Hilaire Belloc: I'm tired of love; I'm still more tired of rhyme; but...

But if we are to retain freedom, then we can only do so by keeping the determining mass of the citizens the possessors of property with personal control over it, as individuals or as families. For property is the necessary condition of economic freedom in the full sense of that term. He that has not property is under economic servitude to him who has property, whether the possessor of it be another individual or the State.

Hilaire Belloc

citizens politics wisdom

Let us then repeat and firmly fix this main point: the evil, the root evil, of that to which the term Capitalism has come to be applied, is neither its functioning for profit nor its dependence upon legally protected private property; but the presence of a Proletariat, that is of men possessing political freedom, but dispossessed of economic freedom, and existing in such large numbers in any community as to determine the tone of all that community.

Hilaire Belloc

wisdom roots men

For every time she shouted "Fire!" They only answered "Little liar!" And therefore when her aunt returned, Matilda, and the house, were burned.

Hilaire Belloc

aunt liars time

The machine does not control the mind of man, though it affects the mind of man; it is the mind of man that can and should control the machine.

Hilaire Belloc

wisdom mind men

Economic freedom is in our eyes a good. It is among the highest of temporal goods because it is necessary to the highest life of society through the dignity of man and through the multiplicity of his action, in which multiplicity is life. Through well-divided property alone can the units of society react upon the State. Through it alone can a public opinion flourish. Only where the bulk of the cells are healthy can the whole organism thrive.

Hilaire Belloc

cells eye men

Money gives me pleasure all the time.

Hilaire Belloc

silly-love funny-valentine giving

To control the production of wealth is to control human life itself. To refuse man the opportunity for the production of wealth is to refuse him the opportunity for life; and, in general, the way in which the production of wealth is by law permitted is the only way in which the citizens can legally exist.

Hilaire Belloc

wisdom opportunity men

In the same way the eminence attaching to the mere possession of great wealth disappoints us nine times out of ten, especially if the wealth has been accumulated rapidly. For great wealth is accumulated rapidly by cunning or chance, or a mixture of the two. Cunning has nothing to do with high qualities; it is rather a presumption against them; while chance has nothing to do with them either. Therefore it is that men are always complaining after meeting So-and-so, that he seemed to be astonishingly stupid, though he made a million in ten years and started as a pauper.

Hilaire Belloc

stupid men years

The whole art of the political speech is to put 'nothing' into it. It is much more difficult than it sounds.

Hilaire Belloc

political sound art

The grace of God is courtesy.

Hilaire Belloc

courtesy grace-of-god grace

It is Mind which determines the change of Society, and it was because the mind at work was a Catholic mind that the slave became a serf and was on his way to becoming a peasant and a fully free man-a man free economically as well as politically. The whole spirit of the Church was for small property, and that spirit was slowly, instinctively, working for the establishment of small property throughout Christendom.

Hilaire Belloc

catholic mind men

Under the old philosophy which had governed the high Middle Ages things had been everywhere towards a condition of Society in which property was well distributed throughout the community, and thus the family rendered independent.

Hilaire Belloc

independent community philosophy

Since it is to the advantage of the wage-payer to pay as little as possible, even well-paid labor will have no more than what is regarded in a particular society as the reasonable level of subsistence. The lower ranks of labor will commonly have less, and if public relief were afforded even up to the wage-level of the lowest ranks of labor, that relief would compete in the labor market; check or dry up the supply of wage-labor. It would tend to render the performance of work by the wage-earner redundant.

Hilaire Belloc

dry-up relief levels

In the midst of all these innumerable forms of a common protest and universal ill-ease there has grown up one definite body of doctrine whose adherents are called Communists and who desired the total subversion of what had been, hitherto unquestioned among civilized European men, the general doctrines of property and individual freedom.

Hilaire Belloc

doctrine wisdom men

The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram "a rising of the rich against the poor."

Hilaire Belloc

rising politics wisdom

I put my pencil upon the paper, doubtfully, and drew little lines, considering my theme. But I would not long hesitate in this manner, for I knew that all creation must be chaos first, and then gestures in the void before it can cast out the completed thing.

Hilaire Belloc

lines paper long

The restoration of property would be a complicated, arduous and presumably a lengthy business; the transformation of a Capitalist Society into a Communist one needs nothing but the extension of existing conditions.

Hilaire Belloc

restoration would-be needs

If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.

Hilaire Belloc

thirds institutions slavery

[A]lways keep a-hold of Nurse For fear of finding something worse

Hilaire Belloc

findings nurse

For one thing, I was no longer alone; a man is never alone with the wind-and the boat made three.

Hilaire Belloc

sailing wind men

I'm tired of love; I'm still more tired of rhyme; but money gives me pleasure all the time.