Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2230

Citadel, Market and Altar, Chapters 13-16, with some slight revisions of punctuation

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 13

The Socialization of Government

All the security, all the capacity to permanently endure that a society enjoys comes from the convention of property and the exercise of ownership through the contractual technique of the Market. The Citadel itself doubtless depended for its origin on voluntary relationships such as “commendation” that prevailed prior to the contractual relationship of land lords (land givers or distributors) and the protected freeholders or users, these last being unforced men having none but reciprocal or exchange obligations towards their lords. This is the fundamental application of the free social relation­ship that conquest by alien arms or corruption and tyranny of the Citadel have so often perverted and finally destroyed. Any organiza­tion consists in the mutual functioning of its parts. Even a successful tyranny depends upon some mutuality of obligation among those who are so organized as to impose it.

 

 Instead of continuing its encroachments upon the free system of the Market, circumscribing the field of freedom and contract, thus undermining the original principle even of its own formation, the Citadel needs to engage itself only with the prevention and punishment of force or equivalent fraud, and to accept the advantages of the contractual process in the performance of its public and community services. This social-izing of government itself cannot fail to follow upon discovery of the presently existing operation of prop­erty in land and resources as the democratic distributive service through a contractual as opposed to a political and coercive process. This discovery will render obvious the profits and the advantages to all of extending this proprietary public service, contractually per­formed, into the field of public protection against official and politi­cal, as well as against criminal, invasions of personal liberty and property and of the right of the society to exist. This assumption of responsibility for public protection, and eventually for all community services, on the part of the basic proprietary system, namely, the proprietors of the community territory and lands, adequately organized for unity of policy and con­cert of action, will introduce a veritable social technique and a solvent system of public services in lieu of the prevailing political tyranny — whether this be absolute and unlimited or watered down with popu­lar elections and the ever ephemeral and crumbling barriers of con­stitutional or other attempted limitations.

 

 When the public community authority rests only upon community ownership and thus has no coercive but only free contractual and therefore mutual service relationships with the community members as recipients of the community services, both protective and positive, the entire available life-years of the population can be freely engaged in the production and mutual exchange of services and goods, and in the free artistries of the creative spirit, the emanci­pated mind.

 

 The free technique that is peculiar to the market — the freedom to serve and to be served by consent and exchange — as it becomes more universal, will so release the distribution of physical things that their production will rise far above the material needs of man­kind. The lengthening life-years of the race need then be devoted only in small part to the physical needs to which they are bound. This efficiency and economy at the physical base emancipates the energies of the population from the compulsions imposed by their material and physical needs and releases them to the unforced and spontaneous expression of creative power. It releases a whole popula­tion to do what in the crude and only partly social-ized state is denied to the many and reserved to the few — the practice of creative artistries in all the free adventures of spirit and mind. This is the free realm of spirit rising out of but transcending the compulsions imposed by the physical and necessitous world. The things created here are real in the sense that they are abiding; they do not pass away.

 

 These creations of inspiration and joy, these services of the spirit and imagination, transcend the material services of the Market as the free and voluntary engagements of contract in the Market tran­scend the crude compulsive and destructive techniques of government and all the strongholds of protection and power. But these things of the spirit — children of the Altar, the temple, symposium and school — in their intangible forms cannot be traded or exchanged; nor need they be, for in this realm the givers are enriched in the giving as well as those who receive. Their original and inspired services and creations, their discoveries and formulations, can be performed only once, but they remain the eternal heritage of man­kind. As those services are esthetic and spiritual, so is their reward. None other is sought nor even desired.

CHAPTER 14

Climate and Conquest

The development and practice of the contractual relationship, upon which all societal organization depends, is much influenced by climate and terrain.

 

 Where nature is least bountiful and least accordant to the biologic needs of man, as in polar lands, and where she is most bountiful, as in the warm, moist and fertile lands, human life is either most pre­carious or most abject. In both conditions life is maintained by what can be appropriated from the environment with but little change. In the one case, the process of appropriation is enormously difficult and even impossible, except through the intimate and immediate co­operation of members of familial groups or tribes. Even thus, the resources are too few and sparse and the conditions too rigorous to admit of either a prosperous or a populous community.

 

 But in warm and fertile lands the ultimate advantage of the better conditions is not great. Here not nature but man himself oppresses man. Even under the most primitive economy, nature’s response to the labors of one can afford subsistence for two. Hence the predatory instincts of wandering tribes, carried over into the settled com­munity, determine that one class shall serve while another rules. Thus a high degree of social organization is not found at either en­vironmental extreme.

 

 But under the conditions of moderately high latitude as in the temperate zones, and at moderately high altitudes in the trqpics, the predatory relationship is too inefficient to prevail. Here the con­tractual relations of division of labor and exchange, industry and trade, most tend to spring up. Where the physical conditions are highly diverse, changeable and relatively sparse, only the freer and more efficient social relationships can prevail. Moreover, there is stimulation to the development of intelligence, versatility and personal competency and power, in contrast to the enervation of masters and the degradation of slaves in the constant and more bounteous climes. This seems to account for the historic conquests of the ages coming always from the higher latitudes and altitudes and imping­ing on the warm, flat and fertile lands, wherein the victors accept, adopt and maintain the compulsive technique of the vanquished, with its attendant personal degradations and deteriorations, and are in turn themselves enervated and overwhelmed.

 

 As trade relations geographically and in other ways expand, specialization develops and all productivity is raised. The enslavement of persons gradually gives way to depredations on trade. The personal enslavement of individuals gives way to the less palpable but more remunerative mass enslavement of populations by official depredations on their property, production and trade by the im­position of taxes at home and the exaction of tribute abroad. This gives rise to colonial systems in which power follows conquest, still proceeding from the colder and dominating the warmer parts of the earth. Personal absolutism gives way to political tyranny, chattel slavery to political sovereignty.

 

 Thus two great systems have developed, the system of property, service and production with distribution by contract under mutual de­sire, consent and exchange, and the system of depredation by coercion and force under some form of political organization, domestic or foreign, drastic or mild. Thus is the House of Man divided against itself. Mild governments practice a degree of warfare upon the pro­ductivity of freedom under contractual relations; drastic ones make war in greater degree against the productive processes that they live upon and destroy, alike during their periods of armed peace and in the convulsions of their international wars. These wars consolidate cities into states, states into super-states and colonial empires. Empire ex­pands, on the one hand, by conquest and annexation; on the other, by the defensive alliances in federations in which the stronger ally always dominates the league or some central power subjugates the federated whole. Each conquering imperial power, in its turn, either annexes its rivals by conquest or by new alliance, and the last federa­tion is itself absorbed. The cycle of political history is the story of centralization and decentralization, the consolidation and collapse of sovereign, war-making powers; it is a swing from many petty sovereignties through the anarchy of wars to the world-wide tyranny of a Pax Romana and the swing back again. Such is the long rhythm in the world history of political power.

 

 The wars of the current century are an imperial strife for compulsive dominance over the Atlantic world. They are but a mam­moth modern, replica of the ancient struggles that consummated in Roman dominance over the Mediterranean world. But whatever Atlantic power at last prevails will reckon with Oriental empire under some Asiatic banner in contest for supremacy over the Pacific and, thereby, a destructive dominance over all the world.[1]

 

This self-liquidating technique of the political powers leading to final “survival of the fittest” in the world of empire is but a global exemplification of the Darwinian process of struggle and survival that seems universal to every realm of conflict, compulsion and force, and which none but the social order, the creative power of contractual relationships, can finally transcend.

 

 From the socio-biologic and natural-science point of view, the current struggle for world supremacy, like all its predecessor conflicts, is a re-arrangement of the mass, motion and duration factors or components, a degradation of human or population energy to a lower order of relationship and organization.

 

This descent through political strife into a more acutely anti-social relationship among the nations of men is only the crude manifesta­tion of erstwhile social energy that has been

de-social-ized by the impairment and abrogation of contractual relationships. Until service and not force becomes the instrument of government, while war continues to be the only consummation of governmental power, a population must lose at last even in victories all that it ever feared to lose in defeat.

CHAPTER 15

The Tragedy of Public Works

Extensions of governmental power, long continued, are always followed by social decline. Periods of transition between social growth and social decline are marked by great proliferations of political pageantries in state-supported arts and architecture and public works. These are the flowers that spring from social decay. They garnish dying dynasties with temples and tombs, pyramids and hanging gardens; they clothe moribund democracies in Periclean beauty, and preside with Augustan grandeur where republics are en­slaved. Even when they are not produced by the forced labor of captives and slaves, great public works nonetheless rest upon the depredations of coercive governments invading the freedom and ending the bounty of the contractual world.

 

 The supposed services of government, though often praised, are seldom weighed against their tragic cost. The destructive effect upon civilization is often obscured by the obvious near-term (but ulti­mately self-defeating) advantages to special individuals and classes who are the recipients of its special and insidious favors.

 

 This more comprehensive view discloses the universal trend of all compulsive relationships towards a shortening of the average life span. Life becomes less abundant as it becomes more enslaved. The wages of social wrongdoing is not abundant life and length of days either for the individual or for his race. Failure to utilize con­structively in contractual ways and service forms the vital energy with which men are endowed, leaves it untamed to degrade them in peace and destroy them in war. In periods of active warfare, the casualties of battle and of disease are but the shortening of lives, and a more than temporary population decline is averted only by the increased biologic reproductiveness that appears always to be stimu­lated by wars.

 

 Thus the technique of government by force, compulsion and war is so opposed to the technique of service by contract and exchange that it brings about an opposite change in the organization of energy that constitutes a population into a societal life-form. The durational element, the quality by which it endures and abides, is diminished with a qualitative loss, and the gross quantity of the energy is con­served only by the higher reproductivity of the shortened lives at a lower qualitative level of organization and life. These seem to be the steps by which civilizations lapse back through organized tyrannies into unorganized barbarisms, in which subsistence falls so low that large numbers of lives cannot be maintained; for, even though rapidly born, they must quickly languish and die.

 

 Does fate then set iron bounds against the achievement of an en­during social organization and abundance of life? The answer is found in the potencies of freedom as manifested in the voluntarism of exchanging services and goods under contractual engagements as to their distribution and flow. When the practicableness of this tech­nique in the field of public and community services and affairs has become well disclosed, it is as certain to be profitably applied as were the underlying principles of physical phenomena profitably applied in the technical arts as they came to be known.

 

 The desire for profit or recompense for services seems to have been the prime individual motivation underlying all the advances of civilization that have been brought about through reduction of scientific discoveries to practice and the merchandising of them as products or services to the generality of mankind.

 

 Similar results under similar motivation and for similar rewards cannot fail to follow upon similar scientific disclosures — in terms of the objective standards employed by all the natural sciences — con­cerning the phenomenon of society as an energy flow. This may occur either soon or late; all things must await their day. Meanwhile, political governments can only repress, inhibit and disorder the societies they are assumed to serve. Such governments, practicing force, are restrained by oppositions, and the successful opposition is in turn opposed until the society, on which they all-unconsciously prey, becomes too weak of will to oppose or resist and through a long tyranny expires.

 

 But the emergence of new orders and relationships in nature, when they come, come quickly. This is true, in general, of all evolutionary advance. There is a long, long darkness but the full light comes suddenly once it dawns. And there are “signs and por­tents” that may be the heralds of a social dawn. Modern science had its ancient precursors, but its dawn is yet young. Its slanting rays have opened many erstwhile mysteries of the natural world so that great and wide services to mankind could be profitably performed. We need not doubt the potency of its rising rays to dissolve the mists that shroud mystic beauties and potentialities in the social order, far transcending those of the natural and material world.

CHAPTER 16

The Basic Social Pattern

Order is said to be Heaven’s first law. It is that into which the dy­namic cosmic energy ever increasingly tends to evolve. For in all organization of energy, from the humblest to the highest, a single basic pattern ever prevails. Whatever be the structure, be it inorganic or organic, the non-living or the living form, it is a composition or organization of lesser units in interrelationships of reciprocal freedom whereby a higher unity is created. This higher unity is the product of the order and harmony that prevails among the lesser units of which it is composed. This functioning of the higher unit depends on the orderly interfunctioning of its component units and parts, and the more harmonious and perfect this interfunctioning the longer will be the functioning period, the living duration of the higher unit that thus they compose. And the functioning periods of the lesser units themselves, through their creative interrelations one with another and with the whole, are lengthened and prolonged. The cosmic energy evolves into ever more enduring manifestations and forms, and the more orderly the pattern, the more perfect and en­during the form. Thus do the more orderly and harmonious or­ganizational forms increasingly and of necessity prevail.

 

 A society, like an individual, depends for its duration upon the orderly and non-collisional interfunctioning of the organic units of which it is composed. Like the individual, it must be born into a specific organic pattern and, like the individual, it can normally de­velop and mature only into the basic pattern in which it was born.

 

 Men do have associative relationships prior to society, but like those of insects and animals, all these relationships are biological and particular, not appertaining to any general society but only to limited consanguineous groups, tribes or clans. For these pre-societal relationships can obtain only among individuals who are in direct and conscious contact and communication in the manner of packs, herds, flocks or swarms in which there is no organic unity extending beyond the particular blood-bonded group. Inter-group antagonisms of necessity tend to prevail, for these biological associations have no general and impersonal system of service and exchange and there­fore but little if any productive power over their environment. They consume without replacing whatever environment affords and thus tend to make it less habitable for themselves. Conflict or armed neutrality is as natural for them as is war among the sovereign politi­cal organizations that consume and destroy but do not produce or create. For among political powers, as among biological and tribal exclusional groups, survival arises upon gains that involve losses to others and not upon the mutual welfare that springs from creation by voluntary cooperation and exchange. Not the tribal and instinc­tive nor yet the political and coercive, but only the societal organiza­tion creates the means to great abundance and through this a higher quality and duration of life.

 

 Emergence of this higher and wider, this more general and in­clusive relationship, marks the birth of the truly societal life form. Within the society, familial and biological relationships still subsist, but they do not distinguish it. For they involve dominance and submission or, in their higher forms, responsibility and loyalty and love. But these fine amenities are restricted. They do not extend beyond the conscious awareness of personal and biological bonds. What does distinguish the societal organization is its system o£ meas­ured and thereby rational exchanges. This practice of impersonal, con­tractual relations, wherein men come not into collision but into rational accord, lifts the level of their lives by creative transformations, each for others, of the environment in which they live.

 

 Employment of the contractual process instead of the political or coercive for the holding and transfer of sites and resources estab­lishes the institution of property in land and thereby brings into being a community occupied by the societal life-form. For with this basic social-ization[2] of the things of nature that no man creates, it becomes possible for individuals, or corporate bodies of them, to hold possession by title instead of by force as the authority for all possession and exchanges of things both natural and artificial. This authority to make contracts with respect to any property is what constitutes its ownership and accounts for its being property, in the societal sense.

 

 The birth of a society, properly as such, occurs when erstwhile nomads or other merely blood-bonded groups cease their dependence on mere animal instincts as to their occupancy of territory and pos­session of natural things. It begins with their gradual adoption of private ownership and thereby of the contractual process for the rational distribution and the secure individual possession of these natural things.

 

 For any large numbers to unite in community as dis­tinguished from family life, the first essential is a rational instead of an arbitrary or coercive mode in the distribution of sites and lands. The granting of social authority to make contracts with respect to sites and resources is what constitutes social and individual instead of tribal and collective property in land. Thereafter, the land is held and distributed not arbitrarily, but under a moral (per mores) sanction and title, an accepted social authority to make valid contracts con­cerning its possession, transfer or use. Thus ownership is more than mere possession. Savages, even animals may have that. There may be possession without title and there may be title without possession, but only under a socially sanctioned title can valid contracts — capable of being performed — be made. The making and performing of such contracts is not a political privilege, not the exclusion but the inclusion of others. It is a vital social function performed under social authority and rewarded by an automatic social recompense. The recompense for this distributive public service is called ground rent, often miscalled unearned income or increment.

Any dense populations must have lived first in warm, flat and fertile regions of the earth. In these more clement lands, communi­ties were formed and civilizations began. Here the earth was so fruitful not all needed to work; slavery could be practiced and the population yet live. In dealing with his community inhabitants, the patriarch or proprietor could depart from the voluntary mode based on kinship or contract, and tax or enslave them. In their condition of ease, the original authorities either lapsed from their protective to the political and predatory relationship or themselves fell victim to other men who seized their places and usurped their powers. In proprietary communities, voluntary rent or rent service became per­verted into forced labor. Thus freeholders became serfs or slaves, and the yoke of tribute and taxation fell on all those who were not directly and personally enslaved. Whether by default or by defeat of patriarchs or proprietors, it was through lapses of the village au­thority that the predatory political sovereignties anciently arose and the political institution of slavery, maintained by the power of the state, continued throughout all ancient times. And with the modern passing of crude chattel slavery, it is by extension of their tax-taking and other compulsive powers that the political sovereignties of modern times have made their world-wide rule supreme.

 

 The early deterioration of free communities by their transforma­tion into political sovereignties took place chiefly in those lush re­gions where slavery and taxation could be practiced and the inhabi­tants yet live, and where the marching and marshalling of armies, the recapture of slaves and the rigors of government could be easily applied. But in lands of high latitude or high altitude and of rugged terrain, the sparseness of natural subsistence forbade the inefficiencies of a servile state. Nor would such terrain favor military operations, other than defensive, or the capture and recapture of slaves. In such lands, men must practice the free relationships of mutual service in order to survive. They alone have limited their sovereignties. Their kings and councils have been heroes and leaders, the lords (Anglo-Saxon: givers) and exemplars, and not the drivers and rulers of men. Through the ages, and from such sparse origins, came the great warriors who conquered the political slave states of the lusher lands, adopted their enervating ways and were in their turn by virile con­querors deposed. The grasslands and the hills have ever bred the power to win — and lose — dominion of the olive and the palm.

When free barbarians took the lands no longer ruled by Rome, they left their wandering ways and adopted the settled community mode of life. But they did not at once form political cities or any slave states. They brought with them a strong native tendency towards the uncorrupted proprietary or free feudal type of com­munity organization, the basic social pattern, in which tribal wan­derers and instinctive village groups seem first always to emerge.

But on the Continent, such free institutions were corrupted at their birth. Only the formal pattern, without its substance of liberty, prevailed. Influenced by the political philosophy and the legendary glories of once imperial Rome, the free barbarian leaders became corrupted by the spirit of their new surroundings into despotic princes and kings. Hence the new social beginnings, though they took the proprietary form, were wholly perverted by grafting on that form the arbitrary and compulsive methods of a political sover­eignty or state. The free contractual relationship between the public authority and the inhabitants, between land lord and free men, did not develop. Compulsory levies supported by force were instituted in place of voluntary rent induced by the services recompensed by it. Proprietors became tax masters instead of land lords. In consequence, there could be no free holders, hence no free men. The result was not the original free feudal or proprietary system but a political and military feudalism of despotic rulers over serfs and slaves.

 

 This political method of public administration impoverished the communities and incited them to the alliances and wars that brought on their consolidation into petty kingdoms and eventually into nationalistic states. And these, by further conquests, expanded into colonial powers, rivals for empire as the Mediterranean slave powers once struggled for dominion over the world.

 

 But in the remoteness of ancient Britain, after the Roman prestige and power was gone, the Anglo-Saxon invaders emerged out of mere tribal solidarity into proprietary communities untouched by the traditions and the politics of Rome. In this remoteness, the Anglo-Saxon system of proprietary administration by land lords for free men evolved, and through almost five centuries became the rude but free society that flowered in the “Golden Age of Alfred” until it was destroyed by the Norman power and its liberties submerged under a political and essentially totalitarian rule.

 

 Social origins are necessarily obscure, yet history and anthropology unite in evidence that as men develop their sense of personality, of having individuality apart from the family or the tribe, then, circum­stances permitting, they pass beyond their merely instinctive and familial groupings, and the authentic society based on individual property and the free contractual relationship begins to emerge. In lands widely remote, as in early Mexico and ancient Japan, there is evidence of merely tribal groupings having given way to property and contractual good faith in respect to security in the individual occupancy of land. And in Saxon England, owing doubtless to its isolation, the continuance was long. In a people who had come not as roving tribes on land but organized for migration by sea, func­tional individuality could the more easily supersede mere familial unity, and the reciprocal obligations of contract supersede the merely consanguineous bonds. As this new relationship developed on land, the parties to it were the de facto accepted public authority on the one hand and the several free holders or free men, usually heads of families, who, together with the subordinate aides or employees of the accepted ownership and authority, constituted the general popu­lation. The prime subject matter of this contractual relationship was necessarily sites and resources — the separately and exclusively occu­pied portions of the community lands. For it was only through their occupancy of particular sites that the free holders could receive or in any way avail themselves of the common or community services appurtenant thereto or make any use of the common and public, the unenclosed portions of the land. And it was only from the hand of a public authority acting as owner of the community, and not as ruler over the persons and properties of its inhabitants, that these com­munity services could be obtained by voluntary contract and for market value received. The first “essential public service,” essential to the very existence of any truly free community, was not to tax or otherwise rule the inhabitants but to safeguard the whole com­munity — as a public service to the common-wealth — against vio­lence, whether from without or from within.

 

 For the services to free men of contractually distributing among them the sites or lands so safeguarded and protected, a socially limited amount of ground rent or of rent service was rendered. Thus the consideration on both sides was services — the service of giving a societal, non-political distribution of the sites, including the common protection and all other advantages appertaining to them, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the services rendered up volun­tarily by free men as rent, the market equivalent of the public services so received.

 

 Under this basic contractual relationship, imposing neither forced labor nor forced payments as taxation upon the thereby free men, the community became a safe and secure, a well served place for the production, ownership and the like contractual distribution of other forms of property, or of their products or services, as capital prop­erties. Thus, under a customary covenant of “quiet possession” in exchange for an amount of rent limited by the custom or agreements of the market, it was possible for “free enterprise” to begin.[3]

 

 The transition from pure nomadism to the proprietary system was not always, if ever, immediate and direct. In Eastern Europe and also among the more advanced aboriginal North Americans, there is much record of village communities in which tribes or clans dwelt for long periods in a state of folk organization intermediate between the nomadic and the truly societal. In this form of organiza­tion, the individual is but little differentiated from the group. Pride in tribal membership and acceptance seems the chief cohesive bond. Subsistence  is consumed immediately from the environment, whether by fishing and hunting, as on the American Northwest Coast, or, most generally, by a primitive agriculture. There is no general system of contractual or measured exchange; only crude and occasional barter, and that only with more or less alien clans or tribes. There is systematic allocation of fishing waters, hunting grounds or plots for cultivation, usually outside of the community itself, under tribal custom and regulation that many writers have regarded as a kind of free communism in land. These village com­munities are essentially biological and instinctive rather than rational, for without separate jurisdiction over property, the individual is merged in the mass, and there is no basis for any quantified and thereby rational system of free contract and exchange. For lack of any public authority, proprietary or political, such communities are poorly organized either for aggression or for defense. Through­out much ancient time, even into recent centuries, such weakly or­ganized, instinctive village units have either developed beyond patri­archy toward the free feudal and then, through corruption or con­quest, become political and predacious, or — more frequently — they have been broken up by political sovereignties extending their realm and rule.

 

 It was the proprietary form of organization, where it developed, that held promise for the future. It is not to be supposed that, in the early making and performing of contracts with respect to quiet pos­session and enjoyment of community lands by free men under pro­tection of proprietary authority, there was any conscious knowledge or understanding of the societal implications. So far as these are con­cerned, there is no reason to suppose that, then as now, any plan or intention beyond a blind empiricism prevailed. The strong man in his stronghold and the free man in his freehold were alike unaware of the basic pattern, of the social foundations, for an eventually free world that they laid. Yet it was thus that the transition from barbaric nomadism and village community to the modern civilized com­munity form of organization in all probability was made. The ownership of and the observance of title to property, however much it may be politically infringed, is still the ancient foundation for all the creative relationships of contract and exchange that distinguish the social and civilized from the merely familial and tribal or the completely political and totalitarian mode of life.

 

 Nowhere has this transition from tribalism and mere folk organiza­tion into the free community pattern been better exemplified than in the social foundations that were laid in England by the Saxon migrants from beyond the German Sea.[4] The basic English com­munity pattern is diagrammatically set out in Figure 3. Here the nucleus of the societal organism is the strong man in his stronghold, like the captain of his ship and crew. Clustered around him are his paid retainers, through whom he defends his community against outside aggression and maintains internal liberty and peace in fulfillment of his covenant of quiet possession in exchange for the rent that maintains him and the services he provides. Thus, under a common defense — a com-munito — the truly societal form of life begins. Its structure is analogous to the physical atom and to the biological cell. For in each there is a central nucleus of great stability to which are gathered peripheral elements in non-collisional, re­ciprocal relations to it and to one another. And just as the physical or the biological structure disintegrates when these free relations are greatly impaired or destroyed, so must any societal organization cease to function and thus cease to exist when its free and reciprocal processes can no longer be performed.

 The Western world has been so long indoctrinated with the Norman and the Classical traditions of political rulership over ser­vile-minded and tribute-burdened populations that any suggestion of moulding public institutions to the basic pattern of the proprietary or free feudal communities is almost sure to be decried as a return to slavery and to barbarism itself. Yet history affords the one striking example, already referred to, of proprietary government as contractual services springing up spontaneously out of the merely blood-bonded condition and growing through a half-millennium in­to a state of freedom and of cultural achievement in sharp contrast to the darkness and degradation that prevailed in its contemporary European world. The Anglo-Saxon community organization cul­minated in the Alfredian Renaissance. It had its seeds in the Roman evacuation, five hundred years before, to strengthen the hard-pressed legions on the frontier of the Rhine. Into this void came the sea­borne barbarians to build anew in the genius of “men who never would be slaves.” For half the dark millennium, the aftermath of Rome, in almost secret isolation, they built their communities on the basis of free men receiving services from and giving services in return to land lords. Once the land was possessed, there was no more offensive war, for there was no public revenue but rent; taxation, like slavery, as an institution, was unknown. After Alfred, the Danish invaders laid taxes for eleven years which were continued until the English Edward, coming to the throne, denounced and abolished them as contrary to Anglo-Saxon custom and law. But Norman ideas and example were having their effects in the discord and divi­sions that laid England open to the Norman arms and victim to the Roman mode of political administration, based on the seizure of property under which Rome herself at last went down.

 

 Rude as were the ages and harsh the times, the Saxon development of proprietary public service was a magnificent example of a society, unperverted by any ideology of public force or of imperial domina­tion, rising through only five centuries to the premier cultural posi­tion of its time through development of the proprietary pattern in which it was born.

 

 The Classical precedent and practice of public administration by force is almost universally accepted. In its milder forms, it is exalted as “democratic” and “free.” Where it is more drastic and complete, it is accepted as absolute and ineluctable. Even the possibility of an alternative and opposite mode of administration is widely ignored. And, beyond the basic public service that land owners everywhere unknowingly perform in their contractual distribution of sites and resources and lands, there is no present-day example, on a nation­wide scale, of government as a service to the population through a proprietary administration of the community affairs.

 

[INSERT FIG. 3 HERE]