Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1678

Carbon of a letter from Heath to John L. Davis, President, Chapman College, Orange, California

October 7, 1959

 

 

Dear Dr. Davis:

 

     I want to thank you most heartily for your kind and cordial letter of August 7^th. In these parlous times, it is rewarding indeed to have your recognition of my effort to uncover something of the almost hidden vast potentials towards an ideal society that lie in our non-political heritages from the past and our widening purely voluntary practices of today.

 

     I have delayed my reply to your letter largely because of uncertainty just when I could return. As it seems now, I can plan to leave here early in November and, with some stop-overs en route, arrive in California about November fifteenth. I shall be honored and delighted to visit and exchange ideas with you and your faculty and staff at any convenient time or times after that date.

 

     Your comparison of your college residence halls and their settings with medieval English inns and the Elizabethan theater is most interesting. It carries my mind further to the thought that the human community at all levels consists normally of separate exclusive and individual portions surrounded or being surrounded by a public and general portion (courtyard or village green) wherein services common to all (including entertainment) are performed or supplied. And even the plays themselves, by reason of their public and universal character, are a kind of public ministration to the private personalities whom, in common, they psychologically and esthetically serve. I can well appreciate your enthusiasm for making your residence hall courts into fit settings for presentations of the Shakespearean plays.

     To my mind, the services that are common and public to the society in general must in every community eventually be performed only upon those portions that are open and public to all. My own perhaps fondest vision — taking my cue from Sir Henry S. Maine — is of a time when not only the private services but the public and common services as well shall come under the common law of contract and consent voluntarily practiced and not coercively or politically imposed.

With my cordial good wishes,