The Reformers And The Reformed Are Alike/1

by Hilaire Belloc

(i) Of the Socialist Reformer:

I say that men attempting to achieve Collectivism or Socialism as the remedy for the evils of the Capitalist State find themselves drifting not towards a Collectivist State at all, but towards a Servile State.

The Socialist movement, the first of the three factors in this drift, is itself made up of two kinds of men: there is (a) the man who regards the public ownership of the means of production (and the consequent compulsion of all citizens to work under the direction of the State) as the only feasible solution of our modern social ills. There is also (b) the man who loves the Collectivist ideal in itself, who does not pursue it so much because it is a solution of modern Capitalism, as because it is an ordered and regular form of society which appeals to him in itself. He loves to consider the ideal of a State in which land and capital shall be held by public officials who shall order other men about and so preserve them from the consequences of their vice, ignorance, and folly.

These types are perfectly distinct, in many respects antagonistic, and between them they cover the whole Socialist movement.

Now imagine either of these men at issue with the existing state of Capitalist society and attempting to transform it. Along what line of least resistance will either be led?

(a) The first type will begin by demanding the confiscation of the means of production from the hands of their present owners, and the vesting of them in the State. But wait a moment. That demand is an exceedingly hard thing to accomplish. The present owners have between them and confiscation a stony moral barrier. It is what most men would call the moral basis of property (the instinct that property is a right), and what all men would admit to be at least a deeply rooted tradition. Again, they have behind them the innumerable complexities of modern ownership.

To take a very simple case: Decree that all common lands enclosed since so late a date as 1760 shall revert to the public. There you have a very moderate case and a very defensible one. But conceive for a moment how many small freeholds, what a nexus of obligation and benefit spread over millions, what thousands of exchanges, what purchases made upon the difficult savings of small men such a measure would wreck! It is conceivable, for, in the moral sphere, society can do anything to society; but it would bring crashing down with it twenty times the wealth involved and all the secure credit of our community. In a word, the thing is, in the conversational use of that term, impossible. So your best type of Socialist reformer is led to an expedient which I will here only mention as it must be separately considered at length later on account of its fundamental importance the expedient of "buying out" the present owner.

It is enough to say in this place that the attempt to "buy out" without confiscation is based upon an economic error. This I shall prove in its proper place. For the moment I assume it and pass on to the rest of my reformer's action. He does not confiscate, then; at the most he "buys out" (or attempts to "buy out") certain sections of the means of production.

But this action by no means covers the whole of his motive. By definition the man is out to cure what he sees to be the great immediate evils of Capitalist society. He is out to cure the destitution, which it causes in great multitudes and the harrowing insecurity, which it imposes upon all. He is out to substitute for Capitalist society a society in which men shall all be fed, clothed, housed, and in which men shall not live in a perpetual jeopardy of their housing, clothing, and food.

Well, there is a way of achieving that without confiscation.

This reformer rightly thinks that the ownership of the means of production by a few has caused the evils which arouse his indignation and pity. But they have only been so caused on account of a combination of such limited ownership with universal freedom. The combination of the two is the very definition of the Capitalist State. It is difficult indeed to dispossess the possessors. It is by no means so difficult (as we shall see again when we are dealing with the mass whom these changes will principally affect) to modify the factor of freedom.

You can say to the Capitalist: "I desire to dispossess you, and meanwhile I am determined that your employees shall live tolerable lives." The Capitalist replies: "I refuse to be dispossessed, and it is, short of catastrophe, impossible to dispossess me. But if you will define the relation between my employees and myself, I will undertake particular responsibilities due to my position. Subject the proletarian, as a proletarian, and because he is a proletarian, to special laws. Clothe me, the Capitalist, as a Capitalist, and because I am a Capitalist, with special converse duties under those laws. I will faithfully see that they are obeyed; I will compel my employees to obey them, and I will undertake the new role imposed upon me by the State. Nay, I will go further, and I will say that such a novel arrangement will make my own profits perhaps larger and certainly more secure."

This idealist social reformer, therefore, finds the current of his demand canalised. As to one part of it, confiscation, it is checked and barred: as to the other, securing human conditions for the proletariat, the gates are open. Half the river is dammed by a strong weir, but there is a sluice, and that sluice can be lifted. Once lifted, the whole force of the current will run through the opportunity so afforded it; there will it scour and deepen its channel; there will the main stream learn to run.

To drop the metaphor, all those things in the true Socialist's demand, which are compatible with the Servile State can certainly be achieved. The first steps towards them are already achieved. They are of such a nature that upon them can be based a further advance in the same direction, and the whole Capitalist State can be rapidly and easily transformed into the Servile State, satisfying in its transformation the more immediate claims and the more urgent demands of the social reformer whose ultimate objective indeed may be the public ownership of capital and land, but whose driving power is a burning pity for the poverty and peril of the masses.

When the transformation is complete there will be no ground left, nor any demand or necessity, for public ownership. The reformer only asked for it in order to secure security and sufficiency: he has obtained his demand.

Here are security and sufficiency achieved by another and much easier method, consonant with and proceeding from the Capitalist phase immediately preceding it: there is no need to go further.

In this way the Socialist whose motive is human good and not mere organisation is being shepherded in spite of himself away from his Collectivist ideal and towards a society in which the possessors shall remain possessed, the dispossessed shall remain dispossessed, in which the mass of men shall still work for the advantage of a few, and in which those few shall still enjoy the surplus values produced by labour, but in which the special evils of insecurity and insufficiency, in the main the product of freedom, have been eliminated by the destruction of freedom.

At the end of the process you will have two kinds of men, the owners economically free, and controlling to their peace and to the guarantee of their livelihood the economically unfree non-owners. But that is the Servile State.

(b) The second type of socialist reformer may be dealt with more briefly. In him the exploitation of man by man excites no indignation. Indeed, he is not of a type to which indignation or any other lively passion is familiar. Tables, statistics, an exact framework for life these afford him the food that satisfies his moral appetite; the occupation most congenial to him is the "running" of men: as a machine is run.

To such a man the Collectivist ideal particularly appeals.

It is orderly in the extreme. All that human and organic complexity which is the colour of any vital society offends him by its infinite differentiation. He is disturbed by multitudinous things; and the prospect of a vast bureaucracy wherein the whole of life shall be scheduled and appointed to certain simple schemes deriving from the coordinate work of public clerks and marshalled by powerful heads of departments gives his small stomach a final satisfaction.

Now this man, like the other, would prefer to begin with public property in capital and land, and upon that basis to erect the formal scheme which so suits his peculiar temperament. (It need hardly be said that in his vision of a future society he conceives of himself as the head of at least a department and possibly of the whole State but that is by the way.) But while he would prefer to begin with a Collectivist scheme ready-made, he finds in practice that he cannot do so. He would have to confiscate just as the more hearty Socialist would; and if that act is very difficult to the man burning at the sight of human wrongs, how much more difficult is it to a man impelled by no such motive force and directed by nothing more intense than a mechanical appetite for regulation?

He cannot confiscate or begin to confiscate. At the best he will "buy out" the Capitalist.

Now, in his case, as in the case of the more human Socialist, "buying out" is, as I shall show in its proper place, a system impossible of general application.

But all those other things for which such a man cares much more than he does for the socialisation of the means of production tabulation, detailed administration of men, the co-ordination of many efforts under one schedule, the elimination of all private power to react against his Department, all these are immediately obtainable without disturbing the existing arrangement of society. With him, precisely as with the other socialist, what he desires can be reached without any dispossession of the few existing possessors. He has but to secure the registration of the proletariat; next to ensure that neither they in the exercise of their freedom, nor the employer in the exercise of his, can produce insufficiency or insecurity and he is content. Let laws exist which make the proper housing, feeding, clothing, and recreation of the proletarian mass be incumbent upon the possessing class, and the observance of such rules be imposed, by inspection and punishment, upon those whom he pretends to benefit, and all that he really cares for will be achieved.

To such a man the Servile State is hardly a thing towards which he drifts, it is rather a tolerable alternative to his ideal Collectivist State, which alternative he is quite prepared to accept and regards favourably. Already the greater part of such reformers who, a generation ago, would have called themselves "Socialists" are now less concerned with any scheme for socialising Capital and Land than with innumerable schemes actually existing, some of them possessing already the force of laws, for regulating, "running," and drilling the protelariat without trenching by an inch upon the privilege in implements, stores, and land enjoyed by the small Capitalist class.

The so-called "Socialist" of this type has not fallen into the Servile State by a miscalculation. He has fathered it; he welcomes its birth, he foresees his power over its future.

So much for the Socialist movement, which a generation ago proposed to transform our Capitalist society into one where the community should be the universal owner and all men equally economically free or unfree under its tutelage. Today their ideal has failed, and of the two sources whence their energy proceeded, the one is reluctantly, the other gladly, acquiescent in the advent of a society which is not Socialist at all but Servile.

(2) Of the Practical Reformer:

There is another type of Reformer, one who prides himself on not being a socialist, and one of the greatest weight to-day. He also is making for the Servile State. This second factor in the change is the “Practical Man” ; and this fool, on account of his great numbers and determining influence in the details of legislation, must be carefully examined.

It is your "Practical Man" who says: "Whatever you theorists and doctrinaires may hold with regard to this proposal (which I support), though it may offend some abstract dogma of yours, yet you must admit that it does good. If you had practical experience of the misery of the Jones' family, or had done practical work yourself in Pudsey, you would have seen that a practical man," etc.

It is not difficult to discern that the Practical Man in social reform is exactly the same animal as the Practical Man in every other department of human energy, and may be discovered suffering from the same twin disabilities which stamp the Practical Man whereever found: these twin disabilities are an inability to define his own first principles and an inability to follow the consequences proceeding from his own action. Both these disabilities proceed from one simple and deplorable form of impotence, the inability to think.

Let us help the Practical Man in his weakness and do a little thinking for him.

As a social reformer he has of course (though he does not know it) first principles and dogmas like all the rest of us, and his first principles and dogmas are exactly the same as those which his intellectual superiors hold in the matter of social reform. The two things intolerable to him as a decent citizen (though a very stupid human being) are insufficiency and insecurity. When he was "working" in the slums of Pudsey or raiding the proletarian Jones's from the secure base of Toynbee Hall, what shocked the worthy man most was "unemployment" and "destitution”: that is, insecurity and insufficiency in flesh and blood.

Now, if the Socialist who has thought out his case, whether as a mere organiser or as a man hungering and thirsting after justice, is led away from Socialism and towards the Servile State by the force of modern things in England, how much more easily do you not think the "Practical Man" will be conducted towards that same Servile State, like any donkey to his grazing ground? To those dull and short-sighted eyes the immediate solution which even the beginnings of the Servile State propose are what a declivity is to a piece of brainless matter. The piece of brainless matter rolls down the declivity, and the Practical Man lollops from Capitalism to the Servile State with the same inevitable ease. Jones has not got enough. If you give him something in charity, that something will be soon consumed, and then Jones will again not have enough. Jones has been seven weeks out of work. If you get him work "under our unorganised and wasteful system, etc.,"he may lose it just as he lost his first jobs. The slums of Pudsey, as the Practical Man knows by Practical experience, are often unemployable. Then there are "the ravages of drink": more fatal still the dreadful habit mankind has of forming families and breeding children. The worthy fellow notes that "as a practical matter of fact such men do not work unless you make them."

He does not, because he cannot, co-ordinate all these things. He knows nothing of a society in which free men were once owners, nor of the co-operative and instinctive institutions for the protection of ownership, which such a society spontaneously breeds. He "takes the world as he finds it" and the consequence is that whereas men of greater capacity may admit with different degrees of reluctance the general principles of the Servile State, the Practical Man, positively gloats on every new detail in the building up of that form of society. And the destruction of freedom by inches (though he does not see it to be the destruction of freedom) is the one panacea so obvious that he marvels at the doctrinaires who resist or suspect the process.

It has been necessary to waste so much time on this deplorable individual because the circumstances of our generation give him a peculiar power. Under the conditions of modern exchange a man of that sort enjoys great advantages. He is to be found as he never was in any other society before our own, possessed of wealth, and political as never was any such citizen until our time. Of history with all its lessons; of the great schemes of philosophy and religion, of human nature itself he is blank.

The Practical Man left to himself would not produce the Servile State. He would not produce any thing but a welter of anarchic restrictions, which would lead at last to some kind of revolt.

Unfortunately, he is not left to himself. He is but the ally or flanking party of great forces which he does nothing to oppose, and of particular men, able and prepared for the work of general change, who use him with gratitude and contempt. Were he not so numerous in modern England, and, under the extraordinary conditions of a Capitalist State, so economically powerful, I would have neglected him in this analysis. As it is, we may console ourselves by remembering that the advent of the Servile State, with its powerful organisation and necessity for lucid thought in those who govern, will certainly eliminate him.

Our reformers, then, both those who think and those who do not, both those who are conscious of the process and those who are unconscious of it, are making directly for the Servile State.

(3) What of the third factor? What of the people about to be reformed? What of the millions upon whose carcasses the reformers are at work, and who are the subject of the great experiment? Do they tend, as material, to accept or to reject that transformation from free proletarianism to servitude which is the argument of this book?

The question is an important one to decide, for upon whether the material is suitable or unsuitable for the work to which it is subjected, depends the success of every experiment making for the Servile State.

The mass of men in the Capitalist State is proletarian. As a matter of definition, the actual number of the proletariat and the proportion that number bears to the total number of families in the State may vary, but must be sufficient to determine the general character of the State before we can call that State Capitalist.

But, as we have seen, the Capitalist State is not a stable, and therefore not a permanent, condition of society. It has proved ephemeral; and upon that very account the proletariat in any Capitalist State retains to a greater or less degree some memories of a state of society in which its ancestors were possessors of property and economically free.

The strength of this memory or tradition is the first element we have to bear in mind in our problem, when we examine how far a particular proletariat, such as the English proletariat to-day, is ready to accept the Servile State, which would condemn it to a perpetual loss of property and of all the free habit which property engenders.

Next be it noted that under conditions of freedom the Capitalist class may be entered by the more cunning or the more fortunate of the proletariat class. Recruitment of the kind was originally sufficiently common in the first development of Capitalism to be a standing feature in society and to impress the imagination of the general. Such recruitment is still possible. The proportion which it bears to the whole proletariat, the chance which each member of the proletariat may think he has of escaping from his proletarian condition in a particular phase of Capitalism such as is ours to-day, is the second factor in the problem.

The third factor, and by far the greatest of all, is the appetite of the dispossessed for that security and sufficiency of which Capitalism, with its essential condition of freedom, has deprived them.

Now let us consider the interplay of these three factors in the English proletariat as we actually know it at this moment. That proletariat is certainly the, great mass of the State: it covers about nineteen twentieths of the population if we exclude Ireland, where, as I shall point out in my concluding pages, the reaction against Capitalism, and therefore against its development towards a Servile State, is already successful.

As to the first factor, it has changed very rapidly within the memory of men now living. The traditional rights of property are still strong in the minds of the English poor. All the moral connotations of that right are familiar to them. They are familiar with the conception of theft as a wrong; they are tenacious of any scraps of property which they may acquire. They could all explain what is meant by ownership, by legacy, by exchange, and by gift, and even by contract. There is not one but could put himself in the position, mentally, of an owner.

But the actual experience of ownership, and the effect, which that experience has upon character and upon one's view of the State is a very different matter. Within the memory of people still living a sufficient number of Englishmen were owning (as small freeholders, small masters, etc.) to give to the institution of property coupled with freedom a very vivid effect upon the popular mind. More than this, there was a living tradition proceeding from the lips of men who could still bear living testimony to the relics of a better state of things. I have myself spoken, when I was a boy, to old labourers in the neighbourhood of Oxford who had risked their skins in armed protest against the enclosure of certain commons, and who had of course suffered imprisonment by a wealthy judge as the reward of their courage; and I have my self spoken in Lancashire to old men who could retrace for me, either from their personal experience the last phases of small ownership in the textile trade, or, from what their fathers had told them, the conditions of a time when small and well-divided ownership in cottage looms was actually common.

All that has passed. The last chapter of its passage has been singularly rapid. Roughly speaking, it is the generation brought up under the Education Acts of the last forty years which has grown up definitely and hopelessly proletarian. The present instinct. use, and meaning of property is lost to it: and this has had two very powerful effects, each strongly inclining our modern wage-earners to ignore the old barriers which lay between a condition of servitude and a condition of freedom. The first effect is this: that property is no longer what they seek, nor what they think obtainable for themselves. The second effect is that they regard the possessors of property as a class apart, whom they always must ultimately obey, often envy, and sometimes hate; whose moral right to so singular a position most of them would hesitate to concede, and many of them would now strongly deny, but whose position they, at any rate, accept as a known and permanent social fact, the origins of which they have forgotten, and the foundations of which they believe to be immemorial.

To sum up: The attitude of the proletariat in England to-day (the attitude of the overwhelming majority, that is, of English families) towards property and towards that freedom which is alone obtainable through property is no longer an attitude of experience or of expectation. They think of themselves as wage-earners. To increase the weekly stipend of the wage-earner is an object which they vividly appreciate and pursue. To make him cease to be a wage-earner is an object that would seem to them entirely outside the realities of life.

Taken from Hilaire Belloc's The Servile State

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The Servile State

The first book on Distributist thought, Belloc offers an interesting and compelling criticism of both capitalism and socialism. Though certain aspects of it are targeted towards Belloc's time, it does posess some surprising insights which are not found in the economics textbooks of today. Belloc's actual words occur in quotation marks. My notes appear in italics.

"Capitalism must keep alive, by non-Capitalist methods, great masses of the population who wouldotherwise starve to death."

"There are three replacements for Capitalism: Slavery, Socialism, or Property."

The incompatibilities of Capitalism are:

1) The ownership of the means of production by a few.

2) Freedom of all.

If property, by which Belloc means the means of production, is restricted to a few, one may either put it into the hands of many or put it into the hands of "none," which in practice means the hands of the politicians.

The only alternative to private property is public property.

"The Capitalist state breeds a Collectivist theory which in action produces the Servile State."

"..a collectivist solution is the easiest for a Capitalist state to aim at, and yet, in the very act of attempting collectivism, the servitude of the many results and the confirmation of the present privilege of the few.

Distributism is working against the grain; Collectivism, with the grain."

Proposals for distributism include:

1) Actively subsidizing small savings.

2) Penalizing(by taxes) undertakings with few owners.

3) Taxing large blocks of shares.

Belloc believes the problem inherent in a Capitalist society is that it generates a "proletarian" class which only aspires for employment, and an "administrative" class of owners.

"Collectivist experiment is throughly suited(in appearance) to Capitalist society. It works within the existing machinery of Capitalism, appealing to just those appetites which Capitalism has aroused, and ridicules as fantastic and unheard-of just those things in society the memory of which Capitalism has killed among men wherever the blight of it has spread."

"Collectivism promises employment to the great mass who think of production only in terms of employment."

Capitalism precedes communism because Capitalism disenfranchises so many, the majority has no problem with disenfranchisement for the Capitalists. Capitalism destroyes their memory of personal private property so collectivism is no longer a personal threat.

"There is in the whole [socialist] scheme nothing with which Capitalist society is unfamiliar, the appeal to no instinct, whether of cowardice, greed, apathy, or mechanical regulation, with which a Capitalist community is not amply familiar."

"The Servile state is that in which the mass of men shall be constrained by law to labor for the profit of a minority."

"The First effect of capitialsim on the proletariat: property is no longer what they seek, nor what they think obtainable for themselves.

The Second effect: they regard the possessors of property as a class distinct from their own, whom they must ultimately obey, often envy, and sometimes hate.

They think of themselves as wage-earners. Their object is almost always an increase in that wage., To somehow cease to be a wage earner is somewhat foreign to them."

“The state says to the serf ‘I saw to it that you should have so much when you were unemployed. I find that in some rare cases my arrangement leads to your getting more when you are unemployed than when you are employed. I further find that in many cases, though you get more when you are employed, yet the difference is not sufficient to tempt a lazy man to work, or to make him take any particular trouble to get work. I must see to this.’”

“All so-called ‘Socialist’ experiments in municipalization and nationalization are merely increasing the dependence of the community upon the capitalist class.”

"Types of collectivist reformers:


a)The man who regards public ownership of the means of production(and the consequent compulsion of all citizens to work under the direction of the state) as the only feasible solution of our modern social ills.

b)The man who loves the Collectivist ideal in itself, who does not pursue it so much because it is a solution of modern Capitalism, as because it is an ordered and regular form of society which appeals to hm in itself. He loves to consider the ideal of a state in which land and capital shall be held by public officials who shall order other men's efforts and so preserve them from the consequences of their vice, ignorance, and folly."

Taken from
http://www.geocities.com/kevinjjonesy/distributism/

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More Hints on Free Speech

by G.K. Chesterton

I should like to continue the enquiry I recenlty made about the general criticism uttered by English Liberals, or indeed men of many English parties, and directed against the Fascist system in so far as it claims to supress papers or plays or books or similar things. For it seems to me that, unless ideas become clearer on the point, liberty will really be lost, not so much by the ferocity of the Fascists as by the feebleness of the Liberals.

The Liberal, by the nature of his philosophy, claims to be accessible to ideas; and even to be able to entertain all or any ideas. But in practice he cannot entertain evn the idea he defends, let alone the idea he denounces. He has not a notion of the new ideas that are now really changing Europe; or especially of those which have his own parliamentary sham fight he can to some extent denounce shams, though they are the shams which he in his turn will practise. He can attack Lord Birkenhead if that nobleman claims to be a True Democrat; but he really has not a word to say to Maurras, or to anybody who says frankly that he is not a Democrat at all. He may even see the absurdity of Lord Melchett or Lord Beaverbrook claiming that Trade Monopoly is True Liberty; but he cannot see the point of the man who flatly denies that the theory of Liberty is true. I for one do think it is true; and I do not think it is inconsistent with some of the truths advanced by supporters of Fascism, as well as supporters of Freedom. But I know it is no good merely to tell a supporter of Fascism that he is not, and does not pretend to be. He must be met on his own moral ground, which is at least a hard and solid ground; and not in the slushy swamps of sentimental rhetoric, about a liberty which he does not pretend to grant and we have not succeeded in granting.

The difficult matter called Free Speech is really bound up with the still more difficult matter called Distributism. The very fact that it is called Free Speech illustrates this suggestion of equalized or scattered power. For Speech is a general attribute of men even as animals; and speaking is what all the people do all the time. But a monopolist newspaper, with hoardings covering the earth and sky-signs covering the sky, is not speech; nor can it be an organ for the people speaking. Even a play, occupying a lighted stage among a limited number of large theatres, cannot be identified with the conversation of the common people. There is a theatrical limelight in all theatres; but to-day there is a journalistic limelight on particular plays. I am not discussing whether this can be remedied; I am pointing out that a licence for these limited things is not a liberty for all. And it works back, as I have said, to Distributism as the only chance of Free Speech, or of any Freedom. Like all economic reformers, the Distributist has to simplify his parables or examples; but the principle is clear enough. Suppose the ownership of a plot of land carries with it the right to put up a placard with some proclamation or public criticism. It is clear that if there are a thousand plots there will be a thousand placards. The vast majority of them will probably proclaim certain normal and national principles, or prejudices, to many of which Mussolini has successfully appealed; but in so far as there are many placards, there is a chance of there being many kinds of placards. But suppose that all the land is bought up by one land-grabber; and there will only be one huge plot and one huge placard. And that is exactly what there is at present. for all practical purposes, in all modern industrial and capitalist communities. It is this, and nothing else, that men like the Liberal Nonconformist call Liberty of Speech. It is this, and nothing else, that he accusses Mussolini of suppressing.

In other words, what we are looking at, for good or evil, is simply the return of those rude, medieval conditions in which the King did not hesitate to break, and perhaps was obliged to break, the few great barons who really became rivals to the kingship. The people nowadays are no more involved, when a Dictator destroys a big newspaper, than the peasants and serfs were involved when a Plantagenet was jealous of a feudal prince or an enormously rich bishop. It is simply a quarrel among the great; and I rather prefer the ruler who can at least be called great to the rival who can be only called big.

The Press is now simply a privilege, and a privilege for the very few; for there are fewer great newspaper-proprietors than there were great barons and bishops. Until our Liberal friends have faced this fact, and done something themselves to remedy it, they will not begin to be ready for debate with a lucid Latin despotist, who disputes both their facts and the fundamental doctrines. I do not say that Mussolini might not, for all I know, repress real liberty in a real distributive democracy. But in the world which the Liberals have made, there is no liberty for him to repress.

The case is doubtless the same, thought I can hardly judge it, with the drama which I mentioned first. As I have never seen Journey's End, I will not classify it; but I believe it is not to be classed with the very craven pieces of pacificism and pessimism that have pestered us of late. But the general question of dramatic liberty is the same. A play like this, or a play far worse than this, is boomed and financed and forced down people's throats by powers quite other than popular instinct. The powers behind publicity, behind official and commercial propaganda, own the limelight and the stage. What they choose to say is not 'free speech'; for no play can consist of everybody's gags. Curiously enough, the nearest approach to such an impromptu individualistic drama has been found in the popular burlesques and buffooneries of Italy; which have survived many ancient despots - and even survived modern democracy. Fascism may really destroy Freedom of speech; but 'the Drama' like 'the Press' is almost the reverse of Freedom of Speech. It is rather Compulsion of Listening.

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On Usury

by Hilaire Belloc

As long as Usury was forbidden by the moral law and its immorality admitted, even though it took place widely, it took place under protest. It was always checked by the public disrepute in which it was held and by the fact that unless it were disguised, the interest could not be recovered by law. Disguises were indeed often used, as for instance, the promise to repay on a certain date a certain sum of money as having been lent, when as a fact a small sum had been lent. But though such subterfuges were continual, the evil could not spread until the taking of interest upon money alone became an admitted practice of which no man was ashamed, which no one thought evil, which was taken for granted.

By the third generation great central banks had arisen, notably in Amsterdam and London. Shortly afterwards, during the 18th century, men had everywhere begun to think (later in Catholic nations than in Protestant, but everywhere at last) as though interest on money were part of the nature of things: as though money had indeed, merely as money, a right to breed. The false doctrine was bound to lead to a deadlock at last, and in our own time that deadlock has been reached. The recovery of the vast usurious loans is impossible. Recourse has had to be made to repudiation on all sides, and the whole system is breaking down.

But remember that the worst of its effects is not its own self-destruction, but the way in which it has gathered into a few centers the power of controlling lives of the community and particularly of the proletariat, whose employment, and therefore existence, depends upon the great advance of credit by the holders of financial power. For all our great enterprises today are possible only through the favor of the lenders of money or credit.

We may sum up then and say that the unrestricted admittance of Usury as a normal economic function about a lifetime after the Reformation advanced the destruction of economic freedom, the swallowing up of the small man by the greater man, and the ultimate production of a large destitute Proletariat in the following fashions:

1. By the eating up of small property by Usury, falling as it did habitually upon men already embarrassed, and achieving their ruin;

2. By transferring real wealth in goods and land to those who directly used their mere money power, often enormous and impersonal, through mortgage and foreclosure.

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Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)

JOSEPH HILAIRE PIERRE BELLOC, ONE OF THE TRUE LORDS of the English language, was not an Englishman by birth. His father was French, his mother was Irish; and when he married, his bride was an American. But he looked more like the traditional figure of John Bull than any Englishman could. He wore a stand-up collar several sizes too large for him. His rotund head was crowned with a black hat-sometimes tall, sometimes of the pancake variety. He was big and stocky and red of face, and a typically British great-coat draped his beefy form except in the warmest weather.

Hilaire Belloc-he dropped the other appendages at an early age-was born at La Celle, near Paris, on July 20, 1870. His father, Louis Swanton Belloc, was well known as a barrister throughout France. Bessie Rayner Belloc, his mother, was of Irish extraction. Somewhere in his immediate background was an infusion of Pennsylvania Dutch blood. His mother, who lived into her nineties and died in 1914, was a remarkably intellectual woman, noted as one of the signers of the first petition ever presented for women's suffrage.

Her son studied at the Oratory School at Edgebaston, England, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1893. In his third year he was Blackenbury History Scholar and an honor student in the history schools.

Between Oratory School and his matriculation at Oxford, Belloc served in the French Army, where as a driver in the Eighth Regiment of Artillery, he was stationed at Toul. It was from this spot that, years later, he was to set forth on the pilgrimage afoot to St. Peter's that furnished material for the book that many critics consider his best,- The Path to Rome.

In 1903 Belloc became a British subject and in 1906 was returned to Parliament by the South Salford constituency. He was a member of the Liberal party in the brilliant House of Commons created by the Tory debacle of the preceding year. He made his maiden speech in the House early in 1906 and it won him an immediate reputation as a brilliant orator. He had already attracted considerable attention during his campaign. In the year of his return to Parliament he was also the nominee of the British Bishops to the Catholic Education Council.

Belloc's literary career began immediately after Balliol. He rapidly achieved success as a newspaper and magazine writer and as a light versifier. His first book, published in the year of his graduation, was Verses and Sonnets, and this was followed within a year by The Bad Child's Book of Beasts, in which his reputation as a master of whimsy was fully established. One of the most famous in this category starts out thus:

The nicest child I ever knew
Was Charles Augustus Fortesque;
He never lost his cap or tore
His stockings or his pinafore;
In eating bread he made no crumbs.
He was extremely fond of sums.

Another, more dire, ballad about an untruthful maiden named Mathilde was a famous forerunner to the Ogden Nash style of rhyming:

It happened that a few weeks later
Her aunt was off to the theatre
To see that entertaining play
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.

Belloc sat in the House of Commons from 1906 to 1910, but refused to serve a second term because, in his own words, he was "weary of the party system," and thought he could attack politics better from without Parliament than from within. From that time on he devoted his entire efforts to writing and lecturing.

Belloc's wife, the former Elodie Agnes Hogan of Napa, California, whom he married in 1896, died in 1914. He never remarried. His eldest son, Louis, was killed while serving as a flier in World War I, and his youngest, Peter, a captain of the Royal Marines, died during World War-II. Belloc made his home with his elder daughter, Mrs. Eleanor Jebb, wife of a member of Parliament, in Horsham, Sussex. Besides Eleanor, he had another daughter, Elizabeth, a poet, as-well as another son, Hilary, who lives in Canada. Belloc's sister, Mrs. Marie Belloc Lowndes, also a noted British writer, died in 1947.

By Pope Pius XI, Belloc was decorated with the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Gregory the Great in 1934 for his services to Catholicism as a writer. In the same year, his alma- mater, Oxford, conferred upon him the honorary degree of Master of Arts. He shared with the then British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, the distinction of being the only persons to have their portraits hung in the National Portrait Gallery while they were alive.

Mr. Belloc visited the United States on many occasions. In 1937 he served as a visiting Professor of History at the Graduate School of Fordham University in New York. From the matter of these lectures came his book, The Crisis of Civilization.

A prolific writer, he was the author of 153 books of essays, fiction, history, biography, poetry and light verse as well as a vast amount of periodical literature. He was largely responsible for G. K. Chesterton's conversion to Catholicism, and the two of them became ranked as not only among England's greatest writers but as the most brilliant lay expounders of Catholic doctrine. The two were also close friends and frequent collaborators, especially on the magazine which came to be known as G. K's. Weekly, and in which they came to wage many a valiant crusade together. As a critic noted: "To Hilaire Belloc this generation owes big glimpses of the Homeric spirit. His mission is to flay alive the humbugs and hypocrites and the pedants and to chant robust folk-songs to the naked stars of the English world to a rousing obligato of clinking flagons."

Because of his antagonism to many British sacred cows and his free and caustic criticism of them, he was not a wholly popular man in England. Nor did his espousal of the Franco cause against the Communists during the Spanish civil war add to his popularity there. But Belloc had never been a man to purchase popularity at the price of integrity.

Just four days before his eighty-third birthday, while dozing before the fireplace in his daughter's home, he fell into the flames and was so badly burned that he died in hospital at Guildford, Surrey, soon afterward on July 16, 1953.

Despite his own prediction to the contrary, his place in English letters is forever secure, primarily as a poet and as the author of The Path to Rome.

©Catholic Authors Press

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