An Editor's Progress, IV

...Where is the love that counts everybody's gain as his own...

...and blasphemous in the ears of the modern dilettantes of art...

...The ancient chivalry of England had been fed upon other bread than that of "modern ideas...

...Even while triumphantly controverting, as it appeared to me, the arguments against the possibility of radical reform in the absence of something greater than reason or self-interest or humanitarianism, my own essential uncertainty and the precariousness of my foundation must have been suspected by my Catholic friends...

...Chivalry may be said to have made its trial with the emergence of the gentleman in social reform...

...An appeal to these slumbering lions would surely be heard and answered...

...Distributivism as a potential weapon of criticism is a very good stick with which to beat the capitalist dog...

...But, between a society containing only individualists" and a society containing no individuals, the choice was difficult to make...

...At the same time, it was not altogether a surrender of the problem in despair...

...I know this is heretical according to the gospel of Ruskin and Morris...

...And, in fact, I doubt whether Mr...

...but the actual mechanics of the idea seemed and still seem to me to labor under the fatality of impracticability...

...Yes, but what is the essence of religion, that distinguishes it from even its most colorable imitations in the form of morality, neighborliness, humanitarianism...

...In the end, every individual must, therefore, owe duty only to his neighbor...

...What we had done when formulating a modern guild system applicable to modern conditions was to take the mediaeval guild out of its original setting and try to make it grow in a soil quite barren in respect of religion...

...In short, if national guilds are not viable, and Douglasism is not viable, then, for the same reasons, distributivism is not viable either...

...Belloc, Father McNabb, Mr...

...and modern chivalry was indistinguishable, save in external manners, from modern finance and industry, and was fast losing even that distinction...

...Here was Douglas's idea, which, if I may repeat myself, promised a way out for everybody from the economic morass...

...No wonder that the seeds so transplanted failed to germinate ; they were sown upon stony ground...

...But at least I am clear now that no other end will end my search...

...Chesterton really believe it is...

...and society is the Moloch of us all...

...In aim yes, since our aims were the same...

...and that it was not because of barbarism that beauty was not named among the things that abide...

...nor, I may add, in any system of morality, transcendental, naturalistic, or rationalist, taken by itself—no hope, I say, for any radical social reform...

...and throughout my whole editorial adventure they made themselves as much at home in the New Age as I, on my side, certainly made them welcome...

...But where is the wish on either side for justice, mean it poverty or riches...

...The guilds were the creation of the Church...

...and it must be allowed that there were acknowledged gentlemen in English socialism even before the cavalier days of Mr...

...Penty, Mr...

...The presumption was that the breed of the barons who forced the king's signature to Magna Charta, and of the gentlemen who fought for the Bill of Rights, the reform of the poor laws, popular education, and the eight-hour day, was not extinct, but only sleeping...

...And, fortunately, the choice proved to be unnecessary...

...How many times had I encountered the idea in polemics and left it, as I thought, for dead...

...Ruskin, Morris, and Leathaby were the pioneers of this experiment...

...The reason is clear...

...Was it to be the brotherhood of man, after all, that could create the emotion in which reason would be felt if not seen...

...What was the missing factor, the neutralizing force that alone keeps the world on the middle way—when it is so kept!—between the extremes of imbecility and madness ? Simply religion...

...The alternative of individualism is, however, quite as unthinkable...

...I reply quite simply, God...

...and here, with the Douglas synthesis, was the satisfying solution of it...

...There is and can be no religion in the absence of God, though there may be God in the absence of religion...

...All that was needed was that everybody should sufficiently wish to be out of the morass to be willing to try Douglas's way...

...English aristocracy, in short, was for all practical purposes only a memory...

...Every such system assumes that man is accountable only to man, and has only social obligations...

...Religion without God is, strictly speaking, as ridiculous as science with nothing to know...

...But how to make everybody really wish—that was now the question for me...

...To return to the historic origin of the English guild system, it appeared to me on reflection that its background was undoubtedly religion...

...But was even that possible...

...There remained the brotherhood and the humanitarian movement, which, it may be recalled, we had before dismissed with Mr...

...Carpenter undoubtedly had a vision of this in his Towards Democracy...

...It must not be assumed, however, that our disillusionment immediately brought us to the realization of the necessity of a change of heart in the religious sense...

...Eric Gill, Mr...

...But it is my emphatic opinion that art as we know it today has no power over the conscience of mankind...

...Yet, here it was alive and walking in my waking mind, and this time as a possible friend...

...But alas, it, too, fell, if not upon stony ground, upon ground thick with thorns...

...Belloc and Mr...

...All these, indeed, had a pretty long trial to see if they could effect such a change in men's hearts that social justice would be established as a mere matter of good taste...

...Edward Carpenter's sandals...

...Certainly, reason had, in my best judgment, completely failed against human nature...

...From out a remote past a phrase recurred to me— a change of heart—or, more poignantly, ye must be born again...

...I never saw a brotherhood church that did not cease in a year or two to bear any relation to its name...

...and a social reform that depended for its support upon a fading recollection had but a very short career to failure...

...Theodore Maynard, and let me not forget my old Anglo-Catholic friends, Conrad Noel and Maurice Reckitt...

...It would be saying too much to affirm that I resigned from the New Age and from active participation in social reform in order to find God...

...What else was to be done but to give it up...

...but the state would totter if the stick were called upon to take the place of the dog...

...At any rate, they were kind to the degree of indulgence...

...Alas, it happened in nine cases out of ten, as it still happens wherever the experiment is tried, that exactly in proportion as individuals began to cultivate a taste for art, their social feelings in respect of faith, hope, and charity degenerated...

...and nobody can deny that if their hypothesis had been workable, they were the men to make it work...

...I refer to the brothers Chesterton, Mr...

...The rich wish sincerely enough that the poor were better off...

...But, again, a reckoning had been made without the host...

...Cunninghame Graham...

...Remembering the cultivated intensity of the anti-religious movement among the intelligentsia of twenty and even ten years ago (it is rapidly losing its momentum today even if it is not entirely dead) nobody will wonder that our first thought was a change of heart by means of brotherhood or chivalry or art...

...Religion I venture to define as the attempt to establish an ideal and conscious relation between man and God...

...A community of Ishmaelites is a contradiction in terms...

...Quite seriously, there appears to me to be no hope in the brotherhood of man secularly conceived...

...His neighbor is his only raison d'etre...

...I only wish that my motives could be as clearly conscious as that would imply...

...or, if not the creation of the Church, at the very least the Church was the soil and garden in which they flourished...

...I recall many articles and even whole volumes addressed to the aristocratic tradition...

...Religion for the so-called modern mind is the last, rather than the first, resort of despair...

...There came back to me, also, my first associations with the guild idea, and subsequently with the extremely able and personally congenial group that became responsible for the Catholic weekly which in England is the counterpart of The Commonweal in America...

...There had been the tremendous problem of economic distress which for centuries had prevoked every species of misery...

...Yet, on account of the inadequacy of human reason, that solution could never be understood by a sufficient number of people to get it adopted...

...and the varieties of brotherhood churches that sprang up in his wake, bore evidence to the fertility of that soil and the vitality of the seed...

...The poor, it goes without saying, wish they were rich...

...With Mr...

...and since, in my experience, every attempt to establish an ideal and conscious relation between man and man, without taking God into account, has failed, the only remaining hope of the serious social reformer is to "find religion," that is to say, find God...

...Belloc's distributivism I cannot, however, say that I had then or have now any sympathy...