Spencer Heath Archive

Item 997

Fall 1939?

Original -> 990

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the proposal of Henry George is seen in the full power and beauty of the social functions and relationships of proprietorship that underlie it; when it is understood as an opportunity for social services of a high order and importance that will create for those who are in position to perform them such public capital (land) values and income as can scarcely be dreamed, then there will be no need to urge action. Right thinking and understanding of physical relationships under which great services can be performed and great fortunes made has always led to appropriate action by way of organization, production and sale or exchange of or of the use of commodities or of services.

 

     In the physical world, power from the atom has been long sought. Important relationships within the uranium molecule are being disclosed by the study of nature at several educational institutions. Once these fundamentals are clearly perceived, it will not be necessary for the general public to be converted to the idea; the great new power sources will spring into being and into popular distribution through the exchange system and thus create its own appropriate values and rewards.

 

     It must be the same with social relationships, once they are properly understood. Not by “complaints and denunciation, by the formation of parties or the making of revolutions,” but by the motive of service for the recompense of profit in accordance with how the free and open market shall make its appraisals and awards.

     Let us all work together (or separately, if any man fear his brother’s light) in earnest endeavor for that clear enlightenment of things controversial and obscure under which right action will be so powerfully induced as to follow as a matter of course.

     You are very right in your principle that education must precede action, but that education must not be “vain repetitions” of prescriptions, precepts and admoni­tions, but the discovery and such illumination of relationships as will make action certain to follow and to be appropriate.

     Since your suggestion nearly a year ago that we should talk matters out some time, I have been disappointed that convenient occasion did not seem to arise. This circumstance will, I hope, excuse the very great length to which I have written upon only one aspect of a very important if hitherto obscure matter of proprietary administration of public as well as of private capital and services.

Sincerely yours,