main Distributist impact has been felt in the States, in Canada and
in Australia.

There is a double-edged difficulty in talking about the influence of
anyone on his times. On the one hand, as Mgr. Knox pointed out, all
our generation has grown up under Chesterton's influence so
completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton.
One sees unacknowledged (and unconscious) quotations from him in
books and articles, one hears them in speeches and sermons. On the
other hand into the making of a movement there flow so many streams
that it is possible to claim too much for a single influence however
powerful. An American Distributist said to me lately that the movement
set on foot by Chesterton had reached incredible proportions for one
generation. I think this is true but we have also to render thanks
(for example) to the suicide of the commercial-capitalist-combine
which created the void for our philosophy. That the Distributist
League has had much influence I doubt: in the United States the
Chesterton spirit is better represented by that admirable paper
_Free America_ than by the American Distributists--for _Free
America_ is offering us precisely what the League has for the most
part failed to offer--the laboratory test of the Distributist ideal.
Every number carries stories of men who have in part-time or
whole-time farming, in small shops, in backyard industries tried out
Distributism and can tell us how it has worked and _how to work it_.
Its editors Herbert Agar, Ralph Borsodi, Canon Ligutti and others,
all foremost in the Ruralist movement, acknowledge debt to Chesterton
and are carrying on the torch. Monsignor Ligutti's own work in the
field of part-time farming, his own periodical and the thoughts that
inspire the Catholic Rural Life Movement of America are among the
most important manifestations of that universal religious and rural
awakening for which Chesterton worked so hard and longed so ardently.

In Canada the Antigonish movement has shown a happy blending of
theory and practise. For the University itself has in its Extension
Movement and by its organ _The Maritime Co-operator_ provided the
theory, while up and down the country co-operative groups have built
their own houses and canneries, started their own co-operative stores
and savings banks, and made the Maritime Provinces a hopeful and
property-owning community of small farmers and fisher folk. Several
important books have grown out o