Poem: The Rebel

THERE is a wall of which the stones
Are lies and bribes and dead men's bones.
And wrongfully this evil wall 
Denies what all men made for all,
And shamelessly this wall surrounds 
Our homesteads and our native grounds.

But I will gather and I will ride,
And I will summon a countryside,
And many a man shall hear my halloa
Who never had thought the horn to follow;
And many a man shall ride with me
Who never had thought on earth to see
High Justice in her armoury.

When we find them where they stand,
A mile of men on either hand,
I mean to charge from right away
And force the flanks of their array,
And press them inward from the plains,
And drive them clamouring down the lanes,
And gallop and harry and have them down,
And carry the gates and hold the town.
Then shall I rest me from my ride
With my great anger satisfied.

Only, before I eat and drink,
When I have killed them all, I think
That I will batter their carven names,
And slit the pictures in their frames,
And burn for scent their cedar door,
And melt the gold their women wore,
And hack their horses at the knees,
And hew to death their timber trees,
And plough their gardens deep and through—
And all these things I mean to do
For fear perhaps my little son
Should break his hands, as I have done.

~Hilaire Belloc

Old and new paganism

"The Old Paganism had a strong sense of the supernatural. This sense was often turned to the wrong objects and always to insufficient objects, but it was keen and unfailing; all the poetry of the Old Paganism, even where it despairs, has this sense. And you may read in those of its writers who actively opposed religion, such as Lucretius, a fine religious sense of dignity and order. The New Paganism delights in superficiality, and conceives that it is rid of the evil as well as the good in what it believes to have been superstitions and illusions. 

"There it is quite wrong, and upon that note I will end. Men do not live long without gods; but when the gods of the New Paganism come they will not be merely insufficient, as were the gods of Greece, nor merely false; they will be evil. One might put it in a sentence, and say that the New Paganism, foolishly expecting satisfaction, will fall, before it knows where it is, into Satanism."

 ~Hilaire Belloc: From Essays of a Catholic.

"The end of history is the establishment of truth"

"WHATEVER brief and epigrammatic summary we make to explain the value of history to men, that formula still remains an imperative formula for them all, and I repeat it: the end of history is the establishment of truth.

"A man may be ever so accurately informed as to the dates, the hours, the weather, the gestures, the type of speech, the very words, the soil, the colour, that between them all would seem to build up a particular event. But if he be not seized of the mind which lay behind all that was human in the business, then no synthesis of his detailed knowledge is possible. He cannot give to the various actions which he knows their due order and proportion; he knows not what to omit, nor what to enlarge upon among so many, or rather a number potentially infinite of, facts; and his picture will not be (as some would put it) distorted: it will be false. He will not be able to use history for its end, which is the establishment of Truth. All that he establishes by his action, and all that he confirms and makes stronger, is Untruth. And so far as truth is concerned it would be far better that a man should be possessed of no history than that he should be possessed of history ill-stated as to its prime factor, which is human motive."

~Hilaire Belloc: On the Method of History.

The Way to Fairyland

A CHILD of four years old, having read of Fairyland and of the people in it, asked only two days ago, in a very popular attitude of doubt, whether there were any such place, and, if so, where it was; for she believed in her heart that the whole thing was a pack of lies.

I was happy to be able to tell her that her scepticism, though well founded, was extreme. The existence of Fairyland, I was able to point out to her both by documentary evidence from books and also by calling in the testimony of the aged, could not be doubted by any reasonable person. What was really difficult was the way to get there. Indeed, so obviously true was the existence of Fairyland, that every one in this world set out to go there as a matter of course, but so difficult was it to find the way that very few reached the place. Upon this the child very naturally asked me what sort of way the way was and why it was so difficult.

"You must first understand," said I, "where Fairyland is: it lies a little way farther than the farthest hill you can see. It lies, in fact, just beyond that hill. The frontiers of it are sometimes a little doubtful in any landscape, because the landscape is confused, but if on the extreme limits of the horizon you see a long line of hills bounding your view exactly, then you may be perfectly certain that on the other side of those hills is Fairyland. There are times of the day and of the weather when the sky over Fairyland can be clearly perceived, for it has a different colour from any other kind of sky. That is where Fairyland is. It is not on an island, as some have pretended, still less is it under the earth—a ridiculous story, for there it is all dark."

"But how do you get there?" asked the child. "Do you get there by walking to the hills and going over?"

"No," said I, "that is just the bother of it. Several people have thought that that was the way of getting there; in fact, it looked plain common sense, but there is a trick about it; when you get to the hills everything changes, because the fairies have that power: the hills become ordinary, the people living on them turn into people just like you and me, and then when you get to the top of the hills, before you can say knife another common country just like ours has been stuck on the other side. On this account, through the power of the fairies, who hate particularly to be disturbed, no one can reach Fairyland in so simple a way as by walking towards it."

"Then," said the child to me, "I don't see how any one can get there"—for this child had good brains and common sense.

"But," said I, "you must have read in stories of people who get to Fairyland, and I think you will notice that in the stories written by people who know anything about it (and you know how easily these are distinguished from the others) there are always two ways of getting to Fairyland, and only two: one is by mistake, and the other is by a spell. In the first way to Fairyland is to lose your way, and this is one of the best ways of getting there; but it is dangerous, because if you get there that way you offend the fairies. It is better to get there by a spell. But the inconvenience of that is that you are blindfolded so as not to be allowed to remember the way there or back again. When you get there by a spell, one of the people from Fairyland takes you in charge. They prefer to do it when you are asleep, but they are quite game to do it at other times if they think it worth their while.

"Why do they do it?" said the child.

"They do it," said I, "because it annoys the fairies very much to think that people are stopping believing in them. They are very proud people, and think a lot of themselves. They can, if they like, do us good, and they think us ungrateful when we forget about them. Sometimes in the past people have gone on forgetting about fairies more and more and more, until at last they have stopped believing in them altogether. The fairies meanwhile have been looking after their own affairs, and it is their fault more than ours when we forget about them. But when this has gone on for too long a time the fairies wake up and find out by a way they have that men have stopped believing in them, and get very much annoyed. Then some fairy proposes that a map of the way to Fairyland should be drawn up and given to the people; but this is always voted down; and at last they make up their minds to wake people up to Fairyland by going and visiting this world, and by spells bringing several people into their kingdom and so getting witnesses. For, as you can imagine, it is a most unpleasant thing to be really important and for other people not to know it."

"Yes," said the child, who had had this unpleasant experience, and greatly sympathized with the fairies when I explained how much they disliked it. Then the child asked me again:

"Why do the fairies let us forget about them?"

"It is," said I, "because they get so excited about their own affairs. Rather more than a hundred years ago, for instance, a war broke out in Fairyland because the King of the Fairies, whose name is Oberon, and the Queen of the Fairies, whose name is Titania, had asked the Trolls to dinner. The Gnomes were very much annoyed at this, and the Elves still more so, for the chief glory of the Elves was that being elfish got you to know people; and it was universally admitted that the Trolls ought never to be asked out, because they were trollish. King Oberon said that all that was a wicked prejudice, and that the Trolls ought to be asked out to dinner just as much as the Elves, in common justice. But his real reason was that he was bored by the perpetual elfishness of the Elves, and wanted to see the great ugly Trolls trying to behave like gentlemen for a change. So the Trolls came and tied their napkins round their necks, and ate such enormous quantities at dinner that King Oberon and his Queen almost died of laughing. The Elves were frightfully jealous, and so the war began. And while it was going on everybody in Earthland forgot more and more about Fairyland, until at last some people went so far as to say, like you, that Fairyland did not exist."

"I did not say so," said the child, "I only asked."

"But," I answered severely, "asking about such things is the beginning of doubting them. Anyhow, the fairies woke up one fine day about the time when your great-grandfather got married, to discover that they were not believed in, so they patched up their quarrel and they sent fairies to cast spells, and any amount of people began to be taken to Fairyland, until at last every one was forced to believe their evidence and to say that Fairyland existed."

"Were they glad?" said the child.

"Who?" said I; "the witnesses who were thus taken away and shown Fairyland?"

"Yes," said the child. "They ought to have been glad."

"Well, they weren't!" said I. "They were as sick as dogs. Not one of them but got into some dreadful trouble. From one his wife ran away, another starved to death, a third killed himself, a fourth was drowned and then burned upon the seashore, a fifth went mad (and so did several others), and as for poverty, and all the misfortunes that go with it, it simply rained upon the people who had been to Fairyland."

"Why?" said the child, greatly troubled.

"Ah!" said I, "that is what none of us know, but so it is, if they take you to Fairyland you are in for a very bad business indeed. There is only one way out of it."

"And what is that?" said the child, interested.

"Washing," said I, "washing in cold water. It has been proved over and over again."

"Then," said the child happily, "they can take me to Fairyland as often as they like, and I shall not be the worse for it, for I am washed in cold water every day. What about the other way to Fairyland?"

"Oh that," said I, "that, I think, is much the best way; I've gone there myself."

"Have you really?" said the child, now intensely interested. "That is good! How often have you been there?"

"Oh I can't tell you," I said carelessly, "but at least eight times, and perhaps more, and the dodge is, as I told you, to lose your way; only the great trouble is that no one can lose his way on purpose. At first I used to think that one had to follow signs. There was an omnibus going down the King's Road which had 'To the World's End' painted on it. I got into this one day, and after I had gone some miles I said to the man, 'When do we get to the World's End?' 'Oh,' said he, 'you have passed it long ago,' and he rang a little bell to make me get out. So it was a fraud. Another time I saw another omnibus with the words, 'To the Monster,' and I got into that, but I heard that it was only a sort of joke, and that though the Monster was there all right, he was not in Fairyland. This omnibus went through a very uninteresting part of London, and Fairyland was nowhere in the neighbourhood. Another time in the country of France I came upon a printed placard which said: 'The excursion will pass by the Seven Winds, the Foolish Heath, and St. Martin under Heaven.' This time also I thought I had got it, but when I looked at the date on the placard I saw that the excursion had started several days before, so I missed it again. Another time up in Scotland I saw a signpost on which there was, 'To the King's House seven miles.' And some one had written underneath in pencil: 'And to the Dragon's Cave eleven.' But nothing came of it. It was a false lane. After that I gave up believing that one could get to Fairyland by signposts or omnibuses, until one day, quite by mistake, I chanced on the dodge of losing one's way."

"How is that done?" said the child.

"That is what no one can tell you," said I. "If people knew how it was done everybody would do it, but the whole point of losing your way is that you do it by mistake. You must be quite certain that you have not lost your way or it is no good. You walk along, and you walk along, and you wonder how long it will be before you get to the town, and then instead of getting to the town at all, there you are in Fairyland."

"How do you know that you are in Fairyland?" said the little child.

"It depends how far you get in," said I. "If you get in far enough trees and rocks change into men, rivers talk, and voices of people whom you cannot see tell you all sorts of things in loud and clear tones close to your ear. But if you only get a little way inside then you know that you are there by a sort of wonderment. The things ought to be like the things you see every day, but they are a little different, notably the trees. It happened to me once in a town called Lanchester. A part of that town (though no one would think of it to look at it) happens to be in Fairyland. And there I was received by three fairies, who gave me supper in an inn. And it happened to me once in the mountains and once it happened to me at sea. I lost my way and came upon a beach which was in Fairyland. Another time it happened to me between Goodwood and Upwaltham in Sussex."

At this moment the child's nurse came in to take it away, so she came to the point:

"How did you know you were in Fairyland?' she said doubtfully." Perhaps you are making all this up."

"Nonsense!" I said reprovingly, "the only people who make things up are little children, for they always tell lies. Grown-up people never tell lies. Let me tell you that one always knows when one has been in Fairyland by the feeling afterwards, and because it is impossible to find it again."

The child said, "Very well, I will believe you," but I could see from the expression of her eyes that she was not wholly convinced, and that in the bottom of her heart she does not believe there is any such place. She will, however, if she can hang on another forty years, and then I shall have my revenge.

~Hilaire Belloc: On Something.

"The man of letters"

"HE rose late, slept long, ate heartily, drank deeply, read newspapers, began things he never finished, and wrote the ending of things whose beginnings he never accomplished; in a word, he was in every respect the man of letters."

~Hilaire Belloc: The Aftermath, or, Gleanings From A Busy Life.

The Suppressed Truth

The Monopoly of Information Through the Power to Control the Press and Radio Is Most Dangerous to Society When It Is Used to Boycott Facts.

THE NEXT most important branch of modern monopoly is “monopoly of information.”

As in all other forms of monopoly, there is a wide margin still left. Information is not monopolized in the sense that it can only be obtained from one source; but the tendency to monopoly in it is very marked, and it is increasing under our eyes. The importance of this tendency will escape no one. We can make no judgment on public affairs, and very few judgments on our own private affairs, without adequate general information. If information be withheld, or warped in the interests of those few who control it, the gravest harm is done to the citizen and to the commonwealth.

There are three forms in which this tendency appears: (1) What is called “the air”—it used to be called “the ether”—that is, the wireless; radio, (2) The general journalistic press; and (3) books, with which may be counted the more instructed magazines.

The wireless tends to monopoly in two ways: First, it may be bought up by a few commercial interests which tend, like all forms of capitalist control, to get fewer and more powerful. Secondly, it may be an admitted monopoly of the government.

Of these two the latter is certainly the more dangerous and the worse. In European countries, and particularly in England, the radio is a public monopoly of this kind. It is, of course, mere hypocrisy to say that it is not controlled by the State. It is controlled by a corporation which the State charters, and of which the State appoints the officials. Those who prefer this form of monopoly by wireless are always pointing out the evils of the alternative system, where wireless is free to be bought by anyone who chooses to hire it. They say that this puts too much power into the hands of private capitalist enterprises. It certainly puts power into their hands, but I have never seen that power abused as it is abused by government monopoly. You at least know who has hired the wireless, and may experience of this form of publicity is that, apart from the quite open advertisement, for brief moments of the service or goods furnished by the firm that hires, there is full freedom. But where you have government monopoly of wireless, as in Europe, there is no freedom at all. The mass of men remain, so far as the wireless is concerned, completely ignorant of whatever the government chooses to shut off from them.

The tendency to monopoly in information by newspapers is strong and dangerous, but it may be exaggerated. There are a few cases in which what is called “a newspaper magnate” really controls all the printed daily information available to the public, even in a limited area. Moreover, although the man with a large number of newspapers under one control and distributed over vast areas had much too much power, yet there is a limit to it in another form, which is that people do not necessarily take his advice. The real danger of such men is that “they can suppress truth.” The positive advocacy which they go in for has much less effect; their effective falsehoods are much more falsehoods of silence than of active untruth, and mere boycott or silence can usually be pierced.

There have been a number of instances, as we all know, of a partial monopoly of information breaking down. Your own presidential elections in the United States are a very good example of that, and sp are many movements on our side. To have nearly the whole of the press against one will not necessarily mean that one will fail. But the boycott is another thing. When the few who control the mass of the press over a given large area agree to say nothing about some important matter, it is very difficult indeed to get the matter ventilated. We had a comic example of that over here in England two years ago. The whole available strength of our fleet was sent to the Mediterranean to frighten Italy. Hardly anyone in England heard of that because our press consented to be silent, but all over the rest of the world everybody heard of it, including of course, the Italians, the only people from whom it was desired to keep a secret.

There is yet another force counter-balancing the monopolies of the press; this is what I myself called in many an article and pamphlet “the free press”. A little free weekly journal, with quite small circulation, will often have the power to break down a most formidable ring of silence, or falsehood, and there is also private conversation, passing on the sufficient information received by the few who read the “free press.” Such information spreads out in circles.

We had a very fine example of that half a lifetime ago in one of our innumerable political scandals, called the Marconi scandal. A little newspaper, with a circulation of not more than about three thousand a week, run by Mr. G. Chesterton and myself did the whole of the work of the exposure in the face of complete boycott and silence by all the official press in England. It is true that culprits were not brought to justice; they continued to hold high office and to draw large fortunes out of the taxes, but at any rate they did not save their reputations.

There remains the freedom of the press in the matter of books and the better instructed magazines. This, as yet, is secure over here, and on your side of the Atlantic, of course, it is still more secure. It is not secure under despotisms; but wherever normal conditions of civic freedom exist the book is free. Now the effect of the book is very great. It has not the immediate effect of the monopolist daily press. The effect of the book is long range. But it tells at last. If you want an example of that look at the effect of a book published eighty years ago, which at first hardly anybody read—the book called “Capital” by Karl Marx. It took a lifetime to produce its effect, but at the end of that lifetime it had given birth to international Communism.

It may be asked what other remedy we have against the monopoly of information as it is now exercised through the more widely distributed newspapers. Well, we have, or rather should have if we carry out our proper reforms, the remedy of public demand. A public possessed of well-distributed property will create a demand for information such as free citizens need and insist upon.

Most of the harm that is done by the monopolists of the modern popular press is only done because they appeal to men dependent upon wages, and enslaved by the industrial system. In their lack of security and lack of sufficient freedom they develop an appetite for sensation. They are the less interested in civic business because they are not as much true citizens as their fathers were. For man is not a full citizen unless he is free; and a man is not fully free unless he has economic freedom. And economic freedom you cannot have without property, either individual, or family, or guild.

~Hilaire Belloc: Published in Social Justice, May 16, 1938.

"The man of letters"

"HE rose late, slept long, ate heartily, drank deeply, read newspapers, began things he never finished, and wrote the ending of things whose beginnings he never accomplished; in a word, he was in every respect the man of letters."

~Hilaire Belloc: The Aftermath: Or, Gleanings From A Busy Life.