of its nature free discussion meant arousing at any rate ridicule and contempt if not hatred against men and measures of which you disapproved it was ridicule that he preferred to arouse the lawyers were quite unconvinced as they generally are when laymen have any complaints about the law and they soon realized that to Chesterton the whole idea of involving the law because of arguments and discussions in Invective was hitting below the belt he could be seen at his happiest in the mock trials which were held every summer for the last 10 years of his life at the London School of Economics for the King Edward the 7th hospital fund he was relied upon year after year to prosecute one year it was leading actors and actresses another year sculptors and architects another year politicians and another headmasters he entered completely into the spirit of the entertainment which combined two of his abiding interests public debate and private theatricals that was a setting in which he could completely exemplify his favorite recipe for the modern world that it should be approached in a spirit of intellectual ferocity and personal ability but what marked his own contributions to these affairs was the intellectual ferocity and the weight and content of his criticism most of the eminent men who consented to take part came to play a game for the sake of the hospitals and because they rarely unbent like that in public they were wholly facetious and trivial to Chesterton there was no difficulty or incongruity in combining the fun of acting with the fun of genuine intellectual discussion when he prosecuted headmasters of leading public schools for destroying freedom of thought I came down on a lift with them afterwards and found they were volubly meddled by the drastic and serious case he had made inside the stage setting of burlesque and seemed to think he had not been playing the game when he wrapped up so much meaning in his speech and examinations this had never entered his head it had come perfectly naturally to him to make wholly real and material points even in a mock trial and with a wealth of fun but he liked being one of the troop on stage very much more than being a lonely eminent figure on a platform because to him the great attraction of discussion was that it should be a joint quest a mental walk with an object in view but also with an eye for everything that might and would turn up on the way he laughed his high laugh like Charlemagne his voice was unequal to his physical scale at his own jokes because they came to him as part of the joint findings of the quest something he had seen and collected and brought to the pot when he made jokes about his size as he so commonly did at the outset of his speech it was to get rid of the elevation of the platform and to get on to equal easy terms with the audience I am not a cat burglar he began to the union of Oxford and had won them the radio suited him so excellently precisely because it is a personal sitting down man to man relationship that the successful broadcaster must establish that was the relationship inside which he naturally thought his difficulty was that while he had not the faintest desire to be a literary man and still less a prophet the kind of truth he divide was in fact on the scale of the prophets it seemed to me that over the last decade of his life he found himself more and more in the dilemma that in the life of his mind he was living with ideas the fruit of a contemplative preoccupation with the incarnation and the sacraments which he shrank from talking about from a natural humility and a clear and grateful understanding of the catholic tradition of reverence and reticence England is full of men to whom the distinction between the platform and the pulpit is very unreal a moral message and they do not much mind where they give it but Chesterton, unlike most public men who deal in general ideas did not come to the idea of public speaking through the Protestant tradition but through the secular tradition the free thinkers debate the political and not the religious side of high park oratory where men and knots shout one another down not where some lonely long haired prophet declaims conversion after he became a catholic he sought to set himself frontiers the apologetic territory suitable for a layman like himself but he found himself more and more preoccupied with the territory further inland penetrating all the time to the deeper meaning of the creed he had embraced he could not look back and see how most of his early books had seized upon some essential part of the catholic doctrine he had written what he had seen at the time but he did not stop looking because he had written and then he always continued to see more the great contemplative he looked out on the universe from a very solid tower of observation because in all but the deepest sense of the word he always had a home his lasting significance in his pilgrimage but the spiritual journey was lived out in a warmly rich setting when he wrote of the home he was not dealing with a notion but with a surrounding reality one on which he had opened his eyes as a baby and which he enjoyed without a break to the end Francis Chesterton is among the great wives of our literary history when he said I can never have enough nothing to do it was the remark of a man with a house he was generally in a house full of things he loved to produce cigars and wine but tea also remained an important fixed part of the day when he was told by the doctor he had better drink nothing he had many alternatives like detective stories read over tea and buns which other lovers of wine would perhaps have found no consolation other men are secret drinkers he would confide I am a secret tea totaler the first time I had tea with him in artillery mansions in 1926 I was much struck that he brought three detective stories to the table I imagine he always had time for Jack Redskin on the trail or whatever it might be because he had the gift to an extent I have never seen elsewhere of opening a book as it were pouring the contents down in one draft like a champion German beer drinker he once seized from my shelves in Lincoln's Inn Wyndham Lewis' Apes of God portfolio and I suggested he should take it away but he opened it and stood reading it and here and there not a process which could be called dipping but a kind of sucking out of the printed contents as though he were a vacuum cleaner and you could see the lines of type leaving the pages and being absorbed when he put it down it was to discuss the thesis and illustrations of the book as a man fully possessed of its whole standpoint once he made one of his common confusions and forgot the Wiseman dining society on the Oxford movement in the train from Bexonsfield he said how nice it was that he had not got to speak Francis Chesterton told him not to be silly he knew he was speaking on the Oxford movement he was visibly disconcerted at the start for many grave seniors had assembled to hear him but all went well in the discussion as soon as he was attacked for something he had said about his views you cannot catch me out about Newman he said with the joy of battle and he produced then and there a most detailed account of just where in Newman's writings the points in question were developed yet he was curiously content to read what happened to come his way and to rely upon his friends for references and facts remembering what they might tell him but not ordering the books which would have greatly strengthened him which he was so often employed a large collection of books at Topmetto but they gave the impression that they had assembled themselves masses of them were adventure stories many were presentation copies from writers you felt that they got into the house knowing that it was a hospitable one if not built for books and that they would probably be allowed to stay but he had a study which would barely home him in the library room he did eventually build was only finished he died I think nothing is more superficial or belittling to him than the idea that while he might have liked the real country he could not like Beckinsfield as it developed into a dormitory town while he lived there his sympathies were far too wide he liked to tell how he had to complain of the noise made by an adjoining cinema company his secretary had said Mr. Chesterton finds he cannot write and the cinema people replied aware of that he liked to think of Mr. Garvin nearby not that I see him very much he said but I like to think that that great factory is steaming away night and day he had great satisfaction when a friend and I driving away in the evening knocked down a white wooden post outside the house and starting the car he had held that he had witnessed just how many a grand old local custom must have originated in men covering up their mistakes killing a ritual which had fallen into neglect you must say you did it on purpose he said say it was a right too long omitted and it will soon be kept up every year and men will forget its origin and it will be known as the bump of Beckinsfield when a friend of his brought him a two-bladed African spear he said as he threw it about the lawn that it was sad to think how many lawns there were in Beckinsfield and how few weapons were ever thrown though all men enjoyed or would enjoy spear throwing more he believed then they enjoyed clock golf he at any rate was a genuinely free man who did what it amused and pleased him to do and did not think he had to choose between the forms of activity or arrest currently pursued by his neighbors much of the serene atmosphere of his home came from that quiet resolute practice of the liberty of a free mind end of chapter 27