doctrine makes it look doctrinaire." A name like _The Distributive
Review_ would suggest that a Distributist was like a Socialist, a
crank or a pedant with a new theory of human nature. "It is so old
that it has become new. At the same time I want a title that does
suggest that the paper is controversial and that this is the general
trend of its controversy. I want something that will be recognised as
a flag, however fantastic and ridiculous, that will be in some sense
a challenge, even if the challenge be received only with genial
derision. I do not want a colourless name; and the nearest I can get
to something like a symbol is merely to fly my own colours."

Although the paper was never exclusively Catholic, that flag was for
G.K. as it had been for Cecil of a very definite pattern and very
clear colours: religiously the paper stood for Catholic Christianity,
socially for the theory of small ownership, personal responsibility
and property. It was in strong opposition especially to Socialism and
even more to Communism. Bernard Shaw, Gilbert once said, wanted to
distribute money among the poor--"we want to distribute power."

During the last part of Cecil's editorship his wife had been
Assistant Editor of the _New Witness_ and she had so continued when
Gilbert first became Editor. But she was neither a Catholic nor a
Distributist. Religion seems not to have interested her, and her
political outlook was entirely different from Gilbert's. In _The
Chestertons_ she dismissed Distributism as "quite without first
principles" and "a pious hope and no more."* Obviously it was
impossible for Gilbert to start his new paper with an Assistant
Editor in entire disagreement with his views. I have sometimes
wondered whether his intense dislike of having to tell Mrs. Cecil
this was not almost as strong a factor in the delay as the money
problem.

[* I have learnt, as this book goes to press, that Mrs. Cecil became
a Catholic in 1941.]

There was no break in their relations: she went on writing for the
paper, doing chiefly the dramatic criticism. But it is clear from her
own account of the incident that she wholly misconstrued Gilbert's
attitude and did not realise how far she herself had drifted from
Cecil's views as well as from Gilbert's.

Shaw wrote again:

Reid's Palace Hotel
Funchal, Madeira.
16th January, 1925.

MY DEAR G.K.C.

The sample number has followed me out here. What a collector's
treasure!