Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2831

Fragmentary pencil writing by Heath on four notepad pages numbered 15-18, indicating many lost pages

No date

With such decay into despotism civilizations die; only by new growth of freedom are they renewed. The 19^th century was the century of ownership and contract, of freer and wider service by exchange than ever before.

 The Barons and Bourbons of the two centuries before were reduced from rulership of men to mere ownership of land, divested of all compulsive and political power. Government by few came to be regarded as tyranny; strong oligarchy became weak demogarchy and, thus partly emancipated, the process of service by trade and exchange blossomed fabulously throughout a wide-expanding Western world. Poverty gave way to plenty, and the lives of men were multiplied in numbers and in length of days. But the old tyrannies under new forms insidiously grew. The governments that extirpated piracy slowly constricted trade into the growing depressions and convulsions that by still profounder tyrannies they are called upon in vain to heal. Reaction against the new “democratic” forms sets in; old tyrannies are invoked to cancel the new. But privilege takes now a new disguise; at the call of “the people” and in their name new tyrants arise and government, especially the impersonal “administrative” kind, is worshipped as men once made oblation and sacrificed before emperors and kings. Thus socialism is embraced even by many who could not abide the term.

 But the ideal of all capital becoming public capital as an ideal is sound — so only there be a legitimate and not a tyrannical means to this end. It is only necessary to know the golden rule of service by exchange as it obtains today when and wherever men are served and being served. In every exchange of value for value, goods for goods, service for service, or of any of these for the other, when truly done

[Breaks off]