Happy New Year! And Thank You All!

At the start of the Year of Our Lord 2005, we want to thank all the readers of the Review - American and otherwise - who have dropped by this weblog since it began. We are still a tiny blog, only averaging about six to eight readers a day, and that only for a few seconds at a time. But it is constant and steady, and the word about us is spreading. Hopefully, it is positive.

Since last we checked, about three months ago or so, we have had visitors to this blog from:

Canada - England - Scotland - Monaco - Spain - Belgium - Holland - Germany - Hong Kong - Phillipines - Australia - India - Venezuela - and Uruguay.

We even had visitors from the University of Stanford and the University of Toronto.

And we are pleased to announce we are no longer alone in promoting Distributism in the weblog world. A new weblog, the "ChesterBelloc Mandate", based in Spain, has been born. A thousand welcomes to the new blog and it's author, Gen. We invite you to visit him at:

http://distributist.blogspot.com

In this new calendar year, we have a lot of prayer and work before us. Socialism and Communism are still spreading throughout the world, while multinational Capitalism continues to grow and consolidate itself. And alas, the anemic vampire of Fascism still lurks here and there in the shadows. But we will not - no, cannot give up now.

The work of Belloc and Chesterton - as well as their legitimate successors - depends on the likes of we at the Review and all of YOU. With prayer, penance and education, and a lot of hard work and honest sweat, we WILL liberate the world from the partisans of Shaw, Wells, Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Mussolini and their ilk on one side, and those of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Ludwig von Mises and their ilk on the other side.

Let us not give up hope of final victory. As Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy:

“Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and eclipse.”

And again:

“For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.”

Let us continue to work and, above all, pray for the establishment of a Distributist Earth.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!