The Cross and the Plough

Subtitled: "The Organ of the Catholic Land Associations of England and Wales," this serial was the official journal of the Catholic Land Movement founded in Great Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. The serial is 9.75 inches in height. Listed inside the back cover of The Cross & the Plough (Vol. 2 No.4 [1936]) were the following goals sought by the Catholic Land Associations: “To apply to Land Settlement the principles of the Encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, with special reference to their insistence on the natural right of man to private property. To begin at the beginning; that is, by establishing Training Farms for as many as possible of our unemployed and over-industrialized urban people. To set up these trained men, with their families, in small subsistence farms to be owned and managed by the holders, and to do this, as far as possible, in communities of land workers and craftsmen forming fully rounded village units. To urge constantly on the Government, and on those who have been spared the horrors of unemployment, the vital need of balancing the realm of England by restoring a landowning Peasantry. To educate Catholics in the need for creating a Catholic Rural Life, and in the necessity for restoring the conception of Family Subsistence Farming to England. To collect funds for all these objects.” The economic system of Distributism, as described by G. K. Chesterton in his The Outline of Sanity (1926), is related to the Catholic Land Movement. For this reason, these volumes were part of the Robert John Bayer Memorial Chesterton Collection.