the simple disaster.

There were two approaches that should be made to these differences.
The first was to state the fundamental principles of Distributism.
The crux of the quarrel was the question of machinery. But even those
who held that machinery should be abolished in the Distributist State
held it, he claimed, not as a first principle, but as a deduction
from their first principles. Chesterton himself felt that machinery
should be limited but not abolished; the order of things had been
historically that men had been deprived of property and enslaved on
the land before the machine-slavery of industrialism had become
possible. The whole history of the machine might have been reversed
in a state of free men. If a machine were used on a farm employing
fifty men that would do the work of forty, it means forty men become
unemployed, "but it is only because they were employed that they are
unemployed. Now you and I, I hope to heaven, are not trying to
increase employment. It is almost the only thing that is as bad as
unemployment." In other words, he did not want men to be employees.
Men working for themselves, men their own employers, their own
employees--that was the objective of Distributism. A wide
distribution of property was its primary aim. And he did not want the
League to consist entirely of extremists lest it should be thought to
consist entirely of cranks, especially at a moment when "intelligent
people are beginning to like Distributism _because_ Distributism is
normal."

The other approach was heralded in the final article of the series
(October 1, 1932) by a reference to the excitement over the Buckfast
Benedictines who had just built their Abbey Church with their own
hands--an adventure

to which, if I understand it as completely as I share it, the
English blood will never be entirely cold. But about these new heroes
of architecture there is one note that is not new; that comes from a
very ancient tradition of psychology and morals. And that is that the
adventurer has a right to his adventure; and the amateur has a right
to his hobby; or rather to his love. But neither has any right to a
general judgment of coldness or contempt for those whose hobby is
human living; and whose chief adventures are at home. You will never
hear the builders of Buckfast shouting aloud, "Down with Downside;
for it was designed by a careful Gothic architect!" You will never
hear them say