What Is DIstributism?
Maynard, Theodore
IT IS a very awkward word,, at any rate, and not much of an improvement upon the "dlstributivism" of the days when I was writing for the old New Witness. But despite its unattractiveness as...
...Yet I share with Mr...
...Even had the English politicians the wisdom to effect it, England's position would still be desperate...
...And that for the reason that In industry a comparatively speedy organization of attack is possible, whereas Mr...
...Whereas in the country he would be reduced to the ignominy of entertaining himself, possibly by the shameful method of conversation with his neighbors in the village inn...
...As I knew at that time of no other country except England, this remained merely a fairy-tale until I met Belloc, who told me my imaginary peasant proprietor existed by the thousands in Europe...
...But it never really appealed to my heart...
...Chesterton's farmers, even though they should answer his trumpet in large numbers— which is unlikely just now—would be isolated units and as such highly vulnerable...
...But I think it could be done by winning first in the Industrial field, and then by extending the principles of cooperation and ownership to farming...
...Where wealth accumulates, and men decay: Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade...
...Throughout the present economic conflict industrialism Is disastrously taken for granted by both sides...
...The things have revealed their practical weakness in "this more enlightened England, in which the employee is living on a dole from the state and the employer on an overdraft at the bank...
...And we need not lose hope...
...And that weakness Is the most critical thing that has confronted the country since the Reformation, which was the ultimate cause of it...
...A breath can make them, as a breath has made: But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied...
...He must exist again, or it is all up with England...
...And that Is an issue which must be fatal to labor...
...He said: When I was a very young man I was naturally horrified by the poverty of the slums, and, because I could see no solution of the problem except the socialist one, I used to recite solemnly the formula about the socialization of all the means of production, distribution and exchange...
...The Outline of Sanity.* For Chesterton is seeking to estabhsh Belloc's thesis: "If we do not restore the institution of property we cannot escape restoring the institution of slavery...
...Centuries of Christian tradition have bred in us a strong distaste of openly advocating slavery...
...If the demand can be shifted from the nationalization of mines and railways to their ownership by the miners and the rallwaymen, I believe that labor can win...
...The problem is how to bring this instinct and appetite Into the consciousness of the people...
...and possibly a kind and good clergyman (if any) who explains in dumb show, with the aid of a few printed sentences, that true religion is social sympathy and progress and marrying and burying people at random...
...And later, when in desperation r professed myself a socialist, I still made up for myself, as a kind of impossible fairy-tale, a person whom I called a peasant proprietor...
...where there will not be lacking a charming and vivacious heroine, recognizable as a modern girl by her short hair and short skirts...
...But even with the most complete control and direct responsibility of labor in factories, mines and railways...
...The United States is now enjoying, and will no doubt for some time continue to enjoy because of its unique economic position—with its enormous natural resources and comparatively uncrowded population—an unprecedented prosperity...
...The Servile State, upon its publication in 1912, was very generally misunderstood, and has been neglected...
...the battle Is over wages, not over ownership...
...he shows how slavery was gradually dissolved by the influence of the Christian faith until the mediaeval system of widely distributed property was established throughout Christendom...
...A similar peasantry still exists in other European countries...
...But this could have been no more than a mitigation, though a considerable one...
...We are not choosing," he says, 'between a possible peasantry and a successful commerce...
...The "Gloomy Dean" has, at least in this instance, the right to be gloomy...
...Yet he does not offer distributism as an easy solution...
...Those Americans—and they include practically all Americans—who are now living in a fools' paradise would do well to turn their eyes to a contemplation of the case of England...
...England has had, like all Christian countries, a peasantry that has been a success, a peasantry which did not fail because of any inherent weakness, but which was destroyed— though no doubt unintentionally—^by the blunder of the Reformation...
...The situation might have been mitigated, if Instead of the ruinous and dishonorable system of "Danegeld" —the weekly doles meted out to so large a proportion of the people—schools of Industrial training had been set up for the benefit of the boys who had spent what should have been the period of their apprenticeship in the army, and who returned home (often with an officer's rank to incapacitate them still further) to find themselves unemployable...
...but these are obviously limited: quantitative production cannot go on indefinitely, and when the saturation point is reached even America will be faced with an economic crisis...
...Capitalism is not merely a hideous piece of injustice...
...my favorite occupation was drawing a man surrounded by as many pieces of his personal property as I could crowd upon the paper...
...how the modern girl is a delightful creature, in spite of (or because of) having shingled hair or short skirts...
...The crux of the question is whether he can exist again in England...
...But here is the difficulty...
...But Goldsmith, though he saw the facts, did not understand their causes...
...upon food supplies from abroad that may be cut off by submarine warfare, and upon a thread of foreign trade that tends to grow more and more tenuous...
...and industrialism— wherever it has taken hold in the world— has been fashioned upon the English model...
...It does not seem to me that it could be done, as Mr...
...Chesterton caustically remark, "With the merely mechanical alternative offered at present, I think that even the slavery of his labor would be light compared to the grinding slavery of his leisure...
...but they must be there, since even these wretched creatures are still men...
...where he will see an American film featuring the features of American millionaires, with all those resolute contortions of visage which accompany their making of great financial consolidations...
...but though syndlcahsm has a bad name it is not very far removed from the old guild system, and is perhaps as close as we can get under present conditions to anything resembling a guild...
...accordingly—in view of the increasing instability of capitalism—men, when they do not react to distributism, must turn to the ideal *The Outline of Sanity, by G. K. Chesterton...
...The mark of the servile state appears, however, when a whole class is compelled by positive law to work for the advantage of another non-servile class...
...Chesterton is more of a realist than Dean Inge, for he perceives not only the crisis but a way of escape...
...As it is, they are reduced to the dishonest attempt of creating an atmosphere of false optimism and to hoping that somehow or other the country will "muddle through...
...And exactly the same pabulum will be offered in the drama and the popular novel and the radio program...
...And sufficiency and security are to be won only by a progressive series of bargains which must necessarily result in a progressive decline of status for the proletariat: and the inevitable end of collectivism working upon a capitalist society is the reestablishment of the servile state...
...The war, however, merely served to reveal the weakness of what had been until then the most powerful and the richest nation on earth: It did not create that weakness...
...It is from this iron ring, and not from any economic necessity, that England must break unless England is to perish...
...These can be obtained only in one of three ways: collectivism, distributism (that is, the reestablishment of a system "in which the mass of citizens should severally own the means of production") or slavery...
...I venture to think that it is one of the most important works, in its own field, of our day...
...It's a beggarly chance to cheat the gallows...
...Chesterton supposes, by blowing a trumpet and announcing a national crisis and calling for volunteers who would vow themselves to agriculture...
...But despite its unattractiveness as a label, it defines accurately: Distributism is the system of widely distributed property...
...The lure of gaiety In the great cities Is described by Chesterton: It means that a man, when he has done turning a handle, has a choice of certain pleasures offered him...
...of collectivism...
...But in practice every attempt to achieve collectivism will inevitably fail to do more— since collectivism is the fruit of capitalism—than bring about a compromise in which security and sufficiency are indeed gained, but which leaves the real control of property in the hands of its capitalistic possessors...
...He sees clearly enough that, should slavery be restored, the word "slavery" may never be used—even that the slave may not be owned, as under the older systems, by a particular master...
...how certain American millionaires are making great financial consolidations...
...Well might Mr...
...Those who are incurable fools will probably say that England's case is due to the war...
...it has succeeded, in combination with the industrialism which has been its product, in altering the shape of men's minds...
...For a more formal statement of its doctrines one has to go to Hilaire Belloc's Servile State rather than directly to Gilbert K. Chesterton's recently published book...
...There are those who take the line that It is impossible to get men back to the country because rural life Is so much duller than urban life...
...But every realist—even Dean Inge, who always thinks in terms of the most rigid capitalism— understands the situation...
...Capitalism there has broken down, and men do not know where to turn for a solution of their economic problems...
...On the other hand, if he prefers some other amusement, he may go to the cinema, where he will see a very vivid and animated scene of the crowds cheering the Crown Prince of Fontarabia after the arrival of the yacht Atlantis...
...Belloc then proceeds to show how capitalism is of its nature unstable because of its failure to guarantee sufficiency and security to the mass of men, and how it consequently necessitates the establishment of some system that does provide the sufficiency and security human nature demands...
...New York: Dodd, Mead and Company...
...And he quotes Stevenson's Captain Wicks apropos of his own scheme: "Safe I Of course it's not safe...
...that this was wrecked, just as it approached completion, in those sections of Europe that supported Protestantism, and that there was substituted for it, "in practice though not in legal theory," a society based upon capitalism...
...But it is hard reading, consisting, as it does, for the most part of severe definition...
...But the case is really stronger than that...
...We are choosing between a peasantry that might succeed and a commerce that has already failed...
...2.00...
...Capitalism originated in England...
...The instinct for ownership, the appetite for a country life, may be buried very deeply In the mass of the English poor...
...Chesterton the hope that England will emerge safely, a hope founded, not upon any nonsense of the bulldog qualities of the Island race, but upon the firm belief that Englishmen will ultimately see that their economic system is no more than an unconscious historic blunder...
...But their spiritual effect remains...
...Belloc exhibits the institution of slavery and the servile basis of all the states of the ancient world, pointing out how these were accepted as normal and eternal...
...What some ignorant people suppose socialism to be—that distributism is...
...There have been minor developments elsewhere, particularly American mass production...
...And capitalism and industi'ialism combined have effected a gradual change in the minds of present-day Englishmen...
...There is thus indeed a very elaborate and well-ordered choice placed before him, in the means of entertainment...
...But England, not America, is the typical capitalist state...
...Chesterton's study, in a chair that had belonged to Charles Dickens, while he explained his own development...
...and how the true religion . . . consists of social progress and marrsring, divorcing, or burying everybody without reference to the precise meaning of the ceremony...
...Goldsmith wrote: 111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey...
...The country cannot continue any longer, as the war has shown, in dependence (England which was once the most independent of countries...
...But distributism is the only chance...
...Another Protestant, who deplored the economic consequences of the Reformation with his whole being, the great Cobbett, never lost hope in the restoration of the peasantry...
...I am aware that this must sound merely academic —perhaps even preposterous—in American ears...
...Moreover the war left America the only real victor among the combatant nations...
...When I was a child my favorite book was Robinson Crusoe, because its hero had saved so many real pieces of proF>erty from the wreck...
...there is no third course...
...He says: "I have nowhere suggested that there is any way of winning without fighting...
...Slavery reposed upon the acceptance of the institution by the slave quite as much as upon the imposition of the institution by the master...
...He can, if he likes, read a newspaper and discover with interest how the Crown Prince of Fontarabia landed from the magnificent yacht Atlantis amid a cheering crowd...
...The shifting of the demand will no doubt take the form of a change from socialism to syndicalism...
...It would still be imperative to get a considerable number of people back to agriculture...
...I shall never forget how I once sat in Mr...
Vol. 6 • July 1927 • No. 9
