Journal 29-30 Pp1-156.Qxd

Article Title 131 Poverty, Socialism and Social Catholicism The Heart and Soul of Henry Manning Race Mathews In the early years of the twentieth century, the social teachings of the Catholic Church gave rise to a distinctive political philosophy that became known as Distributism. The basis of Distributism is the belief that a just social order can only be achieved through a much more widespread distribution of property. Distributism favours a ‘society of owners’, where property belongs to the many rather than the few, and correspondingly opposes the concentration of property in the hands of the rich, as under capitalism, or the state, as advocated by some socialists. In particular, ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange must be widespread. As defined by the prominent early Distributist, Cecil Chesterton: A Distributist is a man who desires that the means of production should, generally speaking, remain private property, but that their ownership should be so distributed that the determining mass of families — ideally every family — should have an efficient share therein. That is Distributism, and nothing else is Distributism ... ARENA journal no. 29/30, 2008 132 Race Mathews Distributism is quite as possible in an industrial or commercial as in an agrarian community.1 Distributism emerged as one element of the widespread revulsion and agony of conscience over poverty in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Its distinctive Catholic character stemmed from half a century of Catholic social thought, as drawn together by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical letter Rerum Novarum in 1891, in part at the instigation of the great English Cardinal, Henry Manning. Manning translated the encyclical into English and provided a distinctive commentary on it for the guidance of British Catholics. His compassion for the poor and championing of social justice and Social Catholicism in turn fired the imagination and idealism of the young Hilaire Belloc. Belloc and the brothers Cecil and Gilbert Chesterton embraced the encyclical’s teachings as the basis of the new political philosophy they named Distributism.2 A Distributist League and Distributist weeklies were established, and attracted significant followings, primarily among Catholics. Following Gilbert Chesterton’s death and the effective demise of British Distributism in the mid-1930s, Distributism in evolved forms was re-born, most notably in Atlantic Canada and the Basque region of Spain.3 1. C. Chesterton, ‘Shaw and My Neighbour’s Chimney’, in The New Witness, 3 May 1917, p. 13. 2. Gilbert Chesterton is so styled to distinguish him from his younger and now little remembered brother Cecil, but was more commonly known by the initials ‘GK’ or ‘GKC’. He, Cecil and Belloc were at the time rising stars of London journalism, published authors and former socialists, whose schooling in and around the socialist movements of the day Gilbert saw as having been instrumental in bringing them to Distributism. That Belloc’s involvement should have been so seminal and central was not necessarily an unmixed blessing for the Distributist cause. To Distributism’s advantage, he was a quintessential polymath and public intellectual — a gifted historian, political theoretician, polemicist, novelist and poet whose contributions enriched and enlivened public debate on major issues for more than half a century. Conversely, to the detriment of Distributism, he was also at times conspicuously careless with facts, overbearing, offensive and intolerant. His anti- Semitism in particular cost Distributism support in quarters in which it might otherwise have gained a more attentive hearing. In the 1930s, the admiration he and some associates expressed for Mussolini and their uncritical championing of Franco in the Spanish Civil War divided the Distributist movement and brought Distributism into significant disrepute. Personal tragedies, career setbacks and chronic financial insecurity frequently distracted him from his Distributist obligations and undertakings, and denied the movement his support and encouragement at stages when its need for them was most acute. 3. For the Atlantic Canada and Basque Distributist experiences and Distributism more generally, see R. Mathews, Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stakeholder Society, Sydney, Australia, Pluto Press and London, Comerford and Miller, 1999. For Distributism in Australia, see R. Mathews, ‘Collateral Damage: B. A. Santamaria and the Marginalising of Social Catholicism’, in Labour History, no. 92, May 2007, pp. 89–111. ARENA journal no. 29/30, 2008 Poverty, Socialism and Social Catholicism 133 Poverty So taken for granted has the idea of poverty consequent and attendant on the Industrial Revolution become that the outrage and unease of conscience to which it once gave rise is largely forgotten. Its immediacy and enormity as witnessed at first hand by the founder Distributists requires reiteration. That the poor could not be ignored was due in part to the fact that increasingly they and the better off or well to do were around the corner from one another. The poor also were in absolute terms more numerous, their ranks swollen not least by the massive influx of destitute Irish refugees fleeing from famine and the exactions of the largely absentee landlords who were so brutally oppressing and dispossessing them. By the 1851 census, Irish expatriates accounted for some 733,866 of the overall population, living in conditions more abject even than those of the indigenous poor, and by their competition in the labour market further driving down wages and worsening the wider unemployment, underemployment, impoverishment and destitution. Concurrently, great wealth and conspicuous consumption had rarely been flaunted in so brazen and blatant a manner. The upshot was a growing sense of the moral untenability of insufficiency in the presence of excess. Britain’s future Conservative Party Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli wrote famously in his novel Sybil in 1845 that Britain was: Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by different breeding, are fed by different food, are ordered by different manners and are not governed by the same laws.4 An 1883 report on the living conditions of the London poor — Andrew Mearns’ passionate cry for working-class housing and sanitation reform in his 1883 best-selling The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Conditions of the ABJECT POOR — saw the situation as being of so unambiguous a gravity and urgency as to leave no room for doubt or procrastination: While we have been building our churches and solacing 4. B. Disraeli, 1845, Sybil, Ware, Hertfordshire, Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1995, p. 58. ARENA journal no. 29/30, 2008 134 Race Mathews ourselves with our religion and dreaming that the millennium was coming, the poor have been growing poorer, the wretched more miserable, and the immoral more corrupt; the gulf has been daily widening which separates the lowest classes of the community from our churches and chapels, and from decency and civilisation. THIS TERRIBLE FLOOD OF SIN AND MISERY IS GAINING UPON US.5 By the 1880s, inquiry and advocacy had been forcing the depth and prevalence of poverty on the attention of an increasingly receptive and aroused community for more than half a century. Notable — albeit far from exhaustive — milestones along the century’s progression to an informed and passionate social consciousness and conscience were marked by the 1827 Select Committee on Emigration, the investigative journalism and social research of Henry Mayhew’s mid-century 1843 Morning Chronicle articles and London Labour and the London Poor, Mearns’ 1883 inquiry into working-class housing and sanitation, and the definitive quantification of poverty at the close of the century by Charles Booth in London and Seebohm Rowntree in York. The privation and destitution consequent on industrialization and urbanization was captured and encapsulated at the outset by the 1827 Select Committee on Emigration. A representative example from the Committee’s Minutes of Evidence reads: Mrs Hulton and myself, in visiting the poor, were asked by a person almost starving to go into a house. We there found on one side of the fire a very old man, apparently dying, on the other side a young man about eighteen with a child on his knee, whose mother had just died and been buried. We were going away from that house, when the woman said, ‘Sir you have not seen all’. We went upstairs, and, under some rags, we found another young man, the widower; and on turning down the rags, which he was unable to remove himself, we found another man who was dying, and who did die in the course of the day. I have no doubt that the family were actually starving at the time’.6 Mayhew — in the view of some ‘incomparably the greatest social 5. A. Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: an Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor (1883), in A. S. Wohl (ed.), The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, New York, Humanities Press, 1970, pp. 58–9. Emphasis in the original. 6. E. P. Thompson, 1965, The Making of the English Working Class, London, Gollancz, p. 286. ARENA journal no. 29/30, 2008 Poverty, Socialism and Social Catholicism 135 investigator in the mid-century’7 — captured the impact on the lives of the labouring poor of insufficiencies and irregularities of work. His London Labour and the London Poor reads: ‘There is barely sufficient work for the regular employment of half our labourers, so that only 1,500,000 are fully and constantly employed, while 1,500,000 more are employed only half their time, and the remaining 1,500,000 wholly unemployed, obtaining a day’s work occasionally by the displacement of some of the others’.8 The effect was devastating.

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