THE CAPITALIST PRESS

“I SAY that our interest lies in the question of degree. It always does. The philosopher said: “All things are a matter of degree, and who shall establish degree?” But I think we are agreed – and by “we” I mean all educated men with some knowledge of the world around us – that the degree to which the suppression of truth, the propagation of falsehood, the artificial creation of opinion, and the boycott of inconvenient doctrine have reached in the great Capitalist Press for some time past in England, is at least dangerously high.”

~Hilaire Belloc: The Free Press, Ch. VIII.

Read more: The Free Press

"The breakdown of Christendom"

“Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it―we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today.”

~ Hilaire Belloc: The Great Heresies

JANUARY

It freezes- all across a soundless sky
The birds go home. The governing dark's begun:
The steadfast dark that waits not for a sun;
The ultimate dark wherein the race shall die. ...

Death, with his evil finger to his lip,
Leers in at human windows, turning spy
To learn the country where his rule shall lie
When he assumes perpetual generalship.

The undefeated enemy, the chill
That shall benumb the voiceful earth at last,
Is master of our moment, and has bound
The viewless wind it-self. There is no sound.
It freezes. Every friendly stream is fast.
It freezes; and the graven twigs are still.

~Hilaire Belloc

Winter Landscape, by Jan van de Cappelle (1626-1679). Oil on canvas.