ated was the norm,
that the modern world was abnormal, was insane. But to achieve the
normal in an abnormal world calls for high courage and a high degree
of energy. It is much easier to sit and drink beer while planning the
world that one wishes was there--the world of simplicity, hard work
and independence. And about the details of this new world there was
room for a variety of opinion. The Distributists soon began to argue
and even to quarrel--about the admission of machinery into the
Distributist state, about the nature of one another's Distributism
and what was necessary to constitute a Distributist. The effect on
Gilbert is interesting, for it showed his belief in the importance of
the League. He hoped, he said, that the quarrel would not "turn into
a dispute"--that it would remain a personal quarrel. "For impersonal
quarrel is schism." He urged again and again that the dogmas of their
creed should be defined.

Heaven forbid that we should ever be True Distributists: as a
substitute for being Distributists. It would be a dismal thing to
join the long and wavering procession of True Christians, True
Socialists, True Imperialists; who are now progressing drearily into
a featureless future; ready to change anything whatever except their
names. These people escape endlessly by refusing definition which
they call dogma. . . .

Practical politics are necessary, but they are in a sense narrow;
and by themselves they do tend to split the world up into small
sects. Only dogma is sufficiently universal to include us all.

Of the world surrounding him which refused definitions he said,
"because there is no image there is nothing except imaginaries."* But
I think there must have been some blushes on Distributists' cheeks as
they read his apology for some slight absence of mind. He explained
his own "ghastly ignorance" of the details of the dispute, "which is
bound up with the economic facts of the position," with the fact
especially of

[* October 12, 1929.]

my own highly inadequate rendering of the part of the Financier. I
am the thin and shadowy approximation to a Capitalist. . . . I could
only manage until very lately to keep this paper in existence at all,
by earning the money in the open market; and more especially in that
busy and happy market where corpses are sold in batches; I mean the
mart of Murder and Mystery, the booth of the Detective Story. Many a
squir