Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2727

Letter from Howard E. Kershner, President, Christian Freedom Foundation, Inc. 250 West 57^th Street, New York 17, NY, attaching draft of an editorial on CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR, to be published in Christian Economics

December 13, 1957

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

 

I have just finished reading your great book CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR, and enclose herewith an Editorial, which I propose to run in CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS.

 

With congratulations and best wishes, I am

 

Sincerely yours,

/s/ Howard E. Kershner

President

HEK:sjp

 

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Editorial 12/12/57

Re-write 12/13/57

 

Citadel, Market and Altar

 

In this issue, we published a review of Spencer Heath’s remarkable book “Citadel, Market and Altar” (The Science of Society Foundation, Inc., Baltimore, Md.) This is a deep, philosophical, hard-to-read, but richly rewarding book. Its pages record the activity of a great and benevolent mind, dealing with the problems of human existence. Spencer Heath sees the possibility of peace, plenty, and high spiritual development.

 

     Standing in the way of this happy accomplishment are: The nationalized states (which) penalize and paralyze their people’s exchange, both within and without. Impoverishment follows. They blindly destroy themselves, and fall by each other’s hands.”

 

     Condemning the use of force and coercion as distinguished from the voluntary cooperative activities of man, Spencer Heath says:

 

 “Standing now before the threshold of a social glory the realization of which will dwarf all poets’ dreams, men must again choose whether in their community affairs the practice of force shall cast them from the House of Life into outer darkness or the practice of public service by profitable exchange shall lift them into the waiting freedom and fullness of life. The great social mutation that awaits and impends is the social-ization of public force into public service by exchange.

 

 “When the great business of community service is carried on as a business and not by depredation upon business, it will be magnificent above all other business in the world.”

    

     This is one of the most eloquent condemnations of the use of force and violence to interfere with and control the activities of men, that we have seen. It is, moreover, a most eloquent plea, for the confinement of government to the protection of life and property, the restraining and punishment of predation and the practice of freedom in the market-place. It properly assumes that these activities must be carried on by moral men, who live in accordance with God’s moral law.

 

     A glimpse of the enormous advantages that will accrue to mankind as the result of setting up such institutions and conscientiously living under them, is beautifully stated by Spencer Heath in the following words:

 

 “Society, thus, will have a free and unrestrained economic system including a free, efficient and self-supporting system of public services. Each will exchange its wealth and services with and thus enhance the productivity of the other. Nature will have achieved a form of integrated life in which the component individuals will have circumstanced in completest freedom to give and to receive. The consequent abundance of economic goods will come to them almost as automatically as the filling of the lungs with air.

 

“Emancipated alike from environmental compulsions that beset and enslave the whole primitive world, and from the political and governmental repressions and restrictions that bind and burden the functioning of the social realm, the spirit of men will leap upward in the free practice and culture of all the artistic, esthetic and spiritual powers with which it is essentially endowed.”

 

     This book will richly reward the patient philosopher, who wishes to delve to the depth in this analysis of Society. We close by citing the following pertinent lines:

 

“In every age, so far as men have practiced the golden rule of service by mutual exchange, the creative ‘power of God’ has blessed them with a measure of freedom, and with freedom, abundance.

 

 “When private persons put others under compulsion by force or deceit and thus get without giving, such actions are forbidden and punished as crimes. But precisely similar acts, systematized under governmental power, we morally approve and applaud or blindly accept and endure. Men acting as government, supposedly as servants of all, have no code of pro-social conduct such as there is for plain and private men, for those who are limited to the voluntary relationships of consent and exchange.

 

 “Every social perversion, every business depression and the downward trend of production and exchange that marks the social decline, can be traced to cumulative repressions of the social process by political authority. This dries the very springs of public revenue, bankrupts the productive economy and destroys all the values that society creates.”

 

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