Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1808

Exchange between Heath and Isabel Paterson, R.F.D. 1 Canal Road, Princeton, New Jersey.

September 1958

 

 

Dear Mrs. Paterson:          September 18, 1958

 

     I recall a very pleasant occasion on which I had your company for luncheon in New York some years ago. Recently, I was telling Rose Wilder Lane how much I thought of your varied novels, and especially your PHILANTHROPIST AND THE GUILLOTINE, all of which was no great surprise to her. She told me you were living on a farm somewhere out­side of Princeton; so, I have been looking up the records of my Science of Society Foundation to make sure whether it had sent you a complimentary copy of my CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR. The result being negative, I look upon it as a very great oversight and am, accordingly, inscribing a copy to you and having it put in the next mail.

Remembering your treatment of power in THE PHILAN­THROPIST AND THE GUILLOTINE, I am wondering if you might not find some interesting analogies in my CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR. In any case, I am glad to put you in possession of a belated memento – of our somewhat casual acquaintance so long ago.

Sincerely yours,

SH/m

     Remembering your intellectual allergy to the propaganda of the Henry Georgites, I am sending you also, after the manner of a lawyer’s brief, a very critical review of PROGRESS AND POVERTY.

Encl.

 

______________________________

 

 

Dear Mr. Heath —             September 20, 1958

 

     I have your letter or the 18th, with pamphlets. I have read them, and I am truly sorry to say that I do not fully understand what it is that you propose, specifically. I take it that your idea is that “the land-owning interest unitedly” and voluntarily should “maintain needful community services” — but I don’t see how, in practical terms.

 

     I am convinced that only property in land is a proper qualification for the vote; but even with that I do not see how taxes can be abolished. (You may believe I wish they could be!) And you do say that your idea is “in no sense taxation at all.” What then? Private associations to perform “needful community service” by “voluntary payments”? Payments by whom? would it be by the persons immediately receiving such services, or by the land-owning interest “voluntarily” with services free to those who need them? what services?

 

     I suppose private property in land does positively require records and courts of law and a police force — unless you go back to rather primitive conditions, as for example in Norway a thousand years ago, by actual possession, personal and traditional memory, and every man armed to hold his own. But public records and law courts and a police force do cost money to maintain. In what way could they be maintained voluntarily? You couldn’t have competing courts and police very well. And if I, a land-owner, did not choose to pay my share voluntarily, you may say I wouldn’t get the protection — but in that case I doubt that my neighbor could be effectively protected either, with me a kind of outlaw, open to violence. Or would my land be forfeit? In that case, the penalty would make the payment a tax, not voluntary.

 

     I hope I am open to argument, to reason; but indeed I have thought or tried to think about this problem for many years, and I see no answer to the objections I have stated above.

 

     I am convinced that only the ownership of landed property is a proper qualification for the vote; but that doesn’t seem to be what you mean. I may add that I can see some incidental risks even with the property qualification; it’s not foolproof, nothing is foolproof; but as far as I can see it is the best chance. . . I will mention, as risks, the possibility of throwing all the burden of taxes on industrial production, unjustly; the possibility of biased legislation in favor of the landed interest; and also, in a highly industrial economy, the possibility of a dangerous imbalance between the numbers of the population having the franchise, and those without it (the upropertied), a simple danger of mob action by the latter. But with the vote, the unpropertied will vote to expropriate property, to the benefit of the politicians! And that is rather worse than mobs.

 

     In short, I do not see any easy answer; and as the world is going now, I don’t know whether or not the human race has got brains enough to maintain a high civilization at all. It looks like a toss-up. However, I think also that individually we are obligated, to the last ditch, to use what brains we have to the best of our ability — therefore I really have read your communication carefully and am replying — I hope to the point, at least honestly…

 

     Of course I remember meeting you, and am obliged for your thought of me.

 

Sincerely,

 

Isabel Paterson

 

 

Post Script — It is always rather a surprise to me to have anyone recall my novels — perhaps needless to say, a pleasant surprise. So it was kind of you to mention them. As you remark, they were “varied,” and that is distinctly a handicap to popularity, so I never achieved notable sales: hence mv surprise on discovering a Gentle Reader. Some months ago I completed another novel, no doubt my last; but I haven’t found a publisher for it. The plain fact is that since I was fired by the Herald-Tribune, I have been out of sight too long. . . Leaving aside the novel, and allowing for prejudice in my own estimate of myself, would you take it as very hopeful for capitalism that the present capitalists will fire anyone who defends their position? It does strike me as a peculiar mode of behavior, to put it mildly.

 

_____________________________

 

 

Dear Mrs. Paterson;

 

     Since receiving your letter of September 20^th, I have been wondering whether or not the inscribed copy of my Citadel, Market and Altar mentioned in my letter of September 18^th ever reached you.

 

     From your letter dated only two days after mine and mentioning pamphlets only and from the general content of your letter, I strongly infer that you had not at that time received my 280-page bound volume that I thought might rate as a companion piece (though rather on the positive side) to your “Philanthropist and the Guillotine,” since both deal  with organized human energy or power — the one coercive and political, the other voluntary and societal.

 

     Please do let me know whether my Citadel, Market and Altar ever came to your hand, for I very much desire you to have a copy of it. Meantime, I cannot wonder and can well sympathize with the naturally somewhat bewildered comment constituting the greater part of your letter of the 20^th.

 

     Regarding your last paragraph, I look upon it that our relatively high Western civilization of today came about empirically through the increasing prevalence for the last two or three hundred years of voluntary contractual interrelationships among men that became possible by reason of the almost total extinction of one-world political power in Europe during medieval times. Now, with so great resurgence of political authority, again tending towards one-worldism, the civilization so far attained is decidedly precarious unless or until the societal relationships out of which it has evolved are dispassionately examined and (in all their basic simplicity) understood and then rationally practiced in the profit-making and thereby value-creating conduct not only of private but also of the necessary public services and affairs. As I see it, the unforeseen rational evolution of our modern physical technology out of its former blind, brutal and superstitious, though often effective, empiricism can be repeated at the societal level through an increasing understanding of the unforced reciprocal relationships among men no less than the energy exchanges among atoms, molecules and among the living cells that characterize the physical and the biological world.

 

     I was and am indeed greatly impressed by the versatility displayed in your fictional work — in its extreme diversity of locus in time and place of group custom and culture and of vividly draw human characters and characteristics — reaching back (as I now recall) through modern and late Victorian Manhattan through eighteenth century Spain even to the age and milieu of Tamerlane and Genghis Kahn.

 

     Capitalists, like other living things, no more appreciate the forces that defend them than they do anything else in the environment that sustains them. Ends and goals commonly are less cherished than the true aids and means for attaining them.

 

     You have found your non-metropolitan life congenial, I hope. It is a pleasure to be in communication with you.

 

                                 Sincerely,