Thrift! Thrift! Thrift!

From: America Magazine (March 19th, 1938)

Has thrift become a forgotten virtue since the depression began? One school of economists advises us to purchase all we can, because that will stimulate business. When the number of purchasers falls, goods will be manufactured in smaller volume, fewer workers will be needed, and the period of unemployment will be extended. A depression, they argue, is not the time to hoard. Every dollar should be put to work, and a dollar cannot work when it is kept under a loose brick in the hearth.

No doubt there is a sense in which this advice is excellent. One of the best ways the rich have of helping the poor, Pius XI tells us in the Encyclical On the Reconstruction of the Social Order, is to invest in enterprises which will give the poor profitable work. Those who are not rich can help in their degree by making purchases as they are needed. But this advice should be tempered; purchases should not be made unless they are needed. In a recent number of This Week Mrs. William Brown Meloney tells of an interview with the late President Coolidge a few months before his death. The President was in a happy mood, but his face became serious as he said fidelity to four maxims had “made New England great.” These maxims were: “Eat it up. Wear it out. Make it do. Do without.”

The tale points a moral. We have all known families who lived very comfortably on $2,400 per year, but felt themselves in real need shortly after the annual stipend rose to $4,800. The trouble was not that the purchasing power of the dollar decreased, but that the family’s supposed needs increased out of all proportion. In their new surroundings, they neither ate it up, wore it out, made it do, or did without. The acquisition of more money did not make them happier. It made them discontented.

A sermon on thrift during this depression may seem a sermon preached out of due time. Yet if thrift is a virtue when the times are prosperous, it can hardly be a vice when we are all poor together. The only danger is that the thrift which is now imposed upon us by lack of means, may make us sour and discontented, just as increasing wealth does in days of plenty. Fifty years ago in thousands of American homes, children were taught to look upon food as a gift of the good God to make them well and strong. Hence it was “wrong” not to eat it all. To put it aside on the plea of “I don’t like it,” or “I want something else,” was not tolerated. Similarly little girls were taught to darn their stockings, not to throw them away when worn, and many a little boy went to school in neatly patched clothes. All this was a valuable training in making it do, or doing without.

Certainly there is plenty of poverty today, the result of causes which offend God, causes which cannot be attributed to the poor themselves. But we also fear that there is a poverty which is not real poverty, but only the poverty of people who once had two cars but must now put up with one.

“Keeping up with the Joneses,” is an unhappy social philosophy which was not swept away by the depression. Too few of us are willing to pray the prayer of the Wise Man who asked neither destitution nor riches, but just enough to live on. What we want is enough to live on in ease and comfort.

“A certain amount of comfort,” translates Prior McNabb, O.P. from St. Thomas’ De Regimine Principum, i, 15, “is necessary for the practice of virtue.” When the head swims from weariness, and the stomach is empty, and the rent unpaid, it is extremely difficult to regard the world with sentiments of overflowing kindliness. It is the duty of every man to do all he can to abate this excessive poverty (and still more destitution) and it is the duty of the state to supplement these private efforts with all the power at its command. At the same time, it is the duty of the individual bread-winner to practice thrift as well as patience.

We like to think that the great Saint whose feast we celebrate today was a thrifty man. The home at Nazareth was not a rich home, but we are sure that by foresight and thrift Saint Joseph always managed to provide enough for his holy Spouse and her Divine Son. May he help us all in these hard days to procure enough for those whom we love, and whatever befalls us, to live always in the spirit of Jesus and Mary.

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Is Bishop Gore a Distributist?

by Fr. Vincent McNabb

There is no cause that would not gain by the pen of Bishop Gore. Not that it would always gain in clearness. The Bishop can be so deep or so dark that many of his writings are read by his enemies, who quarry in them for something to denounce, rather than by his friends, who are anxious for something to understand.

On social matters, such as form the subject of these gathered Halley Stewart lectures, Bishop Gore speaks with something of prophetic power. Amongst the “word-sowers” of the Church of England the authentic prophetical note will oftenest be heard, not from the pulpit of St. Paul’s or the chair of Birmingham, but from this cultured voice to which, we believe, not a few pulpits are closed. But as far as we can judge, if all the pulpits in the Church of England were closed to him, he would feel no sense of narrowed outlet, still less of thwarted ambition. The man who has given up two Episcopal chairs for the sake of intellectual life and social truth is set beyond the little passions that shake lesser men. Nowhere in the written or spoken words of the man has anyone detected an effort or intention to “play to the gallery” or to catch votes. For this reason his readers know that, even in those pages where his mind seems bewildered, his bewilderment comes of that “cor sincerum” on which alone the final stages of truth can be built.

In these lectures, this sincere heart, and on the whole this clear thinker “sets out four main propositions: (1) That the present state of society demands a reform so thorough as to amount to a peaceful revolution; (2) That the revolution must consist of a change of spirit rather than a change in legislative administration; (3) That the change in spirit will not come from any conversion of men in masses, but from the influence and inspiration of leaders; (4) Finally, that Jesus Christ is the Saviour and Redeemer of man in social as well as individual life.”

It is in the development and proof of this thesis that Bishop Gore leads us to ask if he is a Distributist. If ever he was a “Socialist” in deed or name, life and thought have brought a gradual focusing of vision. Or it may be that the young man who saw visions has gradually grown into the older man who dreams dreams – those prophetical dreams that are woven of spun memories. No wonder, then, that the dream which ends the book should have so many pages of history – the “memory of mankind.” But this history of Bishop Gore’s is such as a Distributist would write. It is a quiet panegyric, not of what is primitive but what is primary. It can look on the Middle Ages, as many historians look on the Crusades, as the tragedy of thought and purpose outrunning accomplishment. It has no wish to copy the failures of the past, but only its clear, damning vision of transcendent intellectual and moral right.

In many or most of the details of the Bishop’s dream he is frankly distributist. Thus he writes of the Early Church:-

“We find in the Christian fathers vigorous denunciation of all keeping of private wealth such as is not needed for the support of the possessor’s own family. Such selfish keeping of wealth from the common land they call – not lack of generosity only, but injustice or theft. It is not that they deny the right of private property. In a world of sin, private property must exist; and the law must maintain it. But it is only to be justified when it is reduced to the minimum needed to meet the reasonable requirements of life according to a man’s condition.” (p. 84)

A further passage in Bishop Gore’s most convincing manner might well be copied into any handbook for Distributists:-

“From any democratic point of view the aim of the State in legislature must be, as far as possible, to secure the reality of private property to all citizens, though no doubt in varying degree. As against any thorough-going form of Socialism or Communism I desire to insist that the maintenance of the family (which should always be regarded as the root and center of the organization of human society) as well as the encouragement of individuality demands the maintenance of private property…the object of legislation should always be to endow the largest number of individuals with property and the sense of property. It is in both these respects that our laws have signally failed. Their tendency throughout history has been to create a propertied class and make it dominant over an unpropertied nation. It is certain, if anything that can be called democracy or freedom to prevail, that this tendency has to be deliberately and systematically reversed. Nothing seems to me at this moment more alarming than the concentration of capital, and the vast power that capital gives, in a few hands. For instance, in the department of journalism, so important for the life of any nation, it appears already to have almost destroyed the freedom of the Press.” 9pp.143,144).

This is vigorous, limpid, well-head Distributism. Are we to welcome Bishop Gore as a Distributist?

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Wanted - More Homes

by Mrs. Cecil Chesterton

"There is, thank God," said Ally Sloper, "no place like home." This observation was rapturously applauded at a recent debate when Mrs. Dora Russell proposed the abolition of this place of doom. The Majority of the meeting supported the opener, but neither she nor the audience faced the issue as to what would happen when the home was destroyed.

Familiar arguments were used as to the repression of the home upon the younger generation. We were invited to deplore the spectacle of girls who, working by day in an office, come home at night to wash dishes and suffer the tyranny of parents. There are such cases: we all know them. But the answer, as it seems to me, is that this business of domestic tyranny would disappear if, instead of there being no homes, there were more of them. At this present moment there are not hundreds but thousands of families, consisting of husband and wife with two children and very often a grandmother, compelled to live in one room. Grandmother would undoubtedly like to have a place of her own; just as Mary, rising eighteen, would like to get married to her young man. They can't - why? Because, under present housing conditions, there is no place for them to go to.

It was interesting to listen to the usual complaints: that a wife is a slave to domesticity; that she spends her days in cooking, washing, and ironing, unable even to snatch time to listen to the wireless. If this be so, whence, I ask, comes the enormous army of women that pour into the cinemas every afternoon, that wait outside the theatres in long queues, that thong the shops and gaze into the windows? The tyranny of domesticity is an exploded argument. Nowadays labour-saving devices have made it child's play to keep house.

But even if we grant- the contention that home is a menace to happiness, what is the alternative? The most hygienic and efficient institution, where you enjoy communal dining rooms, communal bedrooms, and communal conversation, is a thing of terror to the ordinary individual.

To live communally is to destroy the right to personal property- those small belongings to which every woman clings. Divorce a woman from her background- deprive her of the ability to express herself in her surroundings, and you postulate a rather dreadful creature.

That this shrill note of feminism, rooted in fear and dislike of man, is likely to influence the next election, in however small a degree, seems fairly certain. Women in commerce, who, past their first youth, have to look forward to a narrow living-wage without prospect of increase, are obsessed with a sense of injustice in life. They will not organize-middle-class women are the worst trade-unionists in the world- they will not think out their economic position; they turn and rend the thing that is nearest to their hand-the home.

That the present calamitous housing shortage could be remedied if the women of this country decided to remedy it is one of my firmest beliefs. That there is any hope of such a decision seems very dubious. What is a distinct danger, however, is that if this bogey, of the home as a source of oppression and of evil, gains ground, all attempts to mitigate the overcrowding will be arrested. What we shall see will be the abolition, not of the home- who is going to interfere with the private residences of Park Lane? -but of the homes of the poor. It is cheaper, more sanitary, to erect huge barracks. Moreover it is to the advantage of the capitalist to do so. Already Lord Melchett has put forward his contention in this direction. Workmen, separated from their wives and families, are necessarily more easy to exploit; deprived of the place where they have freedom of speech (within limits, I admit), deprived of the sense of security which only your own fireside can bring, they will not long exercise effective opposition.

Institutional as opposed to domestic life tends, as experience has shown, to standardization. Regimentation expresses individuality - it is the only necessary to observe the decay of those arts and crafts which flourished in the home to realize what mechanical civilization has effected. It is argued that the home in Europe is of but recent biological growth, and that maybe a return to the nomad condition would bring about a happier state of things. But this again confuses the issue. The tribes were nomad for economic reasons. The desert is not perennially fruitful. But in so far as a home could be established, it was- were it only a few sticks and a camp fire.

The final argument, that home is bad for the child and that the only people incapable of property rearing an infant are its parents, carried to its logical conclusion must mean the abolition of the child. Faced with the fact that the child must be delivered to the State, brought up with thousands of other children all the same- how man women could bring themselves to become maternal machines under Government regulation?

And always, as in every argument of the kind, the menace is directed at the poor.

Taken from G.K.'s Weekly October 13, 1928.

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The Fortress of Property

by G.K. Chesterton

The old parties of our political life are not only old but dead. They are dead by this decisive test; that they are dead to the particular appeal that should and once did rouse them like a trumpet. Liberalism does not want to liberate anything. Conservatism does not want to conserve anything. The Tory can hardly be stung to life even by an insult to patriotism. The Radical can hardly remember when he resented regimentation as the soul of militarism. Of this ugly truth two unquestionable tests of examples may be taken.

For instance, if the Conservative might be expected to wish to conserve anything, he might wish to conserve England. The English life, the English landscape, and especially the old English monuments, might be supposed to be left in the trust to the Tories. If so, the trustees have broken their trust. Individuals have made admirable protests; but there has been no real rally to the defence of old England by all that body that votes and speaks for Conservatism. The painful explanation is that it really votes and speaks only for Capitalism. An English village must cut down its trees because an American factory wants to sell its cars; and the trees are cut down, very often, not only without a protest from the villagers but even from the squire or parson. The gentry seems to have surrendered to the plutocracy and ceased to defend England against foreign invasion. It is the same in every department. Tories will sometimes rave feebly against Jews revolutionizing Russia. But when an insolent German Jew organises a gigantic British combine, they dare not protest against Jews revolutionising England. Suburban Conservatives will sometimes make feeble jokes about the American chasing the dollar. But when an absurd American not only chases dollars down Oxford Street but chases all our own shopkeepers out of their own shops, they dare not even laugh; in the respectful silence there is not so much as a giggle. Moreover, they all go to his shop; a shop decorated outside in a highly florid and ornamental fashion. But among those decorations should be a design of the Caudine Forks, under which pass a conquered people.

Just in the same way, if Radicals rebel against anything they might rebel against Dora. They might resent the extension of merely military discipline, of regulations only defensible in wartime and even only defended as a sort of martial law. Of these restrictions the most ridiculous, the most rigid and the most unpopular, are those limiting the sale of liquor to a few inconvenient hours in a normal working day. All the old champions of liberty would have been stunned with incredulity at such a sight. They would have found their tongues only to thunder against it as they thundered against the tyrants of Turkey or Russia. The modern Radical dares not whisper a word against it. He knows it is wise to be silent when tyrants are agreed; when the Liquor Trust and the Cocoa Trust are met together; when Russia, Prussia, and Austria have kissed each other, partaking of the sacramental body of Poland; when Herod and Pilate have shaken hands.

Amid all these deaf ears and dead instincts there is for us only one thing to say. The moral of all this is still in two words; private property. For the present, and for some time, private property will be a refuge. It will be a refuge for national tradition; it will be a refuge for personal freedom. A man’s garden can still be English when his very town or village has turned foreign. He can drink in his own house as if in an English inn, even when the English inn has been turned into an American hotel. Putting aside the question of economic support for the moment, any moderate sized house and garden like my own would serve well enough as a working model of my meaning. As a matter of fact, I suspect that in the last resort a family could even live on its own eggs and vegetables on a pretty small area, if it all worked with that object; but I am not arguing that practical point now. I am dealing only with the cultural and not the agricultural question. I have not got three acres and a cow, but only two acres and a dog. But even such tradition of property and privacy as still remains is enough to make a difference between the treatment of these things within the area and the treatment of everything else outside. My garden could still remain an English garden even if my town has been entirely changed to an American town. My dog could still be treated like an English (or more strictly Scottish) dog, even if everybody else had fallen in with some new fashion suggested by modern movements; such as sacrificing dogs to science or sacrificing human victims to dogs or training dogs to be vegetarians or any other evolution of the kind. Beaconsfield, where I live, was until lately and is still very largely, a beautiful English town. It is already being cut up to some extent by that curious passion for sacrificing everything to motoring which is the superstition of the hour. Everything is subordinated, not, of course, to the mere miserable inhabitants of Beaconsfield, not even to the visitors who come to Beaconsfield, but entirely to the people who want to get through Beaconsfield; and especially those who want to get through without looking at it. All that process might go on; until every stick and stone had been destroyed in the triumph of the cad in the car, the latest version of the god in the car. The whole place might look exactly like the town of Thermopylae, Neb.; that is it might consist of large advertisements and small sheds made of tin and wood. But so long as my garden is mine, I can still within a reasonable space walk about in the English countryside; even if I am walking on a sort of island like Napoleon at St. Helena.

The time is not come, though I think it will come, when private property can be like the ship Argo, manned by heroes and sailing to find the Golden Fleece; no inappropriate symbol, since it once suggested the medieval link between the English countryside and the guilds of Flanders. It is at present not in the position of the Argo, but of the Ark. It is the refuge into which all truly living things must retire, and all truly precious things be gathered; against a deluge of things that will be worse before they are better; a welter and chaos preceding a creation and a dawn.

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On Peasant Proprietorship

I have not dealt with any details touching distributed ownership, or its possibility in England, for the reason stated in the text. This book deals with what is wrong, wrong in our root of argument and effort. This wrong is, I say, that we will go forward because we dare not go back. Thus the Socialist says that property is already concentrated into Trusts and Stores: the only hope is to concentrate it further in the State. I say the only hope is to unconcentrate it; that is, to repent and return; the only step forward is the step backward.

But in connection with this distribution I have laid myself open to another potential mistake. In speaking of a sweeping redistribution, I speak of decision in the aim, not necessarily of abruptness in the means. It is not at all too late to restore an approximately rational state of English possessions without any mere confiscation. A policy of buying out landlordism, steadily adopted in England as it has already been adopted in Ireland (notably in Mr. Wyndham's wise and fruitful Act), would in a very short time release the lower end of the see-saw and make the whole plank swing more level. The objection to this course is not at all that it would not do, only that it will not be done. If we leave things as they are, there will almost certainly be a crash of confiscation. If we hesitate, we shall soon have to hurry. But if we start doing it quickly we have still time to do it slowly.

This point, however, is not essential to my book. All I have to urge between these two boards is that I dislike the big Whiteley shop, and that I dislike Socialism because it will (according to Socialists) be so like that shop. It is its fulfilment, not its reversal. I do not object to Socialism because it will revolutionize our commerce, but because it will leave it so horribly the same.

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On Rights and Property

by Fr.Vincent McNabb

Let me set down some principles and definitions, chiefly from St. Thomas Aquinas. They may help towards clearer thinking.

A Duty is an act necessitated, not by a physical, but by a moral obligation, i.e. not by nature but by Will. It is a moral, as distinct from a physical, necessity to act, e.g. the duty of living, of seeking the truth, of working, etc.

A Right is a moral, as distinct from a merely physical power to have the means necessary to fulfil a Duty. Hence Duty is primary and absolute; Right is secondary and relative to Duty.
As moral obligation and moral power presuppose a free will, Duties and Rights are predicable only of a Free Will.

The fundamental right of the free will is to be free, and not enslaved.

SERVITUS EST IMPEDIMENTUM BONI USUS POTESTATIS.
(1)(1) Summa Theologica, Ia-IIae, Q. ii, art. 4, 3rd reply.

Slavery is a hindrance of the good USE of power.

'To use is to apply a principle of action to its action.'(2) Hence 'To Use is properly an act of the will.' (3) Slavery is the evil of a being that has the internal quality of free will, but has not the external condition of freedom. Hence the fundamental property or the foundation of property and ownership is our free will. A being that cannot call its will its own can call nothing its own.

(2) ibid. q. xvi, art. 2
(3) ibid. Art. 1

By liberty our acts are our own; by property our goods are our own. Free will is the psychological condition of property; and property ist he material condition of freedom. 'A man by his will possesses (owns) things.'(1) To have (or own) is nothing else than to use or to be able to use; and this is only by an operation.(2) As a right is a moral power to use, Right is the fundamental form of property.

1. ibid. IIa-IIae, Q. lix, art. 3, 1st reply.
2. ibid. 1a-IIae, Q. xxxii, art. 1, 1st reply.

'OWNERSHIP' ... denotes the relation between a person and any right that is vested in him. That which a man owns is a right.

(3)3. Jurisprudence. By Sir John Salmond. 7th Edit. London, p. 277.

Whoever, then, admits the existence of human rights has denied any arguments against human property.

The right to property does not mean that a man shall have a right to as much as he wishes, but that he shall have a right to as much as he needs.

If ownership or property is a right, and especially if ownership is moral power, as distinct from physical power, to use, it is as misleading to speak of the ownership of a thing as to speak of the right to a thing. There are as many limitations of ownership as there are limitations of right and of power.

Where there is no physical power there is no moral power; a blind man has not the right to have electric-light shades.

Yet there may be no moral power where there is physical power. Physical power to use is not moral power to us; and moral power to use in one way may not be moral power to use in another way.

In one and the same material thing there may be centred many physical and many moral powers to use and thus to own.

Of God alone, who alone has full physical and moral power over everything, can we say 'God has the ownership of A. or B.'

All other bings have only an ownership in whatever they are said to own: Thus, in land the nation has not the ownership but only an ownership of the land. All England belongs to all England. The nation has the 'altum dominium', the highest ownership of the land of the nation. But this kind of ownership is quite compatible with another kind of ownership by the individual.

Some examples may stimulate thought. (a) Lord B.---- has a valuable picture-gallery; but is blind. His valet is an artist who has found no money in painting. The valet has the physical and psychological power to use the pictures. Lord B.----, who is said to own them, has not the power to use them, but has only the power to prevent other people from using them.!

(b) Mr. E.-----, the millionaire shipowner, owns half a Scotch county; but his asthma confines him to the South of France. His tenants have the physical and psychological power to use his land both for tillage and for enjoyment. He can neither till nor enjoy. Almost his only ownership of the land is the power of selling; or is a selling-ownership.

(c) A certain Government holds the Communistic doctrine that no one can individually own land. But the individual land-workers have alone the physical power to till the land and largely the physical power to control the fruits of the land. Whether or not their very real control of the 'earth and the fruits thereof' is called ownership by the central authority, it is a more effective ownership than the shadowy overlordship of a doctrinaire bureaucracy. The land-workers, who have no official ownership, can bring the land under cultivation; whereas the central Government's official is a power of putting the land out of cultivation.

All this may lead us to generalize about the words Right and Property. Right is an old word with something like a simple definite meaning. Property (like Capital, Industrial, Employee, Income, etc.)is a new word with a complex or indefinite meaning.

Again, the things which are the objects or RIghts and Property are of many kinds. At the one extreme there are things like food and clothing, whose use is their consumption. At the other extreme there is the earth or land which can be used in a thousand ways and even abused, but cannot be consumed. Between these two extremes there are different classes of things with different ways of being used. To state man's relation to these things, with their complex and multifold ways of use, in terms of one word 'Property,' is to court ambiguity. The older word Right is at once more illuminative and scientific. Thus we can say, Right of Production, Right of Use, Right of Usufruct, Right of Occupation, Right of Selling, etc. etc.

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