Books by Hilaire Belloc

This early work by world famous Anglo-French author and historian Hilaire Belloc was first published in 1902 and is both expensive and hard to find in its first edition. Considered to be his best work by many critics, it details a journey to Rome following in the footsteps of the Christian pilgrims. This is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the author, Christianity or the history of Europe. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

In his treatise on European economic history (The Servile State, 1912) Hilaire Belloc explores the many failings of the Capitalist system. He explains that Capitalism emerged from the English Reformation, reached its present form during England's Industrial Revolution, and from there was exported to the rest of the world."It was in England that the Industrial System arose. It was in England that all its traditions and habits were formed; and because the England in which it arose was already a Capitalist England, modern Industrialism, wherever you see it at work to-day, having spread from England, has proceeded upon the Capitalist model."Belloc also suggests that Capitalism has supplanted another, earlier system, one that had developed throughout Catholic Europe, a system he and his good friend G.K. Chesterton referred to as "Distributism.""Property was an institution native to the State and enjoyed by the great mass of its citizens. Co-operative institutions, voluntary regulations of labour, restricted the completely independent use of property by its owners only in order to keep that institution intact and to prevent the absorption of small property by great.""This excellent state of affairs which we had reached after many centuries of Christian development, and in which the old institution of slavery had been finally eliminated from Christendom, did not everywhere survive. In England in particular it was ruined."

This book is written to maintain and prove the following truth:That our free modern society, in which the means of production are owned by a few being necessarily in unstable equilibrium, it is tending to reach a condition of stable equilibrium BY THE ESTABLISHMENT OF COMPULSORY LABOUR LEGALLY ENFORCIBLE UPON THOSE WHO DO NOT OWN THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION FOR THE ADVANTAGE OF THOSE WHO DO. With this principle of compulsion applied against the non-owners there must also come a difference in their status; and in the eyes of society and of its positive law men will be divided into two sets: the first economically free and politically free, possessed of the means of production, and securely confirmed in that possession; the second economically unfree and politically unfree, but at first secured by their very lack of freedom in certain necessaries of life and in a minimum of well-being beneath which they shall not fall.

Here, Belloc writes of a trip through Sweden and Denmark in 1938, a nostalgic trip taken forty-three years after his first Scandanvian trip in 1895.This volume includes Belloc's history and topography of the area.

The European history is explained by Belloc, who addresses the influence of peoples and religions, mainly the catholic religion, in the history of the continent.

Hilaire Belloc's Europe and the Faith will be of interest to all those - Catholic and non-Catholic equally - who value the contributions of European Civilisation and see possibilities in a United Europe beyond the trade agreements, red tape and political bureaucracy of the present EU. Belloc, the famous poet, essayist, novelist and historian, here shows the organic unity upon which Europe was built over the course of centuries, her rise, flourishing, subversion and decline into petty-statism, capitalism and tyranny. He looks beyond the persistent anti-Catholic propaganda and shows that Catholic Europe was the high point of European Civilisation where even the humblest of people lived well. Belloc shows that tyranny, greed, exploitation and disunity were ushered by the Reformation, heralding the capitalism and plutocracy that continue to enslave the world.Kerry Bolton's 'Introduction' reviews Belloc's major points, drawing from the famous social commentator William Cobbett, who showed that even the humblest classes of Medieval Europe lived far better than their counterparts centuries later. Bolton shows further that the present conception of European Union is a counterfeit and a fraud, planned and implemented by the Church's traditional enemy, Freemasonry, whose aim is not a Europe of faith but a secular Europe as a prelude to a 'Universal Republic', as shown by Masonic boasts.Also traced is the meaning of 'Europe', its birth as a spiritual concept, and the way the peoples of the Occident prior to the Reformation had a common identity, ethics, and notion of what it was to be 'European'.

A poem describing the sad end of Jim, who ran away from his Nurse and was eaten by a Lion.

The Thames lies at the very heart of London and the south of England. This title offers a view of the river Thames in the early twentieth century. It reveals comparisons between the Thames and the Rhine, the Seine and other important European waterways to highlight the Thames' significance within British life.