Farm Ownership Linked With Trades Unions

by Reverend John LaFarge, S.J.

Consistently has America probed the causes which keep the labor situation in the United States in perpetual turmoil. It has insisted, in season and out of season, that the internal difficulties which the unions experience are not to be blamed upon the principle of trades-unionism in either form that it may take, whether of the industrial or of the crafts union. It believes that these difficulties are due to personal factors which can be remedied by a change of heart in certain leaders and by the education in the true concept of Christian trades-unionism of the great body of American labor. But another element in the trades-union situation must be reckoned with if trades-unionism is to be saved.

Speaking over the National Farm and Home Hour, William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, declared that “the farmer’s welfare is labor’s welfare. The two are inseparable.” Mr. Green gave as the reason for his statement the “close and direct relationship” that exists between labor’s economy and the farmer’s economy. “This means that the buying power of the farmer depends directly upon the buying power of labor.” Large-scale agriculture, too, has produced a corresponding body of farm laborers, so that agricultural workers’ unions are now forming in fruit and vegetable farming, in beet growing, in onion growing, in large-scale dairies and in fruit and vegetable packing and canning.

It is not the alleged identity of interests between labor and agriculture which is our concern. Indeed, such an identity is vigorously denied by many prominent farm leaders who look upon such identification as mere propaganda for the proposed Farmer-Labor party. We are concerned with the danger to trades-unionism that was pointed out by Dr. Goetz Briefs of Georgetown University at the recent convention in Richmond, of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference: the formation of an ever-increasing wage-earning proletariat due to the vanishing ownership of the land.

The effect of this vanishing ownership, said Dr. Briefs, is to intensify to the point of madness the rivalries among wage-earners, and between wage-earners and their employers. It makes no difference whether it is an industrial or an agricultural wage-earner that is concerned. The bitterness and rivalry, with corresponding difficulty of reaching a solution increase as a greater and greater percentage of our citizens move into the purely wage-earning class, and thus swell the ranks of an eventual proletariat. The terrific pressure upon trades-unionism created by such a situation adds fuel to the flames of internecine labor disputes. A wider and wider area is opened up for the ambitions of organizers and organizations, and, worst of all, youth grows up conceiving of life only in terms of labor with no other idea of man’s temporal existence.

The Catholic Church appeals to charity and justice as the remedy for these disputes. But charity and justice belong to the supernatural order. They are gifts of Divine Grace, and Divine Grace builds upon nature. If that nature is to be restored, there must be a much greater equalization than now prevails between the two main types of wage-earning and the agrarian; and that can only be accomplished by the restoration of private property to the landless proletariat.

Growing tenantry is a sign of the proletarianizing process. In the rural districts, tenantry has increased from thirty-five per cent of the number of farms in 1900 to forty-five percent in 1935. As was shown by Dr. Edgar B. Schmiedeler, O.S.B., Director of the Catholic Rural Life Bureau of the N.C.W.C., this increased tenantry brings with it physical “erosion” of the farms, which are not cared for by those who do not own them; and social “erosion,” in the shape of irresponsible drifters; “vanishing liberty, since renters, like wage-earners, are not the free people that owners are.” But more threatening than that, it means the continuing of the ranks of competing industrial job seekers in the cities.

The Most Rev. Edwin V. O’Hara, Bishop of Great Falls, father of the Catholic Rural Life Conference, resumed recent Papal teaching as: “First, wide diffusion of privately owned property in land; secondly, the ownership of the land by those who operate it; and, thirdly, the desirability of the family-sized farms as opposed to the larger holdings on which farm laborers were little better than serfs.”

How can all this be brought about? The yearly discussions of the Catholic Rural Life Conference have crystallized certain ideas. The opinion has been very positively formed that no amount of mere economic allurement will attach people to the land who are at present disaffected from it. Farming may be made an attractive business for some of the higher-ups in the cotton or the wheat or the dairying oligarchy, or in the large-scale trucking enterprises, but though some way may be devised to make it yield a good living for the little farmers, the multitudes will not be attracted to farming merely because of its paying facilities. Nor will the multitudes be won by any back to the land mysticism, however it may appeal to individuals. Land as a mere money-making agent, or land as an end in itself, does not offer a sufficiently powerful and reliable incentive. People will only learn to appreciate the land and to value land ownership when they look upon it as an instrument; an instrument given to man by the Creator Himself, but an instrument primarily for a spiritual purpose, and only secondarily for the purpose of commercial or monetary profit.

This spiritual purpose is the sustenance and the physical permanence of the farm home, as the seat of the Christian family. This was put very plainly by the Most Rev. Aloysius J. Muench, Bishop of Fargo, as the fifth of six points with which he summed up the topic of religion and rural welfare: “The principles of social justice, effective tenancy legislation, etc., must have their first point in the farm home. The farmstead as a homestead must be cherished as the priceless social institute in the land.”

In a public address a few days before the Richmond meeting, the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Alexander Troyanovsky, flung down a challenge to the principle of widely distributed, family-sized land ownership as the foundation for a healthy economic life in the nation. It is impossible, said Mr. Troyanovsky, to apply modern technique to the small-sized or family farm. Modern agricultural technique requires large-scale farming, and this means that the only course for American farming is to become collective. That Soviet statement is simply contrary to fact. Where the local community is organized on a cooperative basis, small farms can enjoy every bit of the modern technical facilities—mechanical, electric, biological, etc.,—as are enjoyed in any collective or large-scale enterprise. As was stated by the Conference in a resolution that drew general applause: “We must retain fee-simple ownership of land in small parcels and make technology and scientific research serve this type of land tenure.” A pioneer spirit can use twentieth-century methods.

Behind the Soviet challenge, however, lay a threat of a much deeper nature, a threat that hangs like a cloud over our congressional deliberations at the present time, to the effect that only rigid governmental control can restrain the domination of large-scale farming, curb wasteful competition and greed, and afford sufficient protection to the small farmer. Hence the farmer is confronted with only two entrees on his menu: virtual dictatorship or ruinous laissez-faire. To this challenge we reply:

First, that an immense amount can (and must) be done by the Government, State as well as Federal, to encourage distributed land-ownership and the useful organization of rural economy which does not fall into the class of rigid control or virtual dictatorship. As Bishop Muench noted in the third of his six points, the state can “safeguard the farmers’ interests in the sale of property so that that acquisition of private property is possible.” Taxes can favor small-scale ownership without invading the rights of individuals or destroying all private initiative. Taxation, said Senator Arthur Capper of Kansas at the recent opening of Congress, should favor the family-size farm. Governmental credit can be organized to help the small owner quite as much as the large.

Second, the amount that can be accomplished in this direction by voluntary effort is woefully underestimated. An experiment like that of Father Ligutti in Granger, Iowa, would have been thought utterly impracticable a few years ago. Yet Father Ligutti’s Slavs and Italians have demonstrated a high degree of self-subsistence and skillful utilization of modern technical resources within a framework provided for them through Federal aid. Other experiments spring up daily, all of them in one form or another teaching that no limit has yet been found to the efficacy of cooperation on Christian—not on merely materialistic—lines. The surface of cooperation between city and country groups, between producer and consumer, on a voluntary and regional basis, has hardly been scratched. How many charitable individuals, for instance, in our large cities, have experimented in a most eminently practical form of cooperation, that of making loans, on long-term payments, to young families starting life in the country? Incredibly little has been done in the field of voluntary international cooperation. We talk of export and surpluses as if these things were decreed by the gods on Olympus. Yet they are amenable to voluntary understandings which transcend governmental lines.

At the present time I know of at least one Catholic rural community which is trying to organize itself upon a cooperative basis. Pastor and Sisters are leading in the work. The community is in the East, and is fairly accessible to large centres. Let us suppose that a city Catholic, with some means and some leisure, were to interest himself in the affairs of such a community, were to spend a certain part of his time therein, study on the spot its possibilities for the exemplification of the Christian cooperative, confer with the local men and women who are trying to put the program across, and extend a certain amount of practical aid to the initial ventures—what an immense amount of good could be accomplished for the Catholic social program! Why should a community of decent, self-respecting people, of our own Faith, be obliged always to choose between the dismal alternatives of starting from absolute scratch, or else applying for Federal bounties which are granted only upon rigidly specified lines, entail heavy obligations and dependencies, and, anyhow, do not touch this sort of effort.

While I was writing this paragraph, Father McGoey, of Toronto, dropped in, who has accomplished such wonders in establishing his forty practically self-sustaining families, with their 241 souls, upon the land. He sees a plenty of ways which an intelligent, city Catholic can aid such a rural community. He can help the cooperatives to finance their project. He can help provide outlets in the city, such as a consumer’s organization, for the community’s produce. He can assist the rural community in getting books and furniture for a rural library. But the useful task of all, in Father McGoey’s opinion, for the city person, is to bring the rural dweller to a better appreciation of his own opportunities. This he can do best if he is himself a man who has made a successful career of city life, and so can add realism to his own comparisons.

Finally, it seems to me that we vastly underestimate, in this, as in other matters pertaining to social justice, the immense efficacy of a widespread popular education in the principles of a right order. Were our Catholic periodicals—speaking of Catholics alone—and our Catholic lecturers and preachers and professors of sociology and economics throughout the country to unite upon a wide and general program of educating the American as to the evils of proletarianism, the necessity of distributed private ownership and the family social unit, the nature and efficacy of Christian cooperation and Christian cooperatives, the possibilities, spiritual cultural of Catholic parish life, a definite brake would be put upon the centralizing and depersonalizing theories of agrarian economy which are now invading political circles. The majority of thinking farm leaders welcome these basic truths when they are explained to them. “We simply must accept your Catholic family-economics program,” said the non-Catholic President of a secular college in conversation with a delegate to the Richmond convention. We have had, I believe, altogether too much agrarian defeatism. Let us begin to market the harvest of knowledge which alone can stop the Bolshevist weed from springing up and choking industry and agriculture to death.

From America Magazine (1937)
Farm Ownership Linked With Trades Unions: The Catholic plan replies to a Soviet challenge

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The Obstacle of Industrialism

by A.J. Penty

Not the least of the obstacles that stand in the way of a return of Christendom is the monstrous disproportion that exists between the material and spiritual sides of life. For centuries, and especially since the Industrial Revolution, a larger and larger proportion of our energies have been devoted to the increase and development of our material resources, with the result that the balance between the material and spiritual sides of life which is indispensable to any healthy and normal civilization has been entirely destroyed, and the spiritual life almost crushed out of existence by the dead weight of material preoccupations.

The fact that undue concentration on material things tends to choke the spiritual life was over and over again insisted upon by Jesus Christ. "Take ye no thought, saying. What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or where-withal shall we be clothed (for after all these things do the Gentiles seek)? for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." This is the true political economy; it is the political economy of Christendom, and it is because in some measure the Medievalists pursued this ideal that they were not perplexed by the problem of riches and poverty as it perplexes us to-day. Industrialism is the organization of society on the opposite assumption, "Seek ye first," it says, "material prosperity, and all other things shall be added unto you." But somehow or other it does not work out. These other things are not added, and in the long run the pursuit of riches does not even bring material prosperity. For the concentration of all effort and mental energy upon material achievement upsets the spiritual equilibrium of society. It produces contrasts of wealth and poverty, and out of these come envy, jealousy, class hatreds, economic and military warfare, and finally the destruction of the wealth that has been so laboriously created. For no society built on a lie can endure.

Our industrial society exhibits a spirit that shows itself irreconcilably hostile to all the higher interests of mankind, and all men who care for spiritual things are conscious of this antagonism. Yet as a nation we lack the , courage to face the fact that Industrialism is incompatible with the spiritual life. In the Middle Ages, when the material development of civilization was in its infancy, there were not wanting men to protest with all their might against the corrupting influence of wealth and luxury. St. Francis, in the thirteenth century even, sought to counter the evil by preaching the Gospel of Poverty, and at a later date sumptuary laws were enacted to put a boundary to the growth of personal extravagance, for many people saw the social dangers attendant upon an increase of luxury. In Germany, which in the Middle Ages was the most prosperous country in Europe, extravagance and luxury grew at an alarming pace towards the end of the fifteenth century. Many of the merchants had become richer than kings and emperors, and vanity had prompted them to give visible evidence of their great riches in the adoption of a higher and higher standard of living.

Feasting and gambling increased, while extravagance in dress became the order of the day. Commenting on this, Wimpheling, who was one of the most widely read authors of the period, said that "wealth and prosperity are attended with great dangers, as we see exemplified: they induce extravagance in dress, in banqueting, and what is still worse, they engender a desire for still more. This desire debases the mind of man and degenerates into contempt of God, His Church, and His Commandments." And experience was to prove it led to social catastrophe. The peril arises from the fact that, as extravagance increases, a kind of social compulsion is brought to bear upon others to live up to it whether they can afford to do so or not, and as only the rich can afford to keep up with the standard thus set, a point is soon reached when the need of money is very widely felt. When that point was reached in Germany the same thing happened that has happened with us to-day. Nobody wanted to do any really productive work, but everybody wanted to go into trade where money was to be made. Mercantile houses, shops, and taverns multiplied inordinately, and complaints were made that there was no money but only debts, and that whole districts were drained by usury. The growth of this state of things was followed by the attempt which each class made to save itself from bankruptcy by transferring its burdens on to the shoulders of the class beneath it, which led to the progressive impoverishment of the working class, who had to bear the brunt because the burden could be shifted no farther. Then there arose a bitter enmity between the propertied and the unpropertied classes, and class hatred increased in intensity until finally it led in 1524 to the Peasants' War, which convulsed almost every corner of the Empire from the Alps to the Baltic.

We see then that in attacking extravagance and luxury the Church has been led by a true social instinct. But it becomes daily more evident that to attack extravagance and luxury is not enough. It is necessary to attack those general principles and assumptions of our social and industrial system which of their own nature tend to promote such vices. This fact has of late received some recognition by the Church. The Report of the Archbishop's Committee on "Christianity and Industrial Problems" marks an advance in thought to the extent that it has broken away from that purely personal explanation of social phenomena which satisfied most Churchmen until yesterday, and has recognized that "charity'' with the Church has not been interpreted (as it should be) as "a sort of glorified justice" that "looks at least as much to the prevention of evil as to its cure. On the contrary, it has meant far too exclusively what may be called ambulance work for mankind—the picking up of the wounded and the curing of their wounds." "We have," says the Report, "neglected to attack the forces of wrong. We have been content with the ambulance work when we ought to have been assaulting the strongholds of evil."

In laying down the broad principles which should govern the conduct of Christians in their relation to social questions nothing could be more admirable than this Report. But as it proceeds, the clear vision that marks the early part of the Report gets bedimmed and the writers get entangled in the economic defences of the existing system. Their protests are silenced by those pleas of economic necessity behind which the upholders of the existing order take cover. Thus while on the one hand luxury is attacked, on the other the Report hesitates to carry its attack to its logical conclusion by condemning root and branch those quantitative conceptions upon which our industrial system is based. For it is undoubtedly true that the progressive growth of luxury is a necessary condition of the continued existence of a system that is based upon conceptions of indefinite industrial expansion. It is not too much to say that people nowadays are goaded by advertisers into becoming luxurious. Indeed, unless a man is poor, his difficulty nowadays is how to avoid becoming luxurious, for circumstances combine to force, the individual along the path of luxury whether he likes it or not, and people succumb to luxurious tendencies because they are afraid to appear mean. It may be admitted that expenditure need not be luxurious though it pass the bounds of necessity. Expenditure on the arts, for instance, is of this nature. But this is not the kind of expenditure that is encouraged by latter-day conceptions of industrial expansion. On the contrary, what is encouraged in every sort of vain and useless expenditure on all kinds of things that people would be better without; while the dilemma in which we are placed is that such useless expenditure is necessary to keep the wheels of industry running. There is plenty of unemployment to-day, yet under our existing system if the rich could be induced to abandon luxury unemployment would be actually increased. Hence it is that until we have the courage to attack the principles upon which the industrial system is built there can be no escape from this fundamental dilemma.

This kind of inconsistency must come to an end. We must frankly recognize that the purely quantitative standard is antipathetic to everything that Christianity stands for, for not until we do shall we be able to translate our ideals into the terms of actuality. We must oppose the conception of "maximum production" with that of a "sufficient production." Quantity up to a certain point of course we must have, but we must break with the theory that exalts a standard of quantity as the final test of industrial righteousness, since so long as we accept such a standard, the time will never come when we can say we have produced enough. Appearances will always be against a return to sanity, because when production proceeds beyond a certain point it upsets distribution; and by upsetting distribution, competition is increased and unemployment and poverty is created. The widespread existence of such poverty in turn lends a colour to the demand for still more production, and so we go on from bad to worse, driven from one desperate expedient to another in a vain effort to escape from the consequences of exalting the quantitative standard. The remedy is for us to refuse any longer to sacrifice Christian principles to economic expediency. We can be perfectly assured that what is wrong morally is bad economics; and that professors of economics who maintain the contrary suffer from a constitutional inability to distinguish between appearance and reality.

When we search for an explanation of current fallacies of economics we find that they rest finally on a false philosophy of life—on the belief that work at the best is a disagreeable necessity that it is desirable to reduce to a minimum. In former times it was the normal thing for men to find pleasure and satisfaction in their work. But this is no longer the case. The vast majority of people to-day do not look for any such pleasure or satisfaction. They work in order to get money to live. Their hearts are not in their work, their real interests are outside, either in the pursuit of pleasure, or in some hobby or occupation extraneous to their daily work. Not only do they do as little as they can, but what they do is done in a coeval and slovenly way. The grudging and resentful temper engendered by their daily work infects the whole of life. Character deteriorates: men become restless and dissatisfied. It would matter little if the hours of work were reduced to four or even two hours a day. They would still be restless and dissatisfied. For they would still be in a fundamentally wrong relation to life, and that fact would vitiate the extra leisure they had gained. Men are not men until they have found their true vocation and ministry. When Carlyle said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work : let him ask no other blessedness," he was expressing one of the primary truths of Christian ethics.

All Christians must deplore this demoralization that has overtaken the modern world, and many Christian moralists, recognizing the evil, have attempted to combat it. But they have all failed. They have failed to establish points of contact with the modern mind, and this for the simple reason that they have chosen to ignore the vital facts of the situation. With men to-day as in the past it would be the normal and natural thing for them to find pleasure in their work were it not that they are prevented from doing so by circumstances. Their work fails to inspire them for two reasons. Firstly because as it is done at the dictation and in the interests of profiteers, they cannot feel the call of service; and secondly, because under our industrial system work has become so monotonous that everyone is bored by it.

Recognizing these facts, any analysis of the problem of work and industry that would grapple with the realities of the situation must reassert the claims of the producer. It may be true that the needs of the consumer are the primary basis of any economic system. Yet the producer has equal claims for consideration, since an analysis based entirely upon the needs of the consumer will, if carried to its logical conclusion, lead inevitably to the enslavement and degradation of the producer, for instead of being regarded as a human being he will come to be regarded merely as an instrument for the increase of wealth. To such an extent has development proceeded in this direction that the only way to restore a condition of normality in industry is to assert the claims of the producer, affirming self-expression through work to be a spiritual necessity. The moment we assert this we come into collision with Industrialism as a machine producing wealth, no matter how equitably its products could under some future system be distributed, because it denies all opportunities whatsoever for self-expression.

Industrialism destroys interest in work because it tends towards an ever increasing specialization. This is the key to the problem. We are accustomed to associate the evil with the spread of machine production, but strictly speaking the evil does not reside in machinery, but in the subdivision of labour which preceded the introduction of machinery and which is responsible for its misapplication. And here it is necessary to distinguish between the division of labour which is legitimate and the subdivision of labour which is illegitimate. The former is a necessity in every civilized community, for it is obvious that a man cannot supply all his own needs, since to some extent he is inevitably dependent upon others. No sooner did civilization begin to develop than this necessity brought about the specialization of men into different trades. One man became a weaver, another a carpenter, and so forth. Up to this point the division of labour is justified, not merely because it is a necessity of civilization, but because it enlarges the opportunities of expression of the individual. What, however, we understand by the subdivision of labour is measures taken to increase the output in the interests of profiteering by splitting up a trade into a great number of separate processes. This we must condemn, because by reducing men to automation it undermines their moral and spiritual life and disintegrates personality, while it leads inevitably to sweating and economic insecurity. This system came into existence in the early part of the seventeenth century, the classical example being that eulogized by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, namely pin-making, in which industry, he explained, it takes twenty men to make a pin, each man being specialized on a single process for a lifetime. In our day this method has reached its logical conclusion in the system known as "scientific management." The subdivision of labour attacks the craft; scientific (management attacks the man. Its acknowledged object is further to increase output by the elimination of all the motions of the arms and fingers and body that do not directly contribute to the fashioning of the article under process of manufacture. As such it completes the dehumanization and despiritualization of labour begun by the subdivision of labour.

Now it is apparent that the value to be placed upon such a method of work will depend upon our philosophy of life. If we are materialists and are convinced that the great end of life is to increase wealth—profit and commodities—regardless of the use to which the commodities are put or the degradation of the workers through the methods employed in their production, then we shall regard even such a system as scientific management as evidence of progress. But if we believe as Christians in the aboriginal and imperishable worth of the individual, we shall condemn the system as essentially anti-Christian. We shall maintain that any increase of wealth obtained by such means carries with it a curse, inasmuch as it ignores the sacredness of human personality and degrades man to the level of a machine.

The principle of the subdivision of labour has penetrated into every department of human activity. Overspecialization is the bane of the modern world. It affects the intellectual world, not perhaps to the same degree, but with results that are as potent for evil as those which we deplore in the world of labour. For just as the machine-tender becomes atrophied in certain directions, so the intellectual specialist develops one side of his mind at the expense of other sides, and thereby loses that balance and judgment which are essential to work of permanent value. It is said that in Germany before the War specialization among intellectual workers had reached such a degree of development that men tended to become monomaniacs on one subject, or even one small part of a subject, to the detriment of general culture. This was the Culture that gave to the Germans their sense of superiority over other peoples and was a contributory cause of the War. Specialization up to a certain point we must have if civilization is to exist at all. But a limit must be placed somewhere if men are not to disintegrate morally, intellectually, and spiritually, and to imperil the stability of civilization. An intimate connection exists between the convulsions which have overtaken society and this over-specialization; since when specialization is complete it breaks up society, because the co-ordinating idea which binds men together no longer operates. It is the corollary of that isolation of the soul which Mr. Belloc rightly sees as the fruit of the Reformation.

I said that to the development of specialization a limit must be placed somewhere. That limit, I submit, should be placed at the point craft development had reached before the division of labour degenerated into the subdivision of labour. To suffer specialization to proceed farther is, to use an engineering term "to trespass on the margin of safety." In calculating the strengths of the material he uses, the engineer keeps well within the margin of safety, for he knows that all structures suffer from wear and tear and may at some time or other be subjected to an exceptional strain, and therefore in common prudence he makes allowances for such contingencies in his calculations, distinguishing clearly between a "safe load" and a "breaking load." A sane sociology would make a corresponding destruction. It would recognize that there was a limit beyond which productivity could not be increased without imperilling the stability of the social structure. It would condemn the subdivision of labour because it trespassed on the margin of psychological safety and indefinite industrial expansion because it trespassed on the margin of economic safety. Failure to recognize the truth of this principle is responsible for the disintegration of society to-day. Though it is only since the War that our peril has received any public recognition, the process of disintegration has nevertheless been at work since the seventeenth century, when the subdivision of labour was instituted. If, then, society is to be reconstructed on a stable basis, productivity must not be allowed to trespass on the margin of safety; in other words, we must repudiate the subdivision of labour and return to the handicrafts as the basis of production, using machinery only in an accessory way.

It is now some seventy years since Ruskin wrote his impassioned protests against the human degradation involved in the subdivision of labour. Yet it is only of late that any signs have been forthcoming that his protests have not been entirely in vain. Thus in the Report of the American Committee on "The Church and Industrial Reconstruction" we read: "The tendency to regard labour simply as a means of production has been greatly intensified by modem machinery which has often had the effect of reducing the man almost to the level of a machine. He is left to do what inventive genius is unable to design a machine to do. The process of manufacture is carried to a higher and higher degree of specialization, until the worker's task tends to become a deadening routine and he himself hardly more than a semi-mechanical part of the factory. These conditions almost inevitably result in the loss of the sense of personal creation and fine craftsmanship. In the simpler days before the advent of large-scale production the worker helped to plan the work and with his own strength and skill to carry it into execution. In such a task a man could really find self-expression. But now he does not plan the work or any part of it, and everything except the monotonous details is accomplished by an automatic machine. The work no longer seems really his. The factory, therefore, means barren monotony for millions of men, deadens their imagination, and robs them of any sense of creative joy, and in these results we have had an altogether too complacent acquiescence. If we are seriously concerned about the development of personality we ought to be earnestly seeking ways of affording to modern workers opportunity for self-expression in their tasks by giving tihem industrial education and making it possible for them to share in directing the industry as a whole. At the very least we ought to guarantee them sufficient leisure for self -development in other activities outside the factory. We have shown an inexcusable apathy towards this destruction of human values in the process of producing things. We have been concerned with impersonal goods, with profits and dividends, forgetting that the factor we indifferently spoke of as 'labour' is nothing less than immortal souls for whom the Lord Christ died."

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Seven Keys to A Christian Home

by Emerson Hynes




Imprimatur: +Edward C. Daly, O.P., S.T.M.
Bishop of Des Moines

Emerson Hynes is a familiar figure of the Catholic Rural Life literary landscape. It was he who in 1940 wrote our first pamphlet, "City Slickers and Dumb Farmers." He edited our second one, "Farm-Family-Prosperity." Emerson and Arleen his wife, are Catholic college graduates. Their six youngsters, under seven years of age, are a joy to behold. Mr. and Mrs. Hynes find time to attend a few Rural Life Conventions, and amidst the busy life of their home, they write in behalf of the Catholic Rural Life cause.

"The Seven Keys to a Christian Home" first appeared in the "Marianist" under the title, "Building a Home." We are grateful to the editors for permission to reprint it.

We believe that the very house we live in can lead us to temptation or it can be an instrument of God's graces. The home must be a Sacramental. It can be made so even in a materialistic era. Too many families break up because they have purchased the house of a thousand gadgets with buttons everywhere and a swarm of collectors every payday. Then there are no children; then the wife has to work; then love does not grow deeper and stronger as the years go on; then hell on earth; then the break up, then the very high probability of losing one's soul.

We urge Church and State, banks, investment companies and even real estate interests to help young couples in planning their homes and building their nests along Christian lines.

Mr. and Mrs. Hynes present herewith The Seven Keys to a Christian Home. It is a blueprint as well as a living reality.

Happy the man whose love and care,
A few paternal acres bound,
Happy to breathe his native air
On his own ground. (Alexander Pope.) L.G.L.

We are indebted to Mr. Gruen and Miss Stoner of "Better Homes and Gardens" for the art work and proofreading, and to Sister Mary of the Incarnation for editorial assistance.

It's lovely in Minnesota on a warm fall evening. It's better when your house is atop a hill in the country, banked behind by a forest of birch and oak and overlooking a valley split by a lazy creek and checked with alternate patches of pasture and corn and grain stubble. It's peaceful and quiet, and I am sitting in the easy chair reading the weekly collection of papers and magazines. As if there weren't a thousand ways of knowing it, the periodicals state that housing is one of the biggest national problems.

There are enough families," writes one expert, "to call forth a million houses a year for the next ten years, and houses are what America is eager to buy or rent."

That's a lot of houses, and those figures indicate that there are a lot of unhappy people living in cramped quarters. That's too bad. But from another standpoint, the figures symbolize the possibilities of a great adventure that ten million families could have--planning and building a home.

What worries me is that apparently many of the first principles of home-building have been lost in the battle for houses. There is a great difference between a house and a home. A house, according to Webster, is "a structure for human habitation"; but a home is defined as an "abode of one's family.... The abiding place of the affections.... The social unit or center formed by a family living together."

The principles of house-building concern the use of materials; the problems concern the amount of lumber, brick, mortar, and pipe, and the experience of a contractor. The principles of home-building are those of providing a family social center; the problems are those of making it "the abiding place of the affections."

A house is only a means to the end--a home. Every step in building a house must be tested to determine whether it aids or hinders homemaking. It is more important, therefore, to know the principles of home-making than it is to secure land and materials. In practice, home-building and home-making fuse. But in planning, they must be kept separate--and the principles of home-making come first.

I think back on the ideas that governed our building seven years ago. We were lucky enough to be near places and persons whence sound principles could be learned. We drew from the writings of Father Vincent McNabb, O.P., from the lectures of Monsignor Ligutti, from the tradition of Benedictine monasticism, and from families who had built homesteads during the depression. We also had three advantages then that the average young couple today may not enjoy; building supplies and labor were relatively easy to secure; my work was stable and so situated that we could build either in a rural community, a town, or a small city; and we were able to borrow $5,000 for financing.

Difficulties have increased tremendously in the postwar years, but principles do not change. Circumstances may prevent achieving the ideal in its fullness, but the ideal is still the guide.

At any rate, we made our decisions in terms of the following seven principles, and we have not found cause to regret a single one. If you disagree with some of the principles, it should still be valuable to discuss them, for it is always true that the kind of house you build should be the kind of home you want.

The principles that guided us are:

1. A home should be designed for family living.

2. A home should be independently owned.

3. A home should be built for permanency and growth.

4. A home should provide privacy.

5. A home should be part of a community.

6. A home should be a productive unit.

7. A home should be beautiful.

In bare outline that sounds like a simple list and perhaps not too impressive! With a moment's reflection almost anyone could draw up as good a set of principles. What is important is to start with such a list and then discuss each point in terms of your own family and circumstances.

A few of the arguments and experiences referring to the principles might be significant.

1. A home should be designed for family living.

Nothing is more obvious and nothing is more neglected than the need for a home built to suit the family. A study of pioneer homes will show that they were planned to fit the needs of that way of life. Gradually, we have transformed the home from a unit for the family to an object for public display.

The exterior design, the number and size of rooms, the kind and amount of furnishings, the location of the house and of the rooms in it--all these are influenced more by how it will look to outsiders than by the service and convenience it will provide for the family. The home should not be a depot or a furniture store; it is not meant to serve or to sell the public.

In no way is the trend toward display-type houses so definite as in the decrease in bedroom space for children and the increase in the size of the living room. One commentator has declared that most of the modern homes are "birth control houses," designed for families with one or two children. Space, once allowed for a third and fourth bedroom, is devoted to a hotel-lobby-type living room. Homes which are more than twenty-five years old rarely have less than four bedrooms. Few of the modern standard designs or structures provide that much space for children. Even if those who are building have no children or have grown children, they should think of future generations who will inhabit the house and allow sufficient bedrooms for them.

Every feature of the house should be discussed in terms of the family.

Should there be a basement? Our experience has been that the basement has given us the most valuable space for the lowest cost.

Should there be a second story?

Where should the entrance be?

Where should the bathroom be?

Should the dining room be combined with the kitchen? My wife believes that it should be. Meals and "dishes" are important daily jobs, and she does not want to be isolated from the family at these times. A separate dining room, which multiplies the steps the wife has to make, is often viewed as essential for "fancy" guests. But a guest worth entertaining will not mind eating in the big kitchen with the family and sitting around to visit before and after meals.

Where should the bedrooms be located? We were advised to have the parental bedroom, the nursery bedroom, and bathroom on the same floor as general living quarters. We did not appreciate the tremendous importance of this arrangement until after the second baby arrived. Now it seems that it would be almost impossible to take care of the children if any one of these three rooms were on a different floor level.

No two families will, or should, plan their houses exactly alike. It does not make much difference what the particular arrangement is, so long as it is born of long study and planning about how to make the dwelling a home for the family.

Think about how to enable this most intimate of societies to work, eat, pray, talk, play, and study together. Forget about public opinion and the fancy standards of occasional visitors. Remember that a workshop for boys is more important than a basement bar; a utility room is more important than an arty niche or a fireplace; and babies are more important than extra space for bridge parties.

2. A home should be independently owned.

You might assume that everyone hopes to own his home and that only the lack of money prevents the ideal. This assumption is far from the fact. The value placed on home ownership has gradually decreased. For many the convenience of apartment living and the ease of moving from one place to another are more important than ownership. A recent book was written about the hazards of owning one's house--and the book was a top-seller.

There was a time in the United States when nearly every family owned its home, no matter how crude the dwelling was. The trend toward tenancy has increased at every census, until in 1940 only 43.3 per cent of the nation's families owned their homes. The percentage was much less in the largest cities.

The housing shortage of recent years has forced many people to buy. Since residential real estate mortgages have increased nearly six billion dollars in the last seven years, it may be assumed that more families are owners today than in 1940. Still the sum total does not include more than about half the number of American families.

In face of these figures it is necessary to assert the value of ownership. The Catholic Church has always defended personal or private ownership; recent popes have repeatedly advocated reforms to secure it. According to Pope Pius XII, "nature itself has closely joined private property with the existence of human society and its true civilization, and in a very special manner with the existence and development of the family." He called upon "all public standards" and especially the State to preserve and increase family ownership.

Ownership provides the owner with more security of shelter than renting could, and security is one of the greatest needs of a growing family. It gives the owner a sense of responsibility--to maintain ownership, to add improvements, and to make repairs.

Ownership also elicits personal responsibility toward society from the owner; as Thomas Jefferson believed, only the man who has something to lose will have sufficient interest in the well-being of the government to be a democratic citizen. It furnishes the owner with a basis for independence, especially if the homestead is productive; and economically it represents the soundest type of saving. Ownership creates stability for the family and enables the family to maintain continuous contact with neighbors, parish, school, and community. It develops a family tradition around the homestead or the gathering point, which descendants identify with "back home."

Those are substantial arguments but there is still another-- one which appeals to the heart. That is the pride and joy of ownership. To stand on your own land, to plant and cultivate your own garden and flowers and trees, to build your own fences, to paint and beautify your own house, simply to stand back and survey your own property--here is a value the worth of which cannot be measured.

If a man feels pride in possessing an automobile planned and built by others in a factory hundreds of miles away, how much more pride can he take in a homestead he has helped to improve!

Ownership is not easy for the average family to secure. For many years its gleam is misted by a mortgage. But ownership is worth the struggle. It is worth going without some of the conveniences you might like. It is worth taking a less desirable location. It is worth being satisfied with a less pretentious structure and furnishings than you might get by renting. It is worth foregoing expensive entertainment, autos, or vacations. Ownership is worth sacrifice because it has a value that none of the other things have, a value big with spiritual overtones.

3. A home should be built for permanency and growth.

One of the criticisms of houses built in the last decade is that they are constructed of inferior materials, thrown together with the hope that they will last thirty years. A house should be built of the sturdiest materials and planned to last for generations.

A house that is to become a home should accumulate memories for generations. The bond of a family homestead is a great help to family unity; families need root in the security of the old home even if some of their members can return only occasionally.

Architects often estimate that the shell of a modern house is no more than one-sixth the cost of the house. It is better to build that shell of permanent materials and go without the fancy appointments, than to skimp on the frame and include the gilding.

A well-constructed wooden house will last for generations, though there is always hazard of fire. Lumber, however, has become a more expensive building material than cinder or cement blocks. With modern insulation and heating, the block or stone-walled home is just as comfortable and much more permanent.

We built our home of cinder block with cement floors and cinder block partitions. It's a story and a half high, 26 feet by 36 feet, and has a full basement. Yet the total cost of all the cement and masonry work was less than $2,000 in 1941. Add the cost of windows, doors, and roof, and for about $1,000 more we had the essentials of a house which should last, barring catastrophe, for centuries. Heating, water, electricity, and bath at that time cost $1,500.

It is not necessary that everything be built when you move in. I am not sure that it is even desirable. The fun of finishing the house which has not been completed yet has been one of our deepest satisfactions. Every room has more meaning and charm to us because whatever quality it has, we gave it.

A house is brick and mortar when it is built. It becomes organic through adoption by a family. As the family thinks and feels and grows, so should the house reflect the change. One of our guests, a contractor, recounted how he had built several hundred houses, row on row, varying four basic designs. He built and furnished them completely, even to planting the shrubbery outside, and--as he said--he had food in the refrigerator when the families moved in. I cannot doubt his word, but I do doubt that he sold those houses to normal people.

A house is like a child in many ways. And who would want to become the parents of a full-grown Harvard student?

We moved into our house when the walls were up and the roof overhead. No conveniences were available for several weeks. It was five years before the labyrinth of electric wires was connected to a power line. It was more than a year before all the downstairs rooms were painted; over six years before the two big upstairs "dormitories" were completed.

During a three weeks' vacation last year, without any outside help, we built the shell of a 20 by 26 foot addition to be used as a garage in the winter and a porch in the summer. We have added touches ever since and, while it is serviceable now, it will be another two years before we have the house completed the way we want it. Then will be the time to expand in another direction.

It may seem intolerable to live in a house which is not completed or which is always being improved. That would be true if the house were not your own, or if you wanted it to be a show place to impress outsiders. Many of our visitors have arched an eyebrow as they looked at the unfinished condition of our house, and I suppose some were scandalized. But if you are always planning, you don't see things as they are but as they are going to be--and that is good.

We Americans have an over-developed fastidiousness. We want to see every pin in place and everything done and finished. Nature does not work that way nor does man at his best. The medieval cathedrals took centuries to build, but the world is far richer for them than if bishops had ordered workers to put up the best structure they could finish in ninety days.

The assumption that one cannot have a new house unless it is finished the last splendid detail is a major factor in preventing construction, for it increases the cost tremendously. Over the years we have worked an average of more than an hour a day on the house. Estimated at a dollar an hour (which would be optimistic for our unskilled labor) our work has added $2,500 in value to the house.

Work of this kind does not take any special skill. A century and a half ago every pioneer was able to plan and make nearly everything he needed. There is no evidence that our average intelligence has decreased. Any man who can shave should have a hand steady enough to saw. Anyone who can swing a golf club can swing a hammer.

There are municipal regulations which require licensed workers to perform certain jobs in construction work. Yet there remain hundreds of things which a man can do for himself, and it is in these jobs that the greatest savings can be made. Perhaps it is a double saving, for one who is engrossed in building his own house is a very poor patron of taverns, movies, and costly forms of outside entertainment!

Almost anyone who wants to work on his own house will have to rely upon others. Books and government publications can help you over many rough spots, but the best source is the advice of people in your community who retain knowledge of ancient skills. Such people are generous. They are proud of their art and eager to aid anyone who wants to learn.

4. A home should provide privacy.

The first step toward privacy for the family is to make the house a single-family unit. Over 99 per cent of the families in Manhattan borough live in multiple-family units; the percentage does not fall much below 33 in any city.

Pressure for space accounts for some of this crowding of families into areas where they can have only a superficial privacy--at the expense of remaining anonymous. In cities even single-unit dwellings are often jammed together like slices of bakery bread. Since the decentralization of family units depends upon the decentralization of cities and industry, there is no prospect of an immediate solution to the problem.

Yet privacy remains the ideal. The family home should be secluded enough that members of the family may work, eat, talk, and even quarrel without a dozen other families watching and listening. Rearing normal children is almost impossible if every sound, from baby's cries to Sonny's laughter, must be hushed to prevent neighbors from becoming irate.

A family planning a home should put privacy high on the list. Securing land in a remote suburb or on the fringes of the town or city will mean sacrificing some conveniences, but you should weigh these disadvantages against the gain in family privacy before making a decision.

Fortunately for those who want "space, light, and air" for the family, as Pope Pius XII termed it, big lots in undeveloped areas are far less expensive than small lots in crowded areas. Our house was built in its entirety for less than the estimated cost of two rooms in a Harlem slum-clearance housing project.

5. A home should be part of a community.

The family needs privacy; that is primary. A family also needs neighbors. A community is a collection of families united by a common bond and acting together for similar goals. Geographic proximity is a stimulus to community spirit but it is not sufficient stimulus by itself. Families may live close to one another and yet be strangers or, worse, they may be intensely antagonistic.

People with community spirit know and are interested in one another. They visit. They work together on projects for church, school, safety, and recreation. They cooperate to beautify the community. They exchange help and tools. Their children play and fight together. They have a mutual sense of security in belonging to a loyal group.

Little more thought is given to community than to privacy in buying or building a house today. At best it is a negative concern, verging on snobbery and racism. We pick a location, not because of what it has but because it is guaranteed not to have people in an inferior income bracket or of a different race. Community spirit cannot arise without more vital bonds than similarity of income and color.

The conventional city block style is directly opposed to family privacy and community unity. Each house is a public display, aimed to impress an impersonal audience at the expense of the family. Much of the valuable small lot is used for a front lawn where privacy is impossible. Children must keep off the grass that strangers may be edified by a prim and sterile landscape. The rear of the home is at most uninteresting, facing a dirty alley.

Somewhere along the line we Americans lost a valuable principle guiding our European ancestors. They valued privacy; it was common practice for them to build their houses on the edge of the street, with all the services coming from the street, not from the alley. What we call the the front of the house, they have at the rear in the form of a little court where they and their neighbors can enjoy seclusion.

Ideally, families ought to plan their homes to fit into a community that already exists or they should join several families with like interests in planning a block of houses.

Groups of families building in new districts could achieve community unity by facing their houses inward instead of toward the street and by replacing alleys with a common. Integrated (but not identical) architecture would increase the beauty of the surroundings. Buying and building together, they could save considerably in construction costs. And all that is involved in planning together would develop mutual understanding so that community spirit would be well under way.

In such projects individuality is not lost. Uniformity on all points is not desirable. A common desire to build a Christian community where the importance of rearing children is understood would be a sound basis for cooperative planning.

There are obstacles to working together and temptations to individualism. We fancied a pine-covered acreage overlooking a lake. It was alluring--but alone. No neighbors in sight. We have been grateful a thousand times for the advice not to isolate ourselves. We fitted our home into a small community of seven families, with each house about three to five hundred feet from the other. We vary in nationality, occupation, age, and size of family. No one interferes with anyone else, yet everyone is aware of and interested in the welfare of the other.

A community at its best should probably be larger than ours is, but, regardless of size, it is the spirit of unity and mutual willingness to help that counts. A family that builds a house without knowledge of or concern for neighbors is creating an obstacle to the making of a home.

6. A home should be a productive unit.

From many standpoints, no consideration in home making is more important than planning the home as a productive enterprise--productive for the wife, the husband, and the children. This is a principle to which Pope Pius XII has referred again and again. He says that no form of private property (no, not even automobiles and television sets) "is more conformable to nature . . . than the land, the holding in which the family lives, and from the products of which it draws all or part of its subsistence."

To have a productive unit you do not have to buy a farm, even to have ten acres and a cow, as we do, or one acre and two goats, as a friend has. A 150-foot square lot can be very productive if properly planned.

The concept of productiveness begins within the family itself. In planning the house, the features which will help the wife work more efficiently are much more important than the appearance of the house to outsiders. No matter how pretty certain arrangements and furnishings might be, if they mean that the wife's cleaning load will be doubled or that she will have to take ten extra steps fifty times a day, that plan is faulty. The centers of traffic, the proximity of conveniences, the number and location of closets, and many other items should be planned to facilitate her work.

Productiveness of the rest of the homestead depends upon the location and climate and amount of space. Some men may prefer to concentrate on fine work, making furniture and cabinets, so they should have a shop. Trees and shrubs can be fruit producing and not merely ornamental. Even in cities there is opportunity to raise bees, rabbits, and a garden.

What a family can produce will vary. Within each family it will vary from year to year, depending on the age, experience, and free time of the parents and children. The important thing is to plan the house and its location so that productive work is possible.

The most obvious arguments for a productive home are economic, since less than 10 per cent of American families have a big enough income to relieve them of worry about saving money. There are grounds for suspecting the person who always says, "It's cheaper to buy it than to make it." That's true of automobiles and washing machines. That's not true of cooking, sewing, gardening, and other household services; statistics from every state department of agriculture and home economics prove that.

But the person who is producing must know how to do the work and he must not buy expensive equipment for minor tasks. A 50 by 50 foot garden will not justify a garden tractor; a canning pressure cooker is inefficient if all it processes in a year is seven quarts of beans.

Another consideration is that usually a family has less and of a poorer quality when it buys than when it produces for itself. When our cow is dry, our butter and milk consumption is cut by half, since it is too expensive to use as much.

Even if the productive home were not a noticeable saving, it still would be needed. This necessity follows from the very nature of man, for, as Scripture tells us, "Man was born to labor and the bird to fly." Work is necessary to development as a human person. The home is the first and most important society in which the child matures. When children are deprived of the opportunity to do constructive work, their personalities suffer. We should not be surprised if they become troublesome, irresponsible, and delinquent.

The purpose of play and recreation is to enable us to work and pray better--it "re-creates" us for higher things. Yet in homes where there is no wholesome work for the children, they can only play. Children, being children, may grumble at tasks to be performed, but usually it is because we have not taken time to train them or we have not given them really responsible work to do.

Anyone who has watched 4-H club youth with their livestock or garden or kitchen projects has learned that the greatest values of a productive home are not economic.

This is not to disparage the use of the home as the principal place for recreation. A house planned for family living, as mentioned earlier, is necessarily planned for family play. This is rather to point out that while we give considerable thought to facilities for recreation in planning modern homes, we rarely provide opportunities for work. And work is actually more important for children than play.

7. A home should be beautiful.

Beauty is one of the prime properties of being. Everyone wants to achieve beauty in his home. It is hard to imagine anyone sitting down and saying, "Now let's plan a really unbeautiful house." At the same time, beauty does not "look after herself." Beauty is achieved only after thought and experiment. Beauty takes patience and, sometimes, more money.

There is a temptation to draw the line at the useful and to let it go at that. Or one may hold doggedly to a plan which in theory should satisfy beauty but which is "out of place" in a particular location. Or one may spend too much on some one item, like putting rubies and diamonds on a mop pail. There are many ways of offending beauty. Giving thought to the principle will help to avoid them.

Beauty is the most elusive of the principles of house planning. It is hard to get agreement on what beauty is, beyond the general statement of the philosophers that "The beautiful is that which, when seen, pleases." Beauty is related to harmony and order, though violent contrasts like churning black clouds and jagged lightning are beautiful. Beauty presupposes the good and the true; we can be guided by the knowledge that the bad and the false in themselves cannot be beautiful. False fronts and imitations which do violence to the materials from which they are made will soon reveal their ugliness and mar a house and its furnishings.

Nor should one plan conventional things just because they are conventional. It is probably impossible to please all outsiders anyway; public taste is fickle and changing. The test should be--is it pleasing to you and to your family? Not, what will other people think?

There is no blueprint for beauty and examples are not very useful. Beauty has to be "seen." In building, the "seeing" is first in the imagination. No time is wasted, when you shut your eyes and try to see how this shape and these lines will look against this terrain in this community, how these colors will blend, how this furniture will look in that room.

In our own experience, we believe we have failed in this principle more than in any of the others, largely because I was in too much of a hurry to get a job done. I am afraid that most of us men are too utilitarian and unconcerned with beauty, especially when it takes more time and costs more to do a job well. Wives are almost always better judges of home beauty. If they persevere with patience and tact, the home should become more and more beautiful

These seven principles, we believe, have given us the best standard for making a home. We are more convinced than ever that if we had to start over again we would try to follow the same policy. We believe that it has given us an ideal setting for trying to build a Christian family. If we fail in this environment, we cannot blame anyone but ourselves.

It would be misleading to say that a house can be planned and built easily. Discouragement and obstacles and fatigue are going to win a day now and then. But the continuous process of building a home is an adventure in living, joyous and rich. It should not be approached as a worry and a headache. It should and can be a refreshing experience, calling for creative thought by the intellect, important decisions by the will, and deep personal, human satisfaction in making something for oneself, by oneself.

National Catholic Rural Life Conference

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Toward Social Thinking

by Fr.Vincent McNabb

For the purpose of clear thinking on social matters, I venture to set down some thoughts on Socialism.

Very gravely I add they are not meant to be a defense of Socialism. They are merely social facts, the knowledge of which has been arrived at by a process of observation. I set them down as the astronomer tabulates and records his observed astronomical facts, not knowing what use may be made of them but feeling that it is his duty to record them whether they are used or not.

A late writer in an influential Catholic review maintained that absolution could not be given to a Catholic Socialist who came to confession because the policy of the Socialist party was secularisation. The argument, couched in the accustomed forms of the schools, was very persuasive. But on second thoughts it could be seen that the premises, which served to insure the conclusion desired of the writer, would also serve to justify not a few conclusions which the writer would disown.

Socialism is accused of wishing to a number of undesirable things. Indeed, the common method of disproving Socialism is to show by striking and detailed word painting that if Socialism became dominant in the Commonwealth, the state of things thereby introduced would be intolerable and even unjust.

(1) One of the first charges made against Socialism is that it would socialise everything and everybody and that it would therefore make slaves of us all, or at least of all except the State officials under whom we should all be regimented, case-papered, paid, fed, tendered and buried. This argument if carefully drawn by a man of feeling can be particularly effective. It is perhaps the locus communis which for years has left me not unmoved whenever I hear it.

But, on second thoughts, it appears that this inhuman programme which Socialism is expected to bring forth is already in great part realised and not by the Socialists.

Mr Belloc and others who are confessedly not Socialists agree that Socialism is committed to this dismal homogeneity and slavery. But they add that it is a thing in great part and essentially realised by existing political parties. One has only to read The Servile State to be haunted by the idea that not only existing Socialism but the existing Conservative and Liberal, and Democratic and Republican parties, are committed to a programme of socialised services which rest essentially on a basis of compulsory work, i.e. slavery.

Moreover, in such a thorough-going Monarchy as Germany, the number of social functions that have now become socialised are alsmost as many as most Socialists would claim for their Socialist State. Indeed, the formula of the most absolute monarchy "L'Etat, c'est moi" needs a change not of form but of content, to be the programme of every advanced party in modern political education.

All this is dramatically confirmed by the diagnosis made by Leo XIII of the actual state of social affairs. 'A small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.'(Rerum Novarum.)

It is quite evident that this existing state of thigns is substantially what Socialism is condemned for proposing to bring in! Moreover, it is equally evident that the state of things condemned by the Pope is not due to Socialism; but if attributable to any party, then to Conservatives, Liberals, Republicans or Democrats.

(2) A second plea for decrying Socialism is that it would secularise education.

Here as elsewhere in this paper no attempt is made to accept or deny these pleas although it is well known that a large portion of the Education Act of 19021 was inspired by a leading Socialist.

But anyone dread Socialism because it will secularise education? Has not education, even in these countries, been largely and dominantly secularised? In the United States public education is completely secularised. There it was a bourgeois revolution and not Socialism that brought in secularisation. In England the secular programme is officially Liberal.

If, then, a Socialist is to be refused absolution because his party would bring in secularism, how can absolution be granted in England to a Liberal whose part have an equally secular programme; and in the United States, to both Democrats and Republicans, who agree in accepting and defending the present secularism? At any rate, secularism is not something future to be dreaded but something present to be uprooted.

(3) A further argument against Socialism is that it would degrade women by taking women out into the spheres of public work

But statistics are at hand to prove that women workers are to be found in almost every sphere of labour; moreover, they have often been employed because being non-unionised they could be forced or persuaded to accept a lower rate of wages than men. This is most strongly confirmed by all kinds of investigators. Recently the Municipal Vice Commission of Chicago found that a great deal of the prostitution in their rich city was due to the abnormally low wages paid to girls in a number of employments. The present state of women is such a matter of shame that many of the arguments against the suffrage movement are pointless.

But what has Socialism had to do with the degradation of women? And if Socialists are not to be absolved for a crime they have not committed, why may absolution be granted to those by whom the crime has been either committed or approved?

(4) A further and most forcible argument against Socialism is that it would destroy the home. This argument is of great service in strengthening minds that see in the home the only hope of a nation's future. Any political party that threatens the home, no matter what its calim to social service, must be looked on as anti-social.

But, it may well be asked, has the home not already been threatened? Indeed, have the threats not been but too well realised and are not great masses of the workfolk wholly homeless. A room or two overcrowded with inmates can not be called a home. A house in such conditions and in such surroundings that the infant mortality is twice and thrice as much as in well-to-do neighbourhoods cannot be called a home. Yet the recent blue-book on the housing of Great Britain and Ireland has an eloquence of statistics proving that the homes of our country are not merely threatened but vigorously attacked and undermined.

Moreover, to repeat the argument of the previous section, woman's work has largely taken wives from their own homes and made them wives, not mothers. This is to destroy the home.

Now this again is not a future eveil to be dreaded, it is such a rooted present evil that any whole-hearted efforts to uproot it are likely to offer the features of a revolution.

Yet again, not Socialism but some other political or industrial policy has set up almost unnoticed this enemy of the home.

(5) Lastly, and this is perhaps the most urgent of all the pleas against Socialism, it is said that Socialism would destroy the inborn and inalienable right of property.

But if the right of property means, not that some men shall own all property but that all men shall own some property, one asks 'Where is the right of property existing in the world today?' Is the inalienable right of property kept in a state of things where vast numbers of work-folk have not a square yard of land and are never even more than a month from destitution? Is this inalienable right a fact in a state of things where by the testimony of a Pope 'a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself,' and where there are 'two widely differing castes ... one which holds power because it holds wealth and which has in its grasp the whole of labour and trade, on the other side there is the needy and powerless multitude, broken down and suffering' so that 'some remedy must be found, and found quickly, for the misery (i.e. want) and wretchedness pressing so heavily and so unjustly on the vast majority of the working classes'. (Rerum Novarum).

It is evident that this state of injustice whereby the vast majority of the working classes are in a position of misery is not exactly a state bsed on the right of property

For injustice is the forcible taking or holding of property. And it is evident that this state, based on the violent interference with the right of property, is not in any measure due to the political party called Socialism. It must therefore be due, either in its rise or maintenance, to the other political parties which Catholics freely enter without dread of being refused absolution.

As was said at the outset, this line of thought is not meant nor perhaps even fitted to be a defense of Socialism. It is merely an observed and recorded fact for the guidance of Social thinkers. If a Social thinker refuses absolution to a member of the Socialist party because the Socialist party would bring in a state of things, why does he not refuse absolution to the other political parties; for the state of things is already in existence and has been brought about or, at least, is being upheld by them?

It is evident therefore that there is some flaw in the course of reasoning which would withhold absolution on a probability and give it on a fact. Either the premises are not observed facts or the reasoning is amiss.

For the moment our task is to point out that somewhere there is a flaw in the chain of reasoning, with the hope that social thinkers will revise either their facts or their deductions.

Published in "The Tablet", Jan. 3, 1914

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A Review of Flee to the Fields

by Dr. Peter Chojnowski

“So long as the legislative machine is controlled by and composed of the monopolists, all effort at restoring healthy economic life will fail.”

That quote is from Hilaire Belloc’s preface to Flee to Fields: The Founding Papers of the Catholic Land Movement, a collection of 10 thought-provoking essays by leaders of the movement, first published during the Great Depression. The new edition by IHS Press features an introduction by Dr. Tobias Lanz, and is footnoted and enhanced with classic photos and illustrations.

The primary goal of the Catholic Land Movement was to provide skills, education, and financial aid to families committed to an integrally Catholic life and to producing food and primary goods for their own sustenance. Belloc speaks to the paradoxes and unresolved tensions that pervade this compilation of essays. He points out that a reinvigoration of society can only be realized if the power of the State is dedicated to the common good, rather than the private good of those who finance the rulers of the State.

Belloc also emphasizes a point that evades most contemporary political thinkers: The problem with our own times is that the State has been handed over to private interests. Thus it’s counter-intuitive to believe that those who have access to the halls of political power will ever countenance a situation that jeopardizes their monopoly on the nation’s resources.

Lanz compares the Catholic Land Movement to the American Southern Agrarians of the first half of the 20th century, whereas Fr. John McQuillan points out that it began with the full support of the British Catholic hierarchy in Glasgow, Scotland in 1929 (Fr. McQuillan became parish priest of the surrounding district). The Scottish Catholic Land Association was soon complemented by similar associations in the Midlands and the North and South of England. By 1934, significant numbers of young men, adopted by the respective Catholic Land Associations, were fully trained in every branch of farming.

In his essay, “The Rise and Fall of Industrialism,” Commander Herbert Shove grounds the ideology of British Agrarianism in a systematic analysis of British history, beginning with the Medievel feudal system and ending with the emergence of a fully industrial and monopolistic system in the 19th century. By the time Flee to the Fields was originally published, 80% of the population of Great Britain was crowded into urban areas, as was about 95% of the Catholic population.

Just as many American churchman in the 19th century had feared the assimilation of the Catholic population into Protestant groups, so too did the British Catholic elite fear that conditions of urban life would further a “contraceptive mentality” among Catholics. This was one of the main motivations behind the “Back to the Land” movement of the pre-World War II years.

Flee to the Fields presents a defense of the movement that had such prestigious backers as Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, and Fr. Vincent McNabb. It was the desire to see a reorientation of the Catholic soul toward life on the land that produced both the movement in Britain and Flee to the Fields, the manifesto of its intent. Essayist Fr. McNabb, among others, was convinced that without that movement, Catholic family life would be eroded and finally dislodged, due to the unnatural environment of the cities and the fact that in urban life a man’s work is in one place and his home and family in another. Hence, it was to the not-impossible dream of a free man on his own land, with family at hand, that Flee to the Fields was dedicated.

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