Flee to the Fields

by Dr. Tobias Lanz (Preface by), John McQuillan

Overview

Back in print after 68 years, this anthology of essays is a classic survey of the Catholic reaction to problems created by the industrial revolution and socialism and is a unique milestone in the history of social thought. Reacting to the Depression and the seeming inadequacies of capitalism and socialism, these thinkers contributed landmark essays on the topics of property, craftsmanship, industrialism, and more. With an introduction by Hilaire Belloc, this volume contains a coherent representation of one of the principal schools of thought applying Christian theory to the socioeconomic problems of early- to mid-20th-century Europe. This work will be of interest to anyone concerned with the history of social thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780971828605
Publisher:	Ihs Press
Publication date:	09/01/2002
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.34(d)

About the Author

This volume is an anthology of essays by various scholars including Hilaire Belloc, Fr. Vincent McNabb, Herbert Shove, George Maxwell, Reginald Jebb, and others.

Read an Excerpt

Flee to the Fields

The Faith and Works of the Catholic Land Movement

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By John McQuillan, Herbert Shove, H. Robbins, Vincent McNabb, Reginal Jebb, J. Dey, K.L. Kenrick, George Maxwell H.E.G. Rope

IHS Press

Copyright © 2003 IHS Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-9718286-0-5

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CHAPTER 1

The Origins

by the Rev. John McQuillan, D.D.

It would be quite impossible to say that on a given day, at a given hour, there began in this country the Catholic Land Movement, but one can trace the gradual growth of a conviction which has translated itself into action. The Catholic Land Movement is in actual being. It has enabled Catholics to live and work on the land. If the young plant becomes a mighty tree, as is hoped, generations to come might be desirous to know the initial story of the mustard seed.

As a result of deliberation and study, both of the economic and religious condition of our country at the present time, and of the nature of man as such, there was growing in the minds and hearts of many Catholic men the determination to save their native land and save their Church by freeing themselves and helping to free others from the chains of Industrialism and city life; to develop the country by using its resources to the full, to develop their own personalities by living as freemen on their own land, to develop their Church by bringing it with them into every country district.

The motives behind the Catholic Land Movement will be more fully expounded in the course of this book. The above paragraph is merely a simple statement of what was in the thoughts of some earnest people before any action was taken at all.

It is correct to say that the movement began in Scotland. On the 26th of April, 1929, there was formed in Glasgow, with the permission of the Archbishop of Glasgow, the Scottish Catholic Land Association. This was the first Catholic Society devoted exclusively to the work of settling Catholics on the land. Later, the Scots Hierarchy sent its patronage and blessing to the movement and wished it every possible success.

In January, 1930, it began to publish a quarterly magazine entitled Land for the People, wherein is explained the philosophy of the Catholic Land Movement. This paper has since become the organ of all the existing Catholic Land Associations.

The next group to be formed was in London, in January, 1931. It took the name of the English Catholic Land Association, and had the same objects as the one already established in Scotland.

The good example spread to Birmingham where the Midlands Catholic Land Association was set up on 1st March of the same year with the approval of the Archbishop of Birmingham. The Catholic Land Association previously existing in England was reformed in the following June, and obtained the patronage of His Eminence Cardinal Bourne, and changed its name to the South of England Catholic Land Association.

Manchester was the next to move and on 2nd October, 1931, a group of Catholics there set going the North of England Catholic Land Association with the approval of the Bishop of Salford.

The youngest society of all is, at the time of writing, the Liverpool Catholic Land Association, established on 14th October, 1932, with the approval of the Archbishop of Liverpool.

Thus there are five kindred land societies, each independent of the other, but pursuing the same end with extraordinary identity of programme and unique similarity of outlook. They are united by a Standing Joint Committee, representing each Association, by means of which each group is kept in touch with the others, and unity of policy or action is preserved.

To find the beginning of actual land work, as distinct from propaganda, one must return to Scotland. The Scottish Catholic Land Association leased Broadfield Farm, Symington, Lanarkshire, and took possession of it on 27th May, 1931. It was opened as a training centre for young men who wished to learn farming and to settle later on the land. They were accompanied by the present writer, who also became parish priest of the surrounding district – the whole of South Lanarkshire – a territory of over one hundred square miles.

In December of the same year this Association began to work Bonnaughton Farm, Bearsden, Dumbartonshire, which they intended to lease as a training centre for young women. They were not permitted to use this farm for such a purpose, so they converted it into another training centre for men and entered into possession of it on 28th May, 1932. No priest is in residence there; the trainees live beside the diocesan seminary, whose land they cultivate.

On the other side of the border also land work had begun. The South of England Catholic Land Association leased Old Brown's Farm, Chartridge, Chesham, Buckinghamshire, on 2nd April, 1932. This place, too, is conducted as a training centre, and is presided over by Mr. Bryan Keating, the Secretary of the Association who went with the first batch of trainees. For a time this little colony had the spiritual ministrations of Rev. Francis Tierney, of Salford Diocese.

Then the Midlands Catholic Land Association got to work and opened a training centre at West Fields Farm, Market Bosworth, Leicestershire, on 22nd February, 1933. Fr. Tierney went there from Old Brown's Farm and became the warden and chaplain of the new colony.

The reason why a beginning was made with training centres will be explained in another chapter. Suffice it to say that the above record is a plain statement of what has been achieved in the infancy of the Catholic Land Movement.

Numbers of the young men adopted by the respective Associations are now fully trained in every branch of farming. Some have obtained situations on farms; some have become managers of farms. What the leaders of the movement desire for each of their trained men is a farm, a family farm, where each may live and work on his own land. The only obstacle to such an achievement is our poverty. When this has been removed, we shall have abandoned the chronicle of origins and come into the history of a new civilization.

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COMMANDER HERBERT WILLIAM SHOVE

During World War I, LCdr. Herbert Shove commanded the Royal Navy Submarines C-2 (1915–1916) and E-29 (1915–1922); he was called up again during World War II. He won both the Distinguished Service Order and the Order of the British Empire. During the interwar years, he lived at Hallett's Farm at Ditchling, where he worked alongside the others in the community, and was especially well-known for his "illicit still"! Somewhat of an ideal Distributist, Shove was considered an authority on such varied arts as silversmithing, beekeeping, farming, and distilling. He devoted much of his mental energy to economic theory, the best expression of which can be found in his excellent book on the history of trade and manufacturing, The Fairy Ring of Commerce, which was published in 1930 by the Birmingham Branch of the Distributist League. He also served as the Chairman of the South of England Catholic Land Association. Fr. Brocard Sewell said that, because of his beard, Shove looked very much like William Morris.

CHAPTER 2

The Rise and Fall of Industrialism

by Commander Herbert Shove, D.S.O., R.N.

It is a common error to confuse Industrialism with modern scientific technique. To wish to end the industrial system is supposed to involve a desire to relinquish all those added powers over natural forces which man has acquired within the past couple of centuries. Logically, we are told – quite rightly – that if one proposes to do this one cannot stop short of a return to primitive savagery. There are many today who are alive to the necessity of a return to the land but who withhold support of the pioneers of the Land Movement because they think we are irrational fanatics in deprecating the use of, for example, the tractor plough. Or again, because we make it a crucial point that the new settlers shall produce as much as possible for their own immediate consumption rather than for market. These misapprehensions arise from the failure to recognize that the present industrial system is not merely an imperfect system to be reformed, or even an evil system to be ended, but an impermanent system that must, by its very nature, pass away within a comparatively short time.

The Industrial System is not essentially a matter of technique. It is that system wherein society is dominated by the idea of exchange for gain. Its overlords are middlemen whose test of everything is, "will it pay"; that is, "will it give us more power to effect further exchanges?" This is not necessarily the object of exchange. "The exchange of things is twofold," says St. Thomas Aquinas, "one natural, as it were, and necessary, whereby the commodity is exchanged for another, or money is taken for a commodity in order to satisfy the needs of life. Such-like trading, properly so-called, does not belong to the middlemen, but rather to housekeepers or civil servants who have to provide the household or the State with the necessaries of life. The other kind of exchange is either that of money for money or of any commodity for money, not on account of the necessities of life, but for profit, and this kind of exchange, properly speaking, regards the middleman. The first kind of exchange is commendable because it supplies a natural need. The second is justly deserving of blame because, considered in itself, it satisfies the greed for gain, which knows no limit and tends to infinity. Hence trading, considered in itself, has a certain debasement attaching thereto, insofar as, by its nature, it does not imply a virtuous or necessary end."

It is to be observed – indeed St. Thomas goes on to say so – that the above passage does not mean that it is sinful to be a middleman or to trade for profit. But it does mean that this manner of life is not, in itself, deserving of high consideration. It must be controlled, first by the conscience of the merchant himself, recognizing that he is engaged in a highly dangerous occupation which may very easily become anti-social, and therefore, sinful, and secondly by the watchfulness of statesmen not themselves exposed to its temptations and able therefore to take a disinterested view.

Now the statesman is nothing if he have not the power to enforce his decisions. Justice without her sword becomes a laughing stock to the criminal. With the decline of the moral restraint of the Faith on the mercantile mind there has been associated, particularly in the countries wherein the authority of the Church has been most completely denied, a tendency to deny also the authority of the "Prince" (in the medieval sense). English medieval history is largely a record of more or less successful attempts by Kings to curb the power of overweening nobles. After the rise of the squirearchy, to whom the balance of power passed through the overthrow of the Church, the struggle became one between this class and the Crown. In this the squires were entirely successful.

The feudal theory of landholding was of a graduated personal responsibility of administration culminating in the King, who, as "Lord Paramount" was the trustee – under God – of the National Heritage. However far the practice fell short of this ideal it was always recognized and often insisted upon. It put landlordism on a different, and a higher plane than commercialism. The rise of the squires destroyed it and its last vestiges – save in the verbiage of legal documents – were swept away by the Statute of Tenures – passed under the Commonwealth and re-enacted after the Restoration – whereby land was practically assimilated to goods and made the subject of absolute private ownership.

After this there was really nothing to give the landlord a right to regard himself as the superior of the trader. Nevertheless, the social prestige attaching to landholding has survived almost to this day, though ever diminishing. So, too, it would be grossly unfair to represent the squires as universally oblivious of their duties as trustees of their estates for the common good. Here again, most of us could name even living representatives of the true feudal tradition. Though it is to be feared that in a great many instances family pride is the ruling motive in the desire to "keep up" the estate; or, at best, the idea of a kind of "charity" towards "inferiors" who are not able to look after their own affairs. This doctrine of poverty as arising necessarily from natural inferiority is a legacy of the system of "Political Economy," originated to salve the consciences of the wealthy during the elaboration of the system of mercantile dominance.

We have seen already how landed wealth was assimilated to mercantile. But throughout its history the squirearchy was constantly recruited from the ranks of the mercantile classes, whose riches were gained in the first place chiefly by exploiting the prowess of English seamen. At the outset, in Elizabethan times, these adventurers were hardly to be distinguished from pirates. One of the most famous of them originated the highly lucrative slave trade. Next came the trade to the Indies, the pioneers of which, the Portuguese, soon found that they had but blazed a trail for rivals from France, Holland and England. The Levant, and even Muscovy, also claimed attention. All these, however, were essentially trades in luxuries. Hardly anything was imported that could be produced at home; while all that was essential to national life and culture was so produced. But insofar as the trade was anything more than piracy something had to be exported in return.

For some centuries this export question had been an important one. England is a country well adapted to produce large quantities of high grade wool. The temptation to landlords to divert their land from tillage to sheep ranching wherever they were in a position to do so had proved too much for many of them as early as the fourteenth century. But, so long as the medieval idea of responsibility held, attempts, more or less successful, had been made to check this in the interests of the rural population and of national self-sufficiency.

Under the guild system of industry the introduction of devices which would tend to produce unemployment, or to deprive a trained workman of the advantage of his skill, was also discouraged. Medieval authorities, whether political or industrial, were alive to the injustice of such destruction of the wealth of the poorer classes in this immaterial form of personal skill, and interfered to restrain the use of such machines as, e.g., the gig mill and the fulling mill.

Mr. R.H. Tawney in his admirable book on Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, has dealt at length with the effect of the hard Calvinistic theology of the Puritans on commercial morality. The permeation of England by this spirit was helped, throughout the seventeenth century, by a number of contributory causes. We have already touched upon the development of overseas trade out of the buccaneering of the sixteenth century. Along with this there was also going on an infiltration of Calvinistic ideas from Scotland and Holland, and later, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, from the French Huguenot body. These influences tended to reinforce the indigenous growth of the spirit of mercantilism and overseas exploitation.

Once that spirit gains control of the sword of justice in a community the doom of its peasantry, and "landed aristocracy" is sealed. So also, as we hope to show in the remaining pages of this short outline, is the permanent greatness of the nation. This is due to the interaction of two natural economic causes, forgetfulness of which has led to many modern errors and false systems. Firstly, the difference in what we may call the "rigidity of the time factor" in agriculture and in industrial production. Secondly, the difference in the importance to human subsistence of organic and inorganic substances; of things that grow and of things that are "made" from materials that do not grow. Closely connected with which is the distinction between things consumed in their use (fungibles) and things not so consumed (non-fungibles). We will first consider the operation of the time factor in enabling unrestricted commercialism to destroy national agriculture.

We have already pointed out the difficulty that confronts the overseas adventurer when, ceasing to be a mere pirate, he becomes a trader. Imports can only be paid for in exports.

It is, of course, by no means unusual at the outset for valuable imports to be obtained in return for practically valueless exports. But this stage does not last long. In India and the countries wherein the commercial greatness of England was chiefly built up, the people were not, even at the outset, unsophisticated savages. Large as were the profits of such trade, substantial payment was always necessary. The tributary system on which, e.g., the Spanish Empire was founded, depends on an initial military subjugation of the exploited territory which was only later, and very partially, the English method. Nor, of course, could payment be made in specie, for the precious metals are not English products, but rather those of the other parties to the trade. And the traditional wool or corn of earlier English export were in no demand.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Flee to the Fields by John McQuillan, Herbert Shove, H. Robbins, Vincent McNabb, Reginal Jebb, J. Dey, K.L. Kenrick, George Maxwell H.E.G. Rope. Copyright © 2003 IHS Press. Excerpted by permission of IHS Press.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction by Dr. Tobias Lanz,
Preface by Hilaire Belloc,
The Blessing given by the Holy See to the Catholic Land Associations and their work by E. Cardinal Pacelli,
Flee to the Fields,
I. The Origins by the Rev. John McQuillan, D.D.,
II. The Rise and Fall of Industrialism by Commander Herbert Shove, D.S.O., R. N.,
III. The Line of Approach by H. Robbins,
IV. Training for the Land by the Rev. John McQuillan, D.D.,
V. The Family by the Very Rev. Vincent McNabb, O. P., S. T.M.,
Appendix,
VI. The Community by Captain Reginald Jebb, M.A., M. C.,
VII. The Church and the Land by the Right Rev. Monsignor J. Dey, D. S.O., Rector of Oscott College,
VIII. The Case for the Peasant by K.L. Kenrick, M.A.,
IX. The Reconstruction of the Crafts by George Maxwell,
X. Looking Before and After by the Rev. H.E. G. Repe, M.A.,