eath. But even Top Meadow was distributed, a
small piece being cut off the garden and left to Dorothy Collins. And
I think even in a Distributist heaven it must add to Gilbert's
happiness to see the seventeen rabbits, the chickens and the
beehives--to say nothing of the huge quantities of vegetables
produced on this fragment of his property.

For this war like the last, with all its suffering, will, if the
Bureaucracy permit it, again energise the people of England into that
creative action which is the only soil for the seed of Distributism.
It began by distributing the people. And London was no place for a
Distributist movement. It is no chance that the growth of this
philosophy is among small groups and in the countryside. "On the
land," as Father Vincent often says, "you need not waste a moment of
time or a scrap of material." This is the fierce and pious thrift
that Gilbert saw in his youth as so poetical and in his age as a part
of the philosophy of Distributism.

CHAPTER XXVII

Silver Wedding

THE CONSIDERATION OF the Distributist League that flowed out of the
foundation of _G.K.'s Weekly_ in 1925 has carried us some years ahead
of our story. Back then to 1926 when Frances and Gilbert had been
married 25 years.

One of the things taught me long ago when I first visited them at
Beaconsfield was that it was properly to be called Beckonsfield: that
it was not named for Disraeli but that he, impertinently, had chosen
to be named for it. Gilbert often spelt it Bekonsfield to impress his
point. Both in theory and practice he had a lot of local patriotism
and a little of that special pride taken by all men in houses built
by themselves. But most of his pride went out to the fact that his
home was intensely English. He quoted a lover of Sussex who said
among the beech trees of Buckinghamshire, "This is really the most
English part of England." He felt it "no accident that has called
this particular stretch of England the home counties." Public life
was so ugly just now, the decay of patriotism under the corroding
influence of an evil and cowardly sort of pacifism was hateful to
him, but England still remained to re-vitalise the English when the
time should come. The oaks that had made our ships could still fill
us with "heroic memories; of Nelson dying under the low oaken beams
or Collingwood scattering the acorns that they might grow into
battleships." Yet if, he said, "I were choosing an entirely English