Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1216

Penned notes for a letter to Dr. Limbert

1934 or 1935

 

Dear Dr. Limbert:

To me a consideration of great interest regarding the Middle Ages lies in the fact and circumstance that there was the beginning of a truly new dispensation in the organization of political and social life. From the most ancient time the politics and society had been molded to a plan prescribed by the dream and enforced by the will of the Conqueror. Empire upon empire was deliberately planned and rose and fell. Only in a few places broken and sheltered by nature and relatively isolated from the march of imperial arms had the native genius of peoples found expression in spontaneous social and political forms free from the stultifying bias of an imperial plan. The reference is, of course, chiefly to the Hellenic culture and how it withstood the Persian, weakened to the Macedonian and at last went down compressed in the iron frame of the world-imperial Roman plan. With no more worlds to conquer and destroy, the Roman plan was its own self-destruction. With the basis of life, the productivity of the peoples, almost destroyed by the depredations of the Empire upon their subsistence the economic support of the Imperial organization faded away and no new imperial power raised itself upon the exhausted ruins.

In Europe the largely broken topography, the migratory habits, the narrow margin of wealth and subsistence and doubtless many other factors entered to delay any general reintegration upon any political or social plan. No force without and no power from within could impose its frame. The condition became not unlike a general barbarism without organization and without any authority potent to impose its will.

In this negative state of semi-barbaric equilibrium there was no external plan or pattern to which organization must conform. Whether by choice or not, the human mass perforce must build its social forms under the impulse of its own nature, out of its inherent powers and to the pattern men’s immanent natures prescribed. It seems therefore that we may with confidence look to the beginnings of Mediaeval organization for authentic suggestion of the social pattern into which it is the spontaneous nature of mankind to evolve. We observe the breaking up of the standardized barbaric type in the individual, and the differentiation of individuals into classes and groups according to the social functions they severally performed. This worked out in separate and often isolated communities (for there was little wealth and few facilities for communication and trade) each organized within itself upon the basis of each functional group or class and each individual within the group relating himself to those of other groups upon a rude system of mutual obligation and service, with a lord or baron at the head of the community charged with the vital service of its protection and the furnishing of rights of way and such other facilities and services as the whole community required. For the means to provide these and in recompense for his services, his tenants paid the lord rents in proportion to the lands they held, the amount of which rents were determined, largely at least, by juries drawn from the tenants themselves in manorial courts also officered mainly by them. The real civil government was in the manorial courts and their juries. The land holding class became the civil arm as the lord and his retainers were the military arm of the community and rents were the basis of exchange between them.

In serfdom, of course, we see slavery carried over from the Empire, but in the free cities there were no serfs and the organization was on the same plan of defraying public costs out of rents, any other form of public finance or taxation being practically unknown before the rise of large cities through the development of trade.

We may wonder if the Mediaeval system went down by inherent defects in the type of its organization or by revival of the ancient taxing and ravaging of trade and the perverse warfare of the lords upon each other that finally led to the nationalist states and reintroduction of the concept and ideal of world-empire with planned conquest and control. If the latter we may again be in the road that led to world-wide Rome — and darkness.

Parallel to expansion of warring nationalities into empire we have had the extinguishment of political power in responsible ruling classes whose particular interests, roughly at least, coincided with the general interest and its theoretical diffusion to all the population under republican forms to be re-delegated to professional political groups whose private and particular interests are squarely opposed and inimical to the general safety and welfare. /Sentence? check original/ Extension of empire and of electoral franchise have gone hand in hand. The plan of conquest and dominion is anti-social and is imposed upon men in disregard of their social nature. The republican plan likewise is imposed upon and not evolved from the inner nature of man. Both are great levelers of men but it is at the level to which Rome brought them when their freedom of trade and exchange was broken down and their subsistence destroyed. At the present time with government in the hands of utterly irresponsible groups, that is groups whose particular and private interests run counter to the public welfare; whose relation to the whole is such that they have no definite gain from good government but every direct gain and no direct loss from corrupting it. /Sentence? check original/

The only group who stand in the normal relation of having a direct interest depending upon the public welfare is the land owning interest and class. Their values depend upon the prosperity of every other class. They rise or fall with the fortunes of all. It is the special function and the special interest of this class to guard and protect the wealth-creating, rent-paying public against every power or influence that would weaken or despoil it. And it is their further natural function to supply and administer all the public services at lowest costs and highest efficiency, for their recompense in rents depends on these things being well performed. Land ownership has always been an integral part of government and social organization. It is a prime ingredient of sovereignty. Its function is to maintain the sovereignty and the services upon which the safety and prosperity of the community depends. Its recompense or profit is in the difference between what it costs them to provide for the public safety and security and the public services and the automatic return that comes to them in the enhanced revenues of their lands.

When this great office and administrative function of land ownership fails, every community resource and value declines and with the final demoralization of productive capacity to the level of a bare subsistence for the population, as has so often occurred, all the revenue from land and value of land itself disappears. When the failure of land-ownership to function as protection and service and the depredations of governments on property and trade at last reduce the world to the economic level of bare subsistence and all organization falls apart, an age of darkness and confusion will return.