Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1388

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Clifford H. Kendal, 29 Bellevue Avenue, Summit, New Jersey

July 2, 1941

Dear Mr. Kendal:

Hello!

     It’s good to know you are asking for my present address. Glad you have not given me up for a bad per­formance (job) altogether. I’ve just got back from Bryn Mawr College where they are having another one of those conferences on Democracy and International Affairs, this time under auspices of the Friends Service Committee. (By the way, I have recently joined the Wider Quaker Fellowship and have even been cordially invited by their head office in Philadelphia, J. Barnard Walton, head secretary, to become a regular member of the Society of Friends proper). This conference goes on along the stereotyped pattern of most of them — Senator Wheeler and Norman Thomas with their threadbare platitudes, some Christian holy men of God full of good intentions that they have not the least clear idea how to carry out except that there must be more law and more laws, a pundit from India with much criticism of the Occident and mystical turbulence under his turban, and last but not least some bright sociological lights from the universities of Germany and Austria with their linguistic blitzkrieg on Uncle Sam’s vernacular. Every last one of them wants more laws or at least different laws under which the politicians will be able to polish us off better and more benevolently under some new dispensation of State power.

 

     I did meet a few interesting people, however, at the con­ference and also at Pendle Hill where I spent a day and a night. And the Quakers, some of them, do have a vague traditional philosophy that somehow a way can be found to carry on public and community affairs without resort to violence (taxation?) and war, but their leaders and writers say that no “Light” has come to them on that up to the present time. I have some hopes of getting some of the more earnest and intellectual ones of them to listen to me. The great trouble is, most people seem to think it can be done up in a single capsule which they can swallow immediately and without effort or spit out again if it doesn’t taste just like the dope that they have been long accustomed to.

     Since I last saw you I have been home but little, — only about one week out of the past eight or nine. I spent two weeks in Montreal, mostly personal visiting etc. The University was not in session and most of the faculty were away, but I did lunch with two of them whom I had known before and also had a very fine afternoon with Dr. Robert George, head of the theological depart­ment. He was quite an interested listener for the most part but he did back up a bit at the idea that our system of services by contract could be carried on decently without any regulation by force or at least some theological ministrations to get the original sin out of it or to keep it from becoming totally depraved. A theologian doesn’t know that it is his business to give in­spiration by spiritual (esthetic) processes and not salvation — by government or some other brute force — at a price.

     I am here now trying to put through a real estate deal or two on my industrial location near the water­front and shipyards, but it has now gone over till Monday.

     What are you doing by way of Apologia pro vita sua? (But I believe the last word should be tua in this connection, meaning your instead of his.) I have not gotten myself into any regular or systematic work — still scattered and emotionally unsettled — and no satisfying progress made. But I have had something printed as per enclosed copy and I am sending some extra ones separately. I will send a lot more if you think it worth while to help me circulate them among people who have or have had a special interest in the writings of Henry George.

     That old “Energy Concept of Population” of mine I had set up in type, but since then I have rewritten it to about three times its original size and I am still not satisfied with it. I’m afraid it is still too com­pact of new conceptions and new ideas for the amount of elaboration given them. I would like to be stimulated to work harder and oftener on it and get it in good shape to print. The ideas are fundamental to both the natural sciences and to the science of society which is now just quickening and getting ready to be born.

     Wish I knew well Isabel Patterson (with only one t however). I have read a good many things of hers and I think she is just about the brainiest woman in the public prints today. I enclose her review of old Doctor Socialist Beard’s latest ‘contribution’ as it appears in the New York Herald today.

     I surely hope you and Mrs. Kendal are both feeling fine and many things are going well with you. Next time I come up your way I hope to see you. Best regards to “Bob” too.

 

 

Sincerely,