oken "harshly" of the United States it was nothing to
the way he had talked of the British Empire. Although at moments he
saw in imagination the romance of the fact that England had acquired
an Empire "absentmindedly" through Englishmen with the solitary
spirit of adventure and discovery, yet he had an unfortunate habit of
abusing the Dominions. They were the "suburbs" of England (a curious
phrase from the man who found suburbs "intoxicating"); we could not
learn from them as we could from Europe for they were inferior to us;
these and many other hard things he would throw out again and again
in his articles. One letter in the _Cockpit_ reproached him; from a
New Zealander of English descent it asked him whether he really meant
that those of his own race were so utterly indifferent to him;
whether he really preferred Bohemians and Norwegians to Britons. The
letter received no answer.

My husband and I used to wonder with secret smiles whether he was the
Australian from whom Gilbert derived the idea of that country as a
"raw and remote colony." Belloc also, in a letter extolling the
Faith, asked "what else would print civilised stuff in Australasia?"
Many years earlier Gilbert had written, in reviewing a book on the
Cottages of England, of the inconsistency of the English upper
classes who exalt the achievement of the national character in
creating the Empire and disparage it concerning the possibility of
re-creating the rural life of England. "Their creed contains two
great articles: first that the common Englishman can get on anywhere,
and second that the common Englishman cannot get on in England."
Surely Chesterton had this same inconsistency, as it were, in
reverse? The common Englishman was great in England, the common
Irishman was great in Ireland, the common Scot was a figure of
romance in Scotland, but when these common men created a new country
that new country became contemptible.

The Empire took a magnificent revenge, for it was in the "Suburbs of
England" that Distributism was first taken seriously and used as
practical politics. A far more effectively distributist paper than
_The Distributist_ appeared in Ceylon under the able editorship of
J. P. de Fonseka, in which action was recorded and the movements of
Government watched and sometimes affected from the Distributist
angle, and Catholic Social thinking formed on Distributist lines.
This paper has a considerable effect also in India. But of course the