I shall consider these separate aspects of agricultural distributism more or less in the order in which I have just noted them; but here in the preliminary note I am concerned only with the primary fact. If we could create a peasantry we could create a conservative populace; and he would be a bold man who should undertake to tell us how the present industrial deadlock in the great cities is to produce a conservative populace. I am well aware that many would call the conservatism by coarser names; and say that peasants are stupid and stick-in-the-mud and tied to dull and dreary existence. I know it is said that a man must find it monotonous to do the twenty things that are done on a farm, whereas, of course, he always finds it uproariously funny and festive to do one thing hour after hour and day after day in a factory. I know that the same people also make exactly the contrary comment; and say it is selfish and avaricious for the peasant to be so intensely interested in his own farm, instead of showing, like the proletarians of modern industrialism, a selfless and romantic loyalty to somebody else’s factory, and an ascetic self-sacrifice in making profits for somebody else. Giving each of these claims of modern capitalism their due weight, it is still permissible to say that in so far as the peasant proprietor is certainly tenacious of the peasant property, is concentrated on the interest or content with the dullness, as the case may be, he does, in fact, constitute a solid block of private property which can be counted on to resist Communism; which is not only more than can be said of the proletariat, but is very much more than any capitalists say of them. I do not believe that the proletariat is honeycombed with Bolshevism (if honey be an apt metaphor for that doctrine), but if there is any truth in the newspaper fears on that subject it would certainly seem that large properties cannot prevent the thing happening, whereas small properties can. But, as a matter of fact, all experience is against the assertion that peasants are dreary and degraded savages, crawling about on all fours and eating grass like the beasts of the field. All over the world, for instance, there are peasant dances; and the dances of peasants are like dances of kings and queens. The popular dance is much more stately and ceremonial and full of human dignity than is the aristocratic dance. In many a modern countryside the countryfolk may still be found on high festivals wearing caps like crowns and using gestures like a religious ritual, while the castle or chateau of the lords and ladies is already full of people waddling about like monkeys to the noises made by negroes. All over Europe peasants have produced the embroideries and the handicrafts which were discovered with delight by artists when they had long been neglected by aristocrats. These people are not conservative merely in a negative sense; though there is great value in that which is negative when it is also defensive. They are also conservative in a positive sense; they conserve customs that do not perish like fashions, and crafts less ephemeral than those artistic movements which so very soon cease to move. The Bolshevists, I believe, have invented something which they call Proletarian Art, upon what principle I cannot imagine; save that they seem to have a mysterious pride in calling themselves a proletariat when they claim to be no longer proletarian. I rather think it is merely the reluctance of the half-educated to relinquish the use of a long word. Anyhow, there never has been in this world any such thing as Proletarian Art. But there has most emphatically been such a thing as Peasant Art.

  I suppose that what is really meant is Communist Art; and that phrase alone will reveal much. I suppose a truly communal art would consist in a hundred men hanging on to one huge paint-brush like a battering-ram, and steering it across some vast canvas with the curves and lurches and majestic hesitations that would express, in darkly outlined forms, the composite mind of the community. Peasants have produced art because they were communal but not communist. Custom and a corporate tradition gave unity to their art; but each man was a separate artist. It is that satisfaction of the creative instinct in the individual that makes the peasantry as a whole content and therefore conservative. A multitude of men are standing on their own feet, because they are standing on their own land. But in our country, alas, the landowners have been standing upon nothing, except what they have trampled underfoot.

  II VOWS AND VOLUNTEERS

  We have sometimes been asked why we do not admire advertisers quite so much as they admire themselves. One answer is that it is of their very nature to admire themselves. And it is of the very nature of our task that people must be taught to criticize themselves; or rather (preferably) to kick themselves. They talk about Truth in Advertising; but there cannot be any such thing in the sharp sense in which we need truth in politics. It is impossible to put in the cheery terms of “publicity” either the truth about how bad things are, or the truth about how hard it will be to cure them. No advertiser is so truthful as to say, “Do your best with our rotten old typewriter; we can’t get anything better just now.” But we have really got to say, “Do your best with your rotten old machine of production; don’t let it fall to pieces too suddenly.” We seldom see a gay and conspicuous hoarding inscribed, “You are in for a rough time if you use our new kitchen-range.” But we have really got to say to our friends, “You are in for a rough time if you start new farms on your own; but it is the right thing.” We cannot pretend to be offering merely comforts and conveniences. Whatever our ultimate view of labour-saving machinery, we cannot offer our ideal as a labour-saving machine. There is no more question of comfort than there is for a man in a fire, a battle, or a shipwreck. There is no way out of the danger except the dangerous way.

  The sort of call that must be made on the modern English is the sort of call that is made before a great war or a great revolution. If the trumpet give an uncertain sound — but it must be unmistakably the sound of a trumpet. The megaphone of mere mercantile self-satisfaction is merely loud and not in the least clear. In its nature it is saying smooth things, even if it is roaring them; it is like one whispering soft nothings, even if its whisper is a horrible yell. How can advertisement bid men prepare themselves for a battle? How can publicity talk in the language of public spirit? It cannot say, “Buy land at Blinkington-on-Sea and prepare yourself for the battle with stones and thistles.” It cannot give a certain sound, like the old tocsin that rang for fire and flood, and tell the people of Puddleton that they are in danger of famine. To do men justice, no man did announce the needs of Kitchener’s Army like the comforts of the kitchen-range. We did not say to the recruits, “Spend your holiday at Mons.” We did not say, “Try our trenches; they are a treat.” We made some sort of attempt to appeal to better things. We have to make that appeal again; and in the face of worse things. It is this that is made so difficult by the whole tone of advertisement. For the next thing we have to consider is the need of independent individual action on a large scale. We want to make the need known, as the need for recruits was made known. Education was too commercial in origin, and has allowed itself to be largely swamped by commercial advertisement. It came too much from the town; and now it is nearly driven from the town. Education really meant the teaching of town things to country people who did not want to learn them. I suggest that education should now mean the teaching of country things to town people who do want to learn them. I quite admit it would be much better to begin at least with those who really want it. But I also maintain that there are really a great many people in town and country who do really want it.

  Whether we look forward to an Agrarian Law or no, whether our notion of distribution is rigid or rough and ready, whether we believe in compensation or confiscation, whether we look for this law or that law, we ought not to sit down and wait for any law at all. While the grass grows the steed has got to show that he wants grass: the steed has got to explain that he is really a graminivorous quadruped. The fulfilment of parliamentary promises grows rather slower than grass; and if nothing is done before the completion of what is called a constitutional process, we shall be about as near to Distributism as a Labour politician is to Socialism. It seems to me first necessary to revive the medieval or moral method, and call for volunteers.

  The English could do what the Irish did. They could make laws by obeying them. If we are, like the original Sinn Feiners, to anticipate legal change by social agreement, we want two sorts of volunteers, in order to make the experiment on the spot. We want to find out how many peasants there are, actual or potential, who would take over the responsibility of small farms, for the sake of self-sufficiency, of real property, and of saving England in a desperate hour. We want to know how many landlords there are who would now give or sell cheaply their land to be cut up into a number of such farms. Honestly, I think the landlord would have the best of the bargain. Or rather I think that the peasant would have the hardest and most heroic part of the bargain. Sometimes it would practically pay the landlord to chuck the land altogether, since he is paying out to something that does not pay him back. But in any case, everybody has got to realize that the situation is, in no cant phrases, one for heroic remedies. It is impossible to disguise that the man who gets the land, even more than the man who gives up the land, will have to be something of a hero. We shall be told that heroes do not grow on every hedgerow, that we cannot find enough to defend all our hedges. We raised three million heroes with the blast of a bugle but a few years ago; and the trumpet we hear to-day is in a more terrible sense the trump of doom.

  We want a popular appeal for volunteers to save the land; exactly as volunteers in 1914 were wanted to save the country. But we do not want the appeal weakened by that weak-minded, that wearisome, that dismal and deplorable thing that the newspapers call Optimism. We are not asking babies to look pleasant while their photographs are taken; we are asking grown men to meet a crisis as grave as a great war. We are not asking people to cut a coupon out of a newspaper, but to carve a farm out of a trackless waste; and if it is to be successful, it must be faced in something of the stubborn spirit of the old fulfilment of a vow. St. Francis showed his followers the way to a greater happiness; but he did not tell them that a wandering and homeless life would mean Everything as Nice as Mother Makes It; nor did he advertise it on hoardings as a Home From Home. But we live in a time when it is harder for a free man to make a home than it was for a medieval ascetic to do without one.

  The quarrel about the Limehouse slums was a working model of the problem — if we can talk of a working model of something that does not work, and something on which only a madman would model anything. The slum-dwellers actually and definitely say that they prefer their slums to the blocks of flats provided as a refuge from the slums. And they prefer them, it is stated, because the old homes had backyards in which they could pursue “their hobbies of bird-fancying and poultry-rearing.” When offered other opportunities on some scheme of allotment, they had the hideous depravity to say that they liked fences round their private yards. So awful and overwhelming is the Red torrent of Communism as it boils through the brains of the working classes.

  Now, of course, it might conceivably be necessary, in some wild congestion and convulsion, for people’s houses to be piled on top of each other for ever, in the form of a tower of flats. And so it might be necessary for men to climb on other men’s shoulders in a flood or to get out of a chasm cloven by an earthquake. And it is logically conceivable, and even mathematically correct, that we might thin the crowds in the London streets, if we could thus arrange men vertically instead of horizontally. If there were only some expedient by which a man might walk about with another man standing above him, and another above that, and so on, it would save a great deal of jostling. Men are arranged like that in acrobatic performances; and a course of such acrobatics might be made compulsory in all the schools. It is a picture that pleases me very much, as a picture. I look forward (in spirit of art for art’s sake) to seeing such a living tower moving majestically down the Strand. I like to think of the time of true social organization, when all the clerks of Messrs. Boodle & Bunkham shall no longer come up in their present random and straggling fashion, each from his little suburban villa. They shall not even, as in the immediate and intermediary stage of the Servile State, march in a well-drilled column from the dormitory in one part of London, to the emporium in the other. No, a nobler vision has arisen before me into the very heights of heaven. A toppling pagoda of clerks, one balanced on the top of another, moves down the street, perhaps making acrobatic patterns in the air as it moves, to illustrate the perfect discipline of its social machinery. All that would be very impressive; and it really would, among other things, economize space. But if one of the men near the top of that swaying tower were to say that he hoped some day to be able to revisit the earth, I should sympathize with his sense of exile. If he were to say that it is natural to man to walk on the earth, I should find myself in agreement with his school of philosophy. If he were to say that it was very difficult to look after chickens in that acrobatic attitude and altitude, I should think his difficulty a real one. At first it might be retorted that bird-fancying would be even more appropriate to such an airy perch, but in practice those birds would be very fancy birds. Finally, if he said that keeping chickens that laid eggs was a worthy and valuable social work, much more worthy and valuable than serving Messrs. Boodle & Bunkham with the most perfect discipline and organization, I should agree with that sentiment most of all.

  Now the whole of our modern problem is very difficult, and though in one way the agricultural part of it is much the simplest, in another way it is by no means the least difficult. But this Limehouse affair is a vivid example of how we make the difficulty more difficult. We are told again and again that the slum-dwellers of the big towns cannot merely be turned loose on the land, that they do not want to go on the land, that they have no tastes or turn of thought that could make them by any process into a people interested in the land, that they cannot be conceived as having any pleasures except town pleasures, or even any discontents except the Bolshevism of the towns. And then when a whole crowd of them want to keep chickens, we force them to live in flats. When a whole crowd of them want to have fences, we laugh and order them off into communal barracks. When a whole population wishes to insist on palings and enclosures and the traditions of private property, the authorities act as if they were suppressing a Red riot. When these very hopeless slum-dwellers do actually set all their hopes on a rural occupation, which they can still practise even in the slums, we tear them away from that occupation and call it improving their condition. You pick a man up who has his head in a hen-coop, forcibly set him on giant stilts a hundred feet high where he cannot reach the ground, and then say you have saved him from misery. And you add that a man like that can only live on stilts and would never be interested in hens.

  Now the very first question that is always asked of those advocating our sort of agricultural reconstruction is this question, which is fundamental because it is psychological. Whatever else we may or may not need for a peasantry, we do certainly need peasants. In the present mixture and muddle of more or less urbanized civilization, have we even the first elements or the first possibilities? Have we peasants, or even potential peasants? Like all questions of this sort, it cannot be answered by statistics. Statistics are artificial even when they are not fictitious, for they always assume the very fact which a moral estimate must always deny; they assume that every man is one man. They are based on a sort of atomic theory that the individual is really individual, in the sense of indivisible. But when we are dealing professedly with the proportion of different loves or hates or hopes or hungers, this is so far from being a fact that can be assumed, it is the very first that must be denied. It is denied by all that deeper consideration which wise men used to call spiritual, but which fools were frightened out of calling spiritual, till they ventured to say it in Greek and call it psychical or psychological. In one sense the highest spirituality insists, of course, that one man is one. But in the sense here involved, the spiritual view has always been that one man was at least two, and the psychological view has shown some taste for turning him into half a dozen. It is no good, therefore, to discuss the number of peasants who are nothing else but peasants. Very probably there are none at all. It is no good asking how many complete and compact yeomen or yokels are waiting all ready in smock-frocks or blouses, their spades and hay-forks clutched in their hand, in the neighbourhood of Brompton or Brixton; waiting for us to give the signal to rush back to the land. If anybody is such a fool as to expect that sort of thing, the fool is not to be found in our small political party. When we are dealing with a matter of this kind, we are dealing with different elements in the same class, or even in the same man. We are dealing with elements which should be encouraged or educated or (if we must bring the word in somewhere) evolved. We have to consider whether there are any materials out of which to make peasants to make a peasantry, if we really choose to try. Nowhere in these notes have I suggested that there is the faintest possibility of it being done, if we do not choose to try.

  Now, using words in this sensible sense, I should maintain that there is a very large element still in England that would like to return to this simpler sort of England. Some of them understand it better than others, some of them understand themselves better than others; some would be prepared for it as a revolution; some only cling to it very blindly as a tradition; some have never thought of it as anything but a hobby; some have never heard of it and feel it only as a want. But the number of people who would like to get out of the tangle of mere ramifications and communications in the town, and get back nearer to the roots of things, where things are made directly out of nature, I believe to be very large. It is probably not a majority, but I suspect that even now it is a very large minority. A man does not necessarily want this more than everything else at every moment of his life. No sane person expects any movement to consist entirely of such monomaniacs. But a good many people want it a good deal. I have formed that impression from experience, which is of all things the most difficult to reproduce in controversy. I guess it from the way in which numberless suburbans talk about their gardens. I guess it from the sort of things that they really envy in the rich; one of the most notable of which is merely empty space. I notice it in all the element that desires the country, even if it defaces the country. I notice it in the profound popular interest everywhere, especially in England, in the breeding or training of any kind of animal. And if I wanted a supreme, a symbolic, a triumphant example of all that I mean, I could find it in the case I have quoted of these men living in the most miserable slums of Limehouse, and reluctant to leave them because it would mean leaving behind a rabbit in a rabbit-hutch or a chicken in a hen-coop.