sed fashion by the Rural Life movements with
their own organs of expression.

[* Published by the Australian C.T.S.]

If it is difficult to estimate the impact of mind upon mind it
becomes bewilderingly impossible to weigh, in such a movement as
Distributism, the actual practical effects. Partly because, while
Distributism leads naturally to co-operation (an individual, says
Chesterton, is only the Latin word for an atom and to reduce society
to individuals is to smash it to atoms), still the movement is
essentially local, the groups usually small.

For my own part I have travelled a good deal, always with a primary
interest in social developments, and everywhere I have found
Chesterton or his derivatives. The numbers in America alone--both in
the States and Canada--who are trying out these ideas in big and
small communities is amazing. I did begin to make a list of vital
movements beginning with the Jocistes and the American Catholic
Worker, roving over the world and trying to estimate in each movement
I had met the proportion of Chesterton's influence, and again the
extent to which one movement is in debt to another--but I gave it up
in despair. One can only say that certainly there has been a great
stirring of the waters in every country: each has taken and has given
to the other: and most of those thus co-operating have been the
"little" men whom G.K. loved and in whom Dr. Tompkins tells us to
trust. To utter nobly the thoughts of that little man was, Chesterton
held, the highest aim that poet or prophet could set before him.
Distributism is that little man's philosophy. Chesterton gave it
large utterance.

And he could do it the more richly because--as he said many years ago
of the religious philosophy that was the basis of his social
outlook--"I did not make it. God and humanity made it and it made me."

Meanwhile he himself distributed royally. He gave help to the
Catholic Land Movement, to Cecil Houses, to all who asked him for
help. He educated several nieces and nephews of Frances and gave
money or lent it in considerable sums to old friends in difficulties.
If some event--perhaps Judgment Day--should call together all those
helped financially by Gilbert and Frances, I think they will be
surprised to meet one another and to discover what a lot of them
there are. They gave too to the Catholic Church at Beaconsfield,
which later became Gilbert's monument, and to which Top Meadow was
left after Frances's d