Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2195

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum of conversation with Heath in New York City

January /?/ 1957

 

 

 

When the Roman system of order dissolved, only a rude barbarian freedom could arise out of this confusion. This could not begin on land because of the Romanized feudalism in which the population were reduced to serfdom tantamount to slavery. The free barbarians however could rove the seas, which they did as pirates. But in course of time, they learned that they could live better lives and longer lives by trading than they could by raiding; so, they made rules for their own behavior under which modern commerce was born. This gradually moved to the land as these piratical trading folk took to the shores, built there free cities like Venice and the Baltic Sea communities. The leagues of trade, the Venetian League and the Baltic League and various other combinations of traders established trading cities on the shores. (Freedom rose like Minerva from the foam — the scum, we might say — of the sea.)

 

     The richness and blessings that came to those people on the coastal towns was so great that it attracted people from inland, so it became estab­lished that a former serf who spent a year and a day in a free city became a free man. The attractiveness of freedom in the cities was so great that it drew the virile population from the lands, leaving the barons without very many serfs, in consequence of which political power drifted to the cities, leaving the landed aristocrats more and more deprived of influence and of power, and of wealth. The consequence was the decline of the landed aristocracy with the growth of the towns. This was delayed more in England than elsewhere, so the landed aristocracy didn’t lose all their power until about 1910 in England, whereas they lost practically all of their power at the beginning of the nineteenth century, coincident with the political revolutions which took place then.     

    

     This transition of authority from the landed aristocracy to the great mercantile towns resulted in the breaking up of the servile feudal system. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, there was a great movement in Germany and in various parts of Europe including England, to unshackle the limitations on the land such as primogeniture and entail and all that, so that people could have the same freedom of trade with respect to the things of nature as they had with respect to the things which they could carry by land and by sea. That transition was about completed around the beginning of the nineteenth century, since which time we have had free trade in land as well as free trade in the things which men drew from and made of the land. … I was just noting that parallel, how the two things happened — how they got freedom of the seas, which eventually brought about freedom of the land.

 

/”It was one of the factors contributing to the freedom of the land.”/

 

 Well it was a major factor. These people became so much more productive in the coastal towns and so on that they drained the land, and left the barons without any great wealth or power.

 

/”The political power went to the people then, and we got the great modern boon, democracy, instead of aristocracy, which we had had before?”/

 

 Yes, we had merchant princes in Italy, but then .. Oh, another parallel I meant to take, another part of that parallel. On the land, people resorted to reciprocal arrangements between men of power, land-

/Breaks off here/