Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1247

Carbon of a letter to W. Rhea Moreau, 156 West Main Street, Freehold, New Jersey

June 5, 1939

 

 

 

Dear Mr. Moreau:

 

I feel that I have not been very kind to myself, in that ______________________________________ and did not stop over in Freehold to see you either in my coming or going. I thought very much of doing so, but the exigencies of travel with passengers and keeping of dates would have made it almost impossible to do so.

 

     I have certainly enjoyed the delightful hospitalities from you and Mrs. Moreau, and hope to do so again. I am spending most of my time this summer here at my country place (and private nursery) in Elkridge, but doubtless will be visiting New York again before very long. Meantime I beg to remind you and Mrs. Moreau how much I will be pleased if ever I have opportunity of entertaining you here. If you ever do any touring or other travel that brings you near Baltimore or Washington, I certainly hope to have that pleasure.

 

     I have sent copies of my “Energy Concept of Population” to a number of persons more or less prominent, and several of them seem to have been impressed by it. Dr. Pearl expressed a good deal of interest in it, and thinks my co-efficient of social efficiency very suggestive. Professor Crane Brinton, of Harvard, Department of History, says, “The paper on ‘The Energy Concept of Population’ seems to me one of the most promising bits of social analysis I have seen recently, and I hope very much you will have it printed in one of the learned journals where it will be of readier access. I thoroughly appreciated your crack at Spencer on page nineteen of your ‘Land’ pamphlet. .. There is a good deal I should enjoy discussing with you.”

 

     I have sent this “Energy Concept” to only one magazine,

The Atlantic Monthly, and they write back that it is very interesting, indeed, but that they have just recently published one paper on population, and have another forthcoming. In addition, they say, “We think that your piece belongs by rights in a learned journal such as one of the quarterlies.”

 

     It does seem as though the material that I have to offer in general needs to be presented in rather restricted intellectual circles, and this is where access for an outsider is not always easy to obtain.

 

     I am wondering if you and Commander Holmes have done as much with my larger manuscript, “Building Public Values,” as you wished to. I would like to get a copy of this in the hands of Dr. S.A. Schneidman, 207 Jamaica Avenue, Belaire, Long Island, N.Y., so if you have finished with the copy you have, I am going to ask you to mail it to him, or else let me know, and I will try to arrange to get another copy to him.

 

     I am more and more impressed with the importance of my discovery that the institution of private property in land, right in our midst affords a merchandising mechanism by which public benefits are transformed from special privileges into social values, and equitably distributed for value received. This is a difficult concept for most persons, but once grasped it shows clearly how it is possible and will be profitable to all concerned to assimilate all community activity into the general exchange system, and thereby, place all public functions on the basis of service by exchange instead of coercion by force, which latter is the only foundation of political or authoritarian government that exists or has existed except in England before the Norman Conquest under Alfred. Only yesterday Mr. Hoover bewails the present great drive towards compulsory cooperation, not seeming to know that political government, in contrast with proprietary cooperation by exchange of property and services, has absolutely none but coercive technique and powers. It comes to me as a thing of enormous significance and beauty to realize that it is possible to social-ize all public and governmental processes simply by the extension of the principle of property and exchange into community affairs. I am very earnest about bringing ____________________________________ persons through whom it may be adequately publicized, but I feel that I do not have very adequate facilities for this.

 

Please give my very happy remembrances to the Sutphinmuller /?/ family and to _____ and his parents.

 

Cordial regards to you and Mrs. Moreau.

 

                                 Sincerely,