, "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 earl