ople not in league with the League they were given
short shrift instead of meeting even modified encouragement. The
League was begged to spend more time clarifying its principles, less
time in criticism. But much more fundamental was the constantly
recurrent question: When is the League going to begin to do
something? To this the answer, given often by G.K. himself was that,
while the League hoped in time to create that community of which he
had written, its own work was only that of Propaganda--of a wider and
wider dissemination of the principles of Distributism. Their work,
they said, was to talk.

Outdoor propaganda started in Glasgow and came thence to London. In
October 1931 the Secretary said they must "convince men there is a
practical alternative to Capitalism and Socialism, _by showing them
how to set about achieving it."_ And in November he subscribed to
opinions voiced in the Cockpit for the last two years by saying that
the London Branch acted in the spirit of "a pleasant Friday evening
debating society, which regarded discussion as an end in itself." One
would imagine that all this meant a call to action, but the action
was merely the establishment of a Research Department and the start
of a new paper _The Distributist_ for the discussion of the League's
domestic business. The Research Secretary will explain his plans,
enroll volunteers and allot tasks, thus "equipping the League with
the information for lack of which it is as yet unable to agree on
practical measures." The effectiveness of its Propaganda would,
members were told, depend on its research.

"The pious appointment of investigators," wrote a Leader in _G.K.'s
Weekly_ in reference to a Government commission, "to report what is
already common knowledge is nothing less than a face-saving,
time-marking, shifty expedient." I don't think this article was one
of Gilbert's, but I do wonder whether as time went on he did not
recall his own old comparison between the early Christian and the
modern Socialist. For Distributists far more than Socialists should
have been vowed to action. There was a grave danger both of making
their propaganda ineffective by lack of example and of weakening
themselves as Distributists. Yet there were many difficulties in
their path, some of which may best be seen if we go back a little and
recall the way in which the Encyclical _Rerum Novarum_ was received
by Catholics at the end of the last century. Written in Europe wher