to which, if I understand it as completely as I share it, the English blood will never be entirely cold. But about these new heroes of architecture there is one note that is not new; that comes from a very ancient tradition of psychology and morals. And that is that the adventurer has a right to his adventure; and the amateur has a right to his hobby; or rather to his love. But neither has any right to a general judgment of coldness or contempt for those whose hobby is human living; and whose chief adventures are at home. You will never hear the builders of Buckfast shouting aloud, "Down with Downside; for it was designed by a careful Gothic architect!" You will never hear them say, "How contemptible are these Catholics who pray in common churches; tawdry with waxwork imagery and Repository Art." Of the great adventurers who advance out of the Christian past, in search of Christian future, you could never say that the pioneers despise the army.
What seemed to Chesterton the oddest feature in the opposition to his idea of sanity was the apparent assumption that he was offering an impossible ideal to a world that was already working quite well. With bland disregard of the breakdown of their own system, the orthodox economists were challenging him to establish the flawlessness of his. They laughed at the Distributist desire if not to abolish at least to limit machinery. They adjured him to be more practical. Chesterton had replied in an earlier article:
There may be, and we ourselves believe there are, a certain number of things that had better be always done by machinery. . . . Machinery is now being used to produce numberless things that nobody needs. Machinery is being used to produce more machinery, to be used merely for the production of things that nobody needs. Machinery is being used to produce very badly things that everybody wants produced very well.
Machinery is being used for enormously expensive transport of things that might just as well be used where they are. Machinery is being used to take things thousands of miles in order to sell them and bring them back again because they are not sold. Machinery is being used to produce ornament that nobody ever looks at and architecture that nobody wants to look at. Machinery is taking suicides to Monte Carlo and coals to Newcastle, and all normal human purpose and intelligence to Bedlam; and our critics gaze at it reverently and ask us how we expect ever to be so practical as that.*
[* June 13, 1925.]
This desperate situation must be met by strengthening the home, re-establishing the small workshop, re-creating the English peasantry. But first the ground might have to be cleared.
One phrase used in his articles—the "catastrophic simplification of the social scene"—reminds us once more how keenly aware Gilbert was of something that had not yet happened, the present war with its break-up of the social order. In the article, from which I have been quoting, he compares the urgency of the hour to the period of the French Revolution; in his Outline of Sanity seven years earlier he had stressed the Distributist ideal as the last chance to
do deliberately and well what nemesis will do wastefully and without pity; whether we cannot build a bridge from these slippery downward slopes to freer and firmer land beyond, without consenting yet that our most noble nation must descend into that valley of humiliation in which nations disappear from history.*
[* Outline of Sanity, p. 34.]
In this book which he had tried in vain, he tells us, to make "a grammar of Distributism," he touches on the enormous changes that had made such a grammar of far greater urgency. When Rerum Novarum was issued, or even eighteen years later when G.K. wrote What's Wrong With the World, individualist competition had not yet given place to the Trust, Combine or Merger. "The American Trust is not private enterprise. It would be truer to call the Spanish Inquisition private judgment." The decline of trade had hardly begun at the turn of the Century, liberty was still fairly widespread. But today we had lost liberty as well as property and were living under the worst features of a Socialist State. "I am one of those who believe that the cure for centralisation is decentralisation."