Conservative heirs to the agrarian romantics, G. K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc believed the Industrial Revolution had made the English working class less secure because whereas small property holders had been able to live off the land during hard times, wage earners were dependent on their employers. Chesterton and Belloc advocated land reform and other “distributist” policies to resolve this predicament, but their proposals would have required state action on a scale that would have violated their own anti-socialist principles.

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