The Free Press and the Official Press

"WHEREVER I go, my first object, if I wish to find out the truth, is to get hold of the Free Press in France as in England, and even in America. But I know that wherever I get hold of such an organ it will be very strongly coloured with the opinion, or even fanaticism, of some minority. The Free Press, as a whole, if you add it all up and cancel out one exaggerated statement against another, does give you a true view of the state of society in which you live. The Official Press to-day gives you an absurdly false one everywhere. What a caricature—and what a base, empty caricature—of England or France or Italy you get in the "Times," or the "Manchester Guardian," the "Matin," or the "Tribune"! No one of them is in any sense general—or really national."

~Hilaire Belloc: The Free Press. (An essay on the manipulation of news and opinion, and how to counter it.)

Ballade to Our Lady of Czestochowa

LADY and Queen of Mystery manifold
And very Regent of the untroubled sky,
Whom in a dream St. Hilda did behold
And heard a woodland music passing by:
You shall receive me when the clouds are high
With evening and the sheep attain the fold.
This is the faith that I have held and hold.
And this is that in which I mean to die.

Steep are the seas and savaging and cold
In broken waters terrible to dry;
And vast against the winter night the world,
And harbourless for any sail to lie.
But you shall lead me to the lights, and I
Shall hymn you in a harbour story told.
This is the faith that I have held and hold,
And this is that in which I mean to die.

Help the half-defeated, House of Gold,
Shrine of the sword, and Tower of Ivory;
Splendour apart, supreme and aureoled,
The Battler’s vision and the World’s reply.
You shall restore me, O my last Ally,
To vengeance and the glories of the bold.
This is the faith that I have held and hold,
And this is that in which I mean to die.

Prince of the degradations, bought and sold,
These verses, written in your crumbling sty,
Proclaim the faith that I have held and hold
And publish that in which I mean to die.

~Hilaire Belloc

Image of Our Lady of Czestochowa, a brief history

Letter from Belloc to Chesterton

Reform Club, Manchester, 
11 Dec. 1907. 

My dear Gilbert, 

I am a man afraid of impulse in boats, horses and all action though driven to it. I have never written a letter such as I am writing now, though I have desired to write some six or seven since I became a grown man. In the matter we discussed at Oxford I have a word to say which is easier to say on paper than by word of mouth, or rather, more valuable. All intellectual process is doubtful, all inconclusive, save pure deduction, which is a game if one's first certitudes are hypothetical and immensely valuable if one's first certitude is fixed, yet remains wholly dependent on that. 

Now if we differed in all main points I would not write thus, but there are one or two on which we agree. One is "Vere passus, immolatus in cruce pro homine." Another is in a looking up to our Dear Lady, the blessed Mother of God. 

I recommend to you this, that you suggest to her a comprehension for yourself, of what indeed is the permanent home of the soul. If it is here you will see it, if it is there you will see it. She never fails us. She has never failed me in any demand. 

I have never written thus─as I say─and I beg you to see nothing in it but what I say. There is no connection the reason can seize─but so it is. If you say "I want this" as in your case to know one way or the other─She will give it you: as She will give health or necessary money or success in a pure love. She is our Blessed Mother. 

I have not used my judgment in this letter. I am inclined to destroy it, but I shall send it. Don't answer it. 

Yours ever 
              H. Belloc 

My point is: If it is right She knows. If it is not right, She knows. 

"Implicit Materialism"

"Implicit Materialism─that is, an underlying, unexpressed, conception that material causes explain all things─survives. Men do not commonly say, nowadays, as many did not so long ago, that man is to be explained as a machine or a set of chemical formulae. They no longer, in any great numbers, deny flatly the presence of immaterial factors in the universe. But when they speak of life or death, or when they propose an explanation of anything, they imply, often without knowing it, that all of which they talk is material: that life is a material process, death but a cessation of that process, and that any human occasion─for instance any social development─can be completely understood when it is stated in terms of material things."

~Hilaire Belloc: Survivals and New Arrivals

"The mob loves a scrap"

"WE must be militant. There were, perhaps, in the past, moments when that spirit was unwise; to-day, it seems to me demanded by a just judgment of the situation. Our society has become a mob. The mob loves a scrap, and it is right."

~Hilaire Belloc: Essays of a Catholic