Spencer Heath Archive

Item 292

Pencil notes for a letter, in a notebook with materials dated 1935-1936

Original is in notebook in white envelope in item 287

I am much pleased to have your letter of June 5 (?) thanking me for my efforts to be of service to the Henry George School. I am proud to have been, in one way or another, a supporter of the School from its first beginning and that I was able to aid and encourage the noble project of Oscar Geiger from the time it was first proposed.

After many years of relative neglect and stagnation there are now many evidences that the basic philosophy of Henry George — the philosophy of absolute freedom of exchange —  must be the foundation of all the social advance or improvement that the near or distant future can achieve.

The vanity and futility of more and more economic restrictions to offset the distress already caused by governmental restrictions is a lesson that is bound to be learned, even in the rough school of failure and experience. Meantime, it can be the high mission of the Henry George Schools to send out broad beams of light and inspiration — to teach despairing men that God and nature have endowed the present existing structures of Society, under freedom, with all the loveliness and beauty of the most rapturous social dreams. And it may also be their mission, as visioned by Henry George, to extend and make further application of his all-dissolving principles of liberty and freedom in fields and directions that he made no attempt to explore. Like all the wise and great, he knew that every truth, every conquest and triumph of the mind, is not merely a jewel to be cherished but a sure foundation on which to build. It must be learned that ground rent is purely a social product — the payment and the measure of all the services that are social and public — and that until it is completely used, 100%, in payment of the public wages and other costs there must continue to be serious violation of the principle of free exchange and its attendant evils.

It is with deep regret that I find myself unable to attend the School dinner on the 11^th. Before I learned that the dinner date had been changed from the 12th to the 11^th I engaged myself to the head of the Social Science Department of the ______ High School and the president of the ___________ of U. W. of that place for a Thursday evening discussion of the Philosophy of Henry George.

I shall be happy if you will read this letter (with the exception, perhaps, of the first paragraph) at the School dinner and convey to all present my profound conviction and my congratulations that under the inspiration of Henry George each and every one may be a herald of the Social dawn.