The Monopoly of Credit

“OF all the forms of monopoly, the most dangerous today is the monopoly of Credit. . . . Today you may say that all society is in debt to those who hold the levers of credit, and that when, or if, we lose our freedom altogether we shall have for masters the remaining controllers of land and machinery, who will have behind them, as ultimate masters, the controllers of credit.”

~Hilaire Belloc: The Way Out, Chap. XII—The Monopoly of Credit.

Do We Agree?

George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc & G.K. Chesterton

MR. BELLOC: I was told when I accepted this onerous office that I was to sum up. I shall do nothing of the sort. In a very few years from now this debate will be antiquated. I will now recite you a poem:

  "Our civilization
  Is built upon coal.
  Let us chant in rotation
  Our civilization
  That lump of damnation
  Without any soul,
  Our civilization
  Is built upon coal.

  "In a very few years,
  It will float upon oil.
  Then give three hearty cheers,
  In a very few years
  We shall mop up our tears
  And have done with our toil.
  In a very few years
  It will float upon oil."

In I do not know how many years ─ five, ten, twenty ─ this debate will be as antiquated as crinolines are. I am surprised that neither of the two speakers pointed out that one of three things is going to happen. One of three things: not one of two. It is always one of three things. This industrial civilization which, thank God, oppresses only the small part of the world in which we are most inextricably bound up, will break down and therefore end from its monstrous wickedness, folly, ineptitude, leading to a restoration of sane, ordinary human affairs, complicated but based as a whole upon the freedom of the citizens. Or it will break down and lead to nothing but a desert. Or it will lead the mass of men to become contented slaves,with a few rich men controlling them. Take your choice. You will all be dead before any of the three things comes off. One of the three things is going to happen, or a mixture of two, or possibly a mixture of the three combined.


─From transcript of a debate between George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton, "moderated" by Hilaire Belloc in 1928.

Read the complete debate here

"Properly distributed property"

“IT is imperative in the cause of civilization, that we save the small producer and the small distributor.  . . . .  He is all-important to human society and, under a scheme of properly distributed property, though his property would not be large it would be sufficient for this independence, his dignity and the security of his livelihood.”

~Hilaire Belloc: The Way Out.

MAY

THIS is the laughing-eyed amongst them all: 
My lady's month. A season of young things. 
She rules the light with harmony, and brings 
The year's first green upon the beeches tall. 
How often, where long creepers wind and fall 
Through the deep woods in noonday wanderings, 
I’ve heard the month, when she to echo sings, 
I've heard the month make merry madrigal. 

How often, bosomed in the breathing strong 
Of mosses and young flowerets, have I lain 
And watched the clouds, and caught the sheltered song - 
Which it were more than life to hear again- 
Of those small birds that pipe it all day long 
Not far from Marly by the memoried Seine. 

~Hilaire Belloc

English garden

"A sharp moment of revelation"

“ALL you that feel youth slipping past you and that are desolate at the approach of age, be merry; it is not what it looks like from in front and from outside. There is a glory in all completion, and all good endings are but shining transitions. There will come a sharp moment of revelation when you shall bless the effect of time… All you that have loved passionately and have torn your hearts asunder in disillusions, do not imagine that things broken cannot be mended by the good angels.”

~Hilaire Belloc: The Path to Rome.

"Combat for the soul of Europe"

UPON all this came the enormous incident of the Black Death. Here half the people, there a third, there again a quarter, died; from that additional blow the great experiment of the Middle Ages could not recover.

Men clung to their ideal for yet another hundred and fifty years. The vital forces it had developed still carried Europe from one material perfection to another; the art of government, the suggestion of letters, the technique of sculpture and of painting (here raised by a better vision, there degraded by a worse one), everywhere developed and grew manifold. But the supreme achievement of the thirteenth century was seen in the later fourteenth to be ephemeral, and in the fifteenth it was apparent that the attempt to found a simple and satisfied Europe had failed.

The full causes of that failure cannot be analyzed. One may say that science and history were too slight; that the material side of life was insufficient; that the full knowledge of the past which is necessary to permanence was lacking—or one may say that the ideal was too high for men. I, for my part, incline to believe that wills other than those of mortals were in combat for the soul of Europe, as they are in combat daily for the souls of individual men, and that in this spiritual battle, fought over our heads perpetually, some accident of the struggle turned it against us for a time. If that suggestion be fantastic (which no doubt it is), at any rate none other is complete.

~Hilaire Belloc: Europe and the Faith, Ch. VII─The Middle Ages.

Free Press vs. 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, XI, B.

Complete text here