Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2086

Typescript of an incomplete essay

1930s? This differs from Item 181. Must compare to see which is latest or best. -SHM 3/10/2019

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

by

SPENCER HEATH

THE SCIENCE OF SOCIETY FOUNDATION 1502 Montgomery Road Baltimore 27, Maryland

Egypt, Assyria, Greece and Rome were none of them civilized. Always, predominately, they were slave states.

And the otherwise enlightened world has, as yet, no enlightened governments. For all modern states follow classic models and function in the classic mode. They exist by forced labor and not by service or exchange. Upon the earnings and wages of their subjects they levy tribute. And with this tribute they wage and levy wars.

History records only one civilization — Saxon England — that did not perish from its own decay. It was perverted and then assassinated from without.

Its successors are repeating Rome. They still follow the rule of force, predominant above the democratic practice of voluntary exchange. Thus they repeat the ruin wrought by Rome.

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THE HILL-BRED

The hill-bred have a courage all their own. With vision that perceives beyond a ridge, A second sight, miasmic mental bridge Connecting with experience unknown.

They know the patience of the weary climb Traversing miles that leveled would be rods. They know what man may claim and what is God’s; And make no foolish compromise with time.

No soft, flat-countried heritage is theirs, No smooth, unstubborn soil accepts the plough, No lush, wide fields their granaries endow, Grim hardihood each seed surviving shares.

Though valley folk are valiant to the bone The hill-bred have a courage all their own.

Velma West Sykes

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HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

“The proper study of mankind is man.”

—Alexander Pope

Everything in nature above the single electron or quantum of energy is composite and organized. This is what makes science possible — the fact that all things are organized in definite relationships that make them organic and in that sense alive.

Nature manifests herself in forms of organization; in forms of life. When any form of life attains internal stability against external forces, Nature treats it as a unit for organization into higher and more complex forms. This is Nature’s progres­sion.

Man is a unit composite of myriad living cells which are themselves composite of organized molecules and atoms. He has the most complex structure and the greatest internal stability against the widest range and variety of external influences. He is therefore qualified and, in fact, is being organized into a still higher structure and relationship called Society, or Mankind. As the proper study of man is the structure and organization of the individual man, so the proper study of Mankind is the structure and organization of Society as a high form of life.

Man is a long living animal. The longer he lives, the more perfect he can become. His perfection depends on the lengthening of his days. Meantime, he must die and be renewed in successive generations.

So it is with man as Mankind. The growth and perfection of the social organization, of the Society of Men, depends upon the lengthening of its term. Until it practices completely the law of its own life and being, it must die and decay, to be renewed only in the birth and dawn of a new age and civilization out of the intervening dark.

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Societies live and grow by the organic interfunctioning of their individuals and parts. Such functioning is properly called service. Its mode is called exchange. By this mode, the peculiar genius and capacity of each individual becomes the endowment of all. Thus civilizations arise.

Societies die and decay by the dis-organization or misfunctioning of their individuals and parts. The mode of this is called coercion, compulsion, and force. When force is either perpetrated or permitted by the organized state all peculiar genius and executive capacity is repressed, service by exchange becomes difficult or impossible, social bonds disintegrate, and reciprocal service degenerates into attack and defense. Thus a war-like state is maintained and barbarism is nourished at the heart of an otherwise civilized community.

The emergence of man has been by slow advance from a state of dependence on the bounty of nature to a state of mutual dependence on the bounty of each other through services exchanged. In the social primordial this dependence on nature was unrelieved; man could live only where conditions were mild and fruit or game almost fell into his hands. Even through the pastoral and into the primitive agricultural state, men could not exist in large numbers except in fertile valleys or plains, with climate so mild that only the minimum of food, clothing and shelter was required. Under these favoring conditions, with only moderate advance in agriculture, it became possible for two men to live on the labor of one, and thus a slave state could be maintained. Moreover, these great fertile and unbroken terrains best favored the support and the marching and marshalling of armies under kings and emperors of war.

Until man learned how to trade and practice the efficiency of division of labor through exchange of services, such were the only geographic and social conditions under which large populations could exist. The ancient Mediterranean and South European cultures were founded on this, their societies compulsively stratified and their masses enervated by climate and luxury at the top and degraded by taxation and servitude at the bottom. Hardy tribes from the more rigorous north penetrated southward, and in a heroic age took over the slave technique of

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the vanquished. The arts arose but manhood waned amid the flowers of decaying Greece. Then from the North again came a race whose system of iron order embraced the whole slavish southern world and left at last a heritage of death and darkness for a thousand years.

The rugged, non-despotic lands of the North without high social organization could support only sparse and primitive populations, nor could large armies be maintained or maneuvered to enslave them. The land would not support two by the labor of one, nor would even the labor of both support them separately and apart but only as they gave each other cooperation and mutual aid in the basic essentials of life. The north was impossible to anchorite or pariah. Small village groups were the rule, and high activity, industry and frugality were imposed, not by the dominance of masters but by the natural conditions themselves. Nature herself kept Northern men out of slavery and drove them into a rude freedom that only mutual aid and dependence upon each other could sustain.

These free but rigorous relations bred rugged character and social virtues that were impossible among slaves. Moreover, the variability and vicissitudes of climate and other natural conditions stimulated the higher activities and bred a versatility of physiological adjustment and capacity for external adaptation and improvement that only such changing conditions could require or bring forth. And this was not without its psychological effects. Confidence in personal power and individual effort arose, in contrast with tropic fatalism bred of long and hopeless submission. Qualities of enterprise and leadership were encouraged and rewarded, in migration as in war. Personal power was sustained more by the homage to the strong and brave than by submission of the timorous and weak.

The great builders and conquerors, the masters of nature and of men in all lands descended from the north. The age-long tyrannies of the Orient have been but the fatalistic submission of enervated masters and of degraded slaves to the confidence and dominance of Northern men. The historic turmoil of Europe has been its writhings and resistance to the slave technique of the south, this technique being imposed and resisted alike under

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leadership almost always of Northern race or extraction. Charlemagne and William were of Northern breed, and the Corsican, like the Caesars before, came of invading races from the North.

The world holds two distinct types or tendencies of social organization. Its conflicts arise from their incongruous blend. The slave technique and despotic relationships indigenous to the fertile south are vastly the older. There are no such antiquities of the north. It is probable that all life originated in fertile and sunny lands and men moved to the inclement north only by slow migration — perhaps as they preferred the rigors of the north to the social despotism of the south. This sets the social organization of the North later in time, just as Northern conditions set it higher in type. Socially and politically, the South was old and hardened before the people of the North began. The barbarians of Europe had made but little advance in social organization, but they possessed a definite tendency towards social integration under rude freedom without compulsion and under relationships of specialized service and voluntary exchange.

It was virility from the north that suckled on the she-wolf of the Seven Hills and rose to a fierce and independent vigor that gave Rome her dominion over the ancient slavish world. In her the ancient despotisms culminated and then collapsed against the barbarian wall. The civilization of the North had not developed; it was still only a tendency. As its hordes broke over the South it could only destroy. In the ensuing dearth and darkness it began slowly to build its small free communities under personal leadership and protection and the bonds of voluntary service and obligation. Thus as a necessary convenience and by spontaneous desire and consent, the simple feudal and manorial communities arose so that men could make their livelihoods under the protection and security and by aid of the public services that only community life and organization could afford. The small community with its voluntary engagements and obligations was the all unconscious gift of the Northern barbarians to the post-Roman reorganization of the Western World.

Theretofore public authority was instituted to govern and to

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rule by force and seizure and without consent. In this new integration there were public authorities pledged to protect their charges against force and seizure, and in exchange for this and for other community services, the inhabitants of these communities voluntarily rendered up to their proprietors and public authorities their feudal and manorial dues to an amount fixed by custom and agreement or by the market, as we would now say of rent.

These small communities, with all obligations, both public and private, based on service and consent and carried out by exchange, were the nuclei of an authentic society — the integration of individuals in a free community relationship of public and private responsibility and exchange of services without coercion or force, but all things for value received. They were like biological organisms fundamentally capable of symbiotic relationships and integration into higher and more complete and complex forms such as the higher animals and man. They were like individual men who, though fundamentally social and symbiotic towards each other, have not yet learned to enter fully into these relationships in preference to the parasitism and conflicts of slavery and war.

Small wonder these newborns of the social yearnings and needs of men could not grow up into relations of brotherly service and love! They came under bad influence and example. Individuals still loved destructive power — that was their savage endowment — and the Church, after earning its authority as spiritual exemplar, had put on the “garments of the Empire,” endorsed the imperial technique of tribute and enslavement and itself practiced government by deception and force.

The lords of these free communities, not content with protection and service to their own, set out to subdue one another and enslave or, more commonly in the North, to hold their people under the ransom of tribute and taxation. It is a long story how they waged wars against each other until their communities were bereft of all their original freedom under the iron rule of military lords who used them only as instruments for the making of war and gave the essential feudal relationships of service and exchange the horrid repute that has

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extended persistently, but nonetheless mistakenly, even to the present day.

As these petty despotisms were captured and consolidated the European national states arose under the equivocal leadership of Cardinals and kings, with the kings finally in chief command over the persons and properties of their populations. Thus the small communities of service by exchange failed to practice the service and exchange relations with each other, as among their own members, and did not integrate into any general society under that relationship. The Northern spirit of social organization by service and exchange became perverted by the Southern spirit of servitude and force, and modern national states raised themselves upon the Classical foundation of tribute and slavery, taxation and war.

But one small part of Europe was unique as to the manner and order in which this development took place.

England

At the beginning of the Christian Era, there was one outpost of Rome inhabited by a race of barbarians of relatively southern extraction, probably in part at least a Mediterranean race and thought by some to be of Punic origin. At any rate, they were of a racial spirit more easily subdued and enslaved than that of the North. These were the Britons, quite possibly descendent from Mediterranean exiles and slaves from the tin mines of Cornwall. Whoever they were, the Romans in Britain placed them again under a subjugation from which they never in the least emerged during the three centuries that passed before the legions were withdrawn to bulwark the nearer defenses of the tottering Empire against Germanic hordes.

But in this fourth century some of the Germanic tribes, instead of throwing themselves against the Roman frontiers, moved westward across the North Sea to British shores. These were the Angel-ish, Saxon, and Jutish tribes whom Caesar, Tacitus, and Suetonius all described as having the least knowledge and coming least under the influence of the laws and institutions of Rome. They moved into England to stay. The miserable Britons whom the

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Romans left behind, except in the West, they slew or temporarily enslaved. But they ignored the Roman cities and towns, fine houses, temples, and baths and set up their crude, small communities in the rural wilds. Their enslavement of Britons seems rather to have been by exclusion from communal right than by forced labor, and slavery tended to die out rather than to grow into an institution upon which a master class would depend. The Saxons had developed no technique for the regimentation of slaves. They did their own working as they did their own fighting. They were loyal to leaders for their rude valor and virtue and they followed them by choice more than by compulsion and command. They would not submit to personal power and dictation. Even crimes were proved and punished only by community condemnation and consent.

Insulated alike from the Roman tradition of seizing personal power and the slave religion of present submission for sake of future emancipation, the Saxon villages slowly evolved in the free pattern set by social habits and instincts acquired under Northern geographic and climatological conditions. Notwithstanding the wars and conflicts that mark their early occupancy of the land and persisted in some form throughout, still the manorial pattern unfolded in the small communities. They developed upon the basis of protection and other services rendered by exchange and under obligations fixed by accepted custom or contract. Under this economy the proprietary lords of the lands had no political power of personal rule or to tax and seize but were obligated to provide and maintain the customary public services out of the customary individual services and rents that those who held under them rendered and paid. The lord’s proprietary interest in his revenue prompted him to support the agricultural and other production of his community by maintaining peace and civil order; to preside over justice (or revenge), either personally or by his paid subordinates, in accordance with community desires; to maintain public facilities in roads and bridges, and to guarantee the common rights of his tenants in the forests, pastures and streams under his ownership or jurisdiction but which were not let out in severalty to individual possession. The lord, with those employed under him, took substantially the form of a modern business organization in which the owner administers all the property, supervises his

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employees and out of the sales returns on their combined services or product maintains his employees and his properties, and, in the profit or surplus remaining, finds recompense for his own administrative and supervisory work. The lord, in effect, provided and sold to his people all such services as appertain to the land and serve the common need of his com­munity, and the rent coming to him by custom or contract from occupancy of his community lands balanced all his costs and expenses, including his own labor, as a going concern.

It is not urged that this was carried on with all modern refinements but, however crude, it was in principle the same. But in some respects it was superior. Not the lord nor any under him had power to tax and seize, nor were tenants bound to the land.¹ And just as tenants were under no compulsion of their lords, so the lords were not tributary to any king. Kings they had, to be sure, but they were chosen by the lords for their service. They were paid by the lords and it was by their authority alone that the king prescribed and proclaimed the rules and regulations for their common rights and association among themselves and performed the military and other services necessary for the common security and protection of themselves and of the tenants under them.

With the coming of the Danes the need of kingly services and protection became very great. They came, as the Saxons had done. with fire and sword, but they also were of Germanic stock. The Saxon resistance resulted in treaties under which the Danes held the eastern regions already occupied by them and here, in accordance with their racial instincts and aided by the Saxon influence and example, they adopted the same type of community organization and service as the Saxons had done before them. There was no permanent conflict between Saxon and Dane.

As there were many tribes and regions all needing protection from the invading Danes on the east and remnants of Britons on

¹ That came long after when taxation and tribute by Norman invaders with their Roman tradition and technique made the payment of customary rents impossible. Eviction under the Saxon law was forbidden and thus “protection” was later and logically extended to bind the tenants to the land. Thus did taxation destroy rent and erstwhile free-men were “protected” into serfdom.

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the West, so there were many kingdoms and kings and internecine wars; but the Saxon kingships did not include any right or accepted power to seize property or levy taxes. Life in a rude age was rude, but the form and spirit of the social organization did not encourage or admit of forced labor, tribute and taxation or slavery in any guise.

From the Roman evacuation at the beginning of the fifth century the social development that took place in Saxon England was free from the power and influence of Southern despotism for nearly six hundred years. During this period, in the very midst of the Dark Ages, in this isolated isle, there grew up a civilization, indigenous to its Northern peoples and races, that climaxed in the character of Alfred and his almost golden time.

Out of this prosperity and the humane spirit of Alfred the practice of buying peace from the Danish invaders grew up and, under the brief supremacy of Canute, took the form of tribute laid chiefly on the earls and lesser lords, but the devout Edward, the Confessor, soon after rescinded this taxation as a device of the Evil One.

However, this example by the Danish marauders and the general Norman influence that was seeping into England, by intermarriage and otherwise, excited the covetous ambitions of contending earls to attempt the levying of taxes on their tenants, but by national enactment it was forbidden that any lord should take from a freeman any more rent than the free-man was willing to pay. But this prohibition seems to have been ineffective, for the earls continued fighting each other at their tenants’ expense until their much-divided house almost tottered into the hands of the Norman William.

From this point on, the formation of a despotic state in England paralleled the erection of nationalized kingdoms on the Continent. But in England a social growth and tradition of six hundred years so resisted the new Roman despotism that it took yet four centuries more for its full weight to be imposed. Resistance through these centuries to Norman, Tudor and Stuart encroachments on life and property is what brought forth Magna Charta and all the so-called charters of liberty which are so

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generally supposed to be the origins of Anglo-Saxon freedom and the foundations of the pseudo-democratic “liberty” that is now vanishing from the earth. The truth is that the Normans Romanized the Saxon social system from one of service and exchange into one of servitude and taxation, and the charters, one and all, were but the desperate defiances or cringing petitions for relaxation of the enslaving power.

The power to command and extort tribute or taxes is only dimly seen as being identical with ancient forced labor and personal slavery, so far as its ultimate and economic effects are concerned. As the wise and learned believed in slavery in ancient times, so they accepted taxation and tribute in later times.

In most of Europe this transition was imperceptible. But in isolated England, in the centuries between the early Roman rule and its return again under Norman banners, there grew up, among people of social instincts and habits molded by Northern conditions, a free pagan society of service, obligation and exchange. This social polity was the last to assimilate the despotic ideology of Rome. Its men were free-men and not hopeless slaves grasping at hopes of future salvation. Though the missionaries of Rome pressed them from east, west and north, it was in this land alone the kings who first gave them ear and saw in the new Valhalla surer promises of a continuation of the joys of life. As these free pagans were the last to accept Romanized religion, so were they the last to submit to Romanized politics. From the Conquest, it took four centuries of turmoil to enforce their submission to an absolute king.

English liberty was not being won from predacious foreign kings; it was defending itself against them. Charters and constitutions then as now only served as barricades against des­potic power. But then as now it was not against the acts of despotism but against the persons or parties in power that revolt came. Always it is against their masters and not against their slavery that men seem to hate and against whom they rebel. All political governments seize the property and coerce the persons of their people and employ the tribute so taken to tyrannize over them and their affairs. The revolutions that

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overthrow kings do not abolish the power that kings abuse. They only transfer this power to new kings, dictators, cabals, oligarchies or the leaders of popular factions under other names. Only the outward forms change; the seizure or property still remains, and the obligations of ownership and voluntary exchange are thus impaired. Violence and revolution do not abrogate, they only shift the center of anti-social power.

The Saxon kings had been chosen as leaders. Until after the half-Norman Edward, they laid no claim to autocratic power. But the Normans came as Roman masters with the right of might and divine sanction. Lords and tenants alike, now beholden to the king and under forced contribution to him, could not perform their age-old obligations to each other. The levies of the king upon the free-men (Vide Statutes of Westminster, etc.) pressed down voluntary rent and thus impaired all local revenue and obligations. The property and services that he extorted from high and low the king employed against both lords and free-men and for making war abroad.

With their peace-time revenues and their civil authority thus broken down, the lords themselves became robber barons seizing the property and services of their people and warring against each other except when pressed into common cause against the encroachments of the king. Under tyrannical or ambitious kings they stood united as at Runnymede. Under weaker kings they fought each other for power and for the crown itself. They became fewer in number as their lands slowly fell into the hands of a lesser nobility, the Knights of the Shire, while arbitrary power gravitated to the king. As the old, great barons curbed the tyranny of John, so the new and lesser ones for the same cause brought Charles to the block. The revolution “liquidated” the king but it preserved the tyrannical power that cost Charles his head. The Great Council of the king became the House of the lesser Lords. To this new center went the power to seize property and compel services.

Corrupted by the turmoil and tyrannies of a Romanized polity, these new lords were not content to be truly lords of the land providing public and governmental services out of rent in the Saxon manner. Despite such warnings as John Locke and Sir

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William Wyndham gave, they practiced the same despotic power as the Tudors and the Stuart Charles. Vainly thinking they could preserve rents intact, they laid the wealth and commerce of the nation under burdens of taxes that became again the public despair. This politically perverted and predacious false landlord-ism with its piratical levies on property and trade and its control over elections frustrated the king only by its own succession to his tyrannies in a century of grotesque parasitism on trade and exchange.

Again imputing evil to its perpetrators and not to their acts, the rising commercial and industrial classes clamored for a participation in the policies that were their own undoing. They won various reforms of the voting franchise and its progressive extension to them. Under this wider suffrage the power of the Lords declined as the Commons rose, and the authority to levy tribute on production and trade and to enslave business in a growing bondage of taxation and regulation passed entirely to the Popular House.

However, the expansion of industry and growth of world trade — the so-called “Industrial Revolution” in which there was no revolt — was so great that it was not until the Great War and its burdens that the democracy of production and exchange was fully borne down under the old-time enslavement to political force. The nations became so “democratic” in their employment of taxation and other violence against the economic democracy of business and exchange that they did not know they were breaking it down. They supposed that the seizures by tyrannies of kings and lords would be harmless when imposed under “democratic” forms.

This almost universal delusion was fostered by the world-wide expansion of population and trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in which new economic values were created more rapidly than they could be politically destroyed. The great growth of business values beyond the lengthening reach of tribute and taxation during this whole period is what made enterprise so very profitable and conservative investments so certain and secure. Of this great expansion the peopling and economic rise of the Western World was the most significant

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part.

The inherent trend of social organization into despotic slave states in the mild and fertile South as against free communities based on obligation and exchange in the rugged North — this tendency under European social and political growth has ever been and still remains a restless compromise in which Northern freedom resists the despotic spirit of the South even after it accepts its coercive technique, whether under democratic /or/ despotic forms — this, in a measure, repeated itself in the New World.

America

When the seventeenth century began, England was low-bowed under the yoke of despotism that the Normans had brought from Romanized France and beyond. Her government was the same as had been that of Egypt and Rome. Her coloni, like those of Rome, sweated for the enrichment of Imperial Masters. The dominance of the royal power gave rise to a theory that the king, by some divine dispensation, was the sole and original owner and that all lands were held of and under him. Settlements were made in the royal name and the inhabitants were under the dominion of the king or of proprietors under and authorized by him.² All colonial   government, especially in southern lands, was, in theory at least, despotic. Slavery was recognized and proprietors and government were under no restraint save that of a distant king, and the king even assumed to grant absolute dominion in cases where he desired to confer special favors or cancel obligations. The grant of Pennsylvania to William Penn was an absolute dominion given in discharge of a royal debt. A tendency towards Saxon ownership and administration was often manifest but, for the most part, the proprietors assumed no responsibility for community services. Neglecting the basic and essential function of ownership, they lost ownership itself: as

² The idea still persists that the Roman corporation, the “state,” instead of Society, as a whole, is the original source and authority for the ownership of land. It is practically certain, historically and otherwise, that the corporate state originated in the ownership of land — that ownership and sovereignty over land is the origin of the sovereignty of the state.

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absolute states grew up the lands passed into many hands under systems of slavery and taxation that became general and, in substance, still persist.

By a striking parallel a different form of settlement characterized the North. Across the North Atlantic went daring ship loads of the dissatisfied. They went as their ancestors on the Romanized mainland a thousand years before had braved a northern ocean for an unknown land. They sailed unsponsored and not to extend but to escape despotic rule and organize their lives on freer lines. Again they subdued and drove westward the wild inhabitants, reestablished the folk moots of their ancestors and founded community responsibility and administrative authority upon the ownership of land. Nor did they set up the relation of master and slave that prevailed, except for a few northernmost, in the settlements that were made under the auspices of states and kings. As of old, it was not the rigors of conscience but of climate and geography that forbade gross personal bondage and imposed the more efficient relationship of freer trade and exchange.

The Old World stamped upon the New its historic pattern of slave states in the South with relatively free communities in the North based upon free enterprise under voluntary obligation and exchange. But the exchange relationship was by no means wholly free. Always it came under dominion of and tributary to the Roman type of absolute and unsocialized (by exchange) political state, itself practicing no exchange by consent and exercising none but compulsive powers, under whatever forms.

The national period in the New World began with the same kind of revolt against taxation without representation that brought on the Reform Laws in England under which the power to tax became vested in the Commons as it was wrested from the Lords who in an earlier day had divested the King.

America was settled by people whose wages and property had borne all the long burdens of ancient tyrannies and wars. The labor and capital with which they braved the distant and unknown land was free from ancient bondages and but lightly taxed to supply few and simple public needs. The revolt was against

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