ier he
had stressed the Distributist ideal as the last chance to

do deliberately and well what nemesis will do wastefully and
without pity; whether we cannot build a bridge from these slippery
downward slopes to freer and firmer land beyond, without consenting
yet that our most noble nation must descend into that valley of
humiliation in which nations disappear from history.*

[* _Outline of Sanity_, p. 34.]

In this book which he had tried in vain, he tells us, to make "a
grammar of Distributism," he touches on the enormous changes that had
made such a grammar of far greater urgency. When _Rerum Novarum_ was
issued, or even eighteen years later when G.K. wrote _What's Wrong
With the World_, individualist competition had not yet given place to
the Trust, Combine or Merger. "The American Trust is not private
enterprise. It would be truer to call the Spanish Inquisition private
judgment." The decline of trade had hardly begun at the turn of the
Century, liberty was still fairly widespread. But today we had lost
liberty as well as property and were living under the worst features
of a Socialist State. "I am one of those who believe that the cure
for centralisation is decentralisation."

Both in the book and in the paper he urged constantly a double line
of escape towards the restoration of freedom, initiative, property
and the free family: the one line was the comparatively negative one
of winning such concessions from the State as would make action
possible, the other was personal action to be taken without any State
aid or even encouragement. The germ of recovery lay in human nature.
If you get poison out of a man's system "the time will come when he
himself will think he would like a little ordinary food. If things
even begin to be released they will begin to recover." To the
question did Chesterton believe Distributism would save England, he
answered, "No, I think Englishmen will save England, if they begin to
have half a chance. I am therefore in this sense hopeful. I believe
that the breakdown has been a breakdown of machinery and not of men."

A most difficult question to answer is the degree of the League's
success. Its stated aim was propaganda, the spreading of ideas.
"There is a danger that the tendency to regard talking as negligible
may invade our little movement . . . our main business is to talk."
One sees the point, of course; yet I cannot help feeling that it
would have been better if