e
the remains of the mediaeval social structure still lingered on far
more than in industrial England or America, it was taken by the more
conservative Catholics as a general confirmation of the established
order. I well remember people like my own father and Father Bernard
Vaughan quoting it in this sense. And if they tended to advert to
only one half of it, the more radical Catholics readily obliged by
appearing conscious solely of the other half and thus enabling
themselves to be dismissed as one-sided.

Unfortunately they were worse than one-sided: they were curiously
blind, with rare exceptions, to those true implications of the
document which spelt Distributism--for which the word had not then
been coined--or the _Restoration of Property_. _"The law, therefore,
should favour ownership and its policy should be to induce as many
people as possible to become owners._ Many excellent results will
follow from this; and first of all, property will certainly become
more equitably divided. For the effect of social change and
revolution has been to divide society into two widely different
castes. . . . _If workpeople can be encouraged to look forward to
obtaining a share in the land, the result will be that the the gulf
between vast wealth and deep poverty will be bridged over, and the
two orders will be brought nearer together."_* Yet the Pope's words
were treated almost as an acceptance of the existing conditions of
property by the more conservative, while the more radical simply
tried to evade them. The question of my youth undoubtedly was: how
far can a Catholic go on the road to Socialism?

[* _Rerum Novarum_ (translation in Husslein's _The Christian Social
Manifesto_). Italics mine.]

Distributism would seem today to have cut like a sword the knot of
this mental confusion, but it did not do so for many people. I
suppose the leading Distributist among the clergy was Father Vincent
McNabb and I have heard him called a Socialist a hundred times. And
even among those who had accepted the Distributist ideal and had now
had fifteen years of the _New Witness_ and _G.K.'s Weekly_ to
meditate upon--to say nothing of the Belloc and Chesterton
books--there was still a good deal of confusion of mind to be cleared
up. The Chesterbelloc had begun a mental revolution, but even the
mind cannot be turned upside down in a moment of time; and then there
is the will to be considered.

Gilbert often claimed that the Society he advoc