Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2900

Penciling on 17 pages of notepad, possibly during World War II because of a reference to widespread conflict. Opening lines crossed out by Heath.

No date

 

 

 

By this practice of compulsions upon their community members the proprietors degenerated from land lords selling their services of protection and distribution to freemen into masters owning and disposing not only of land but also of slaves,

The services originally rendered by consent as rent became forced labor and the erstwhile free men became slaves. Doubtless there were many degrees of enslavement, depending on the power or defenselessness of the community members and their relationship to the proprietary class. And the high consanguinity of the patriarchal community group must have been a bar to its members being bought and sold until after that practice was applied to captives taken in inter-communal wars. Conquest was a natural technique for those proprietors who were most successfully predacious on their own communities, but as luxury and unbridled power deteriorated their sons the ruling power as naturally passed not only to conquerors but also by usurpation and default out of the proprietary hands into those of their chief officers and captains of temple and state who took political jurisdiction as sovereigns or suzerains alike over proprietors, freemen and slaves without consanguineous ties or any of the obligations and responsibilities of the patriarchal or proprietary relations.

 Thus were the predatory-political states, by a high probability, evolved in all those lush lands where the patriarchal could lapse into the slave state.                        

 But in the _______ lands the transition was more direct from the patriarchal proprietary to the predatory-political without the intermediate slave state. By usurpation from within or conquest from without the proprietary lapsed and became subordinate to the political. In the very ancient world the whole genesis of the political state is historically obscure. However, after the world-debacle of political Rome the new societal beginnings took place chiefly under dominance of barbarians just emerging out of the nomadic state into the patriarchal form of community life. Under the Roman tradition of political force these new beginnings were infected with the virus of Roman ideology and its predacious military technique. “When the German settled down as master amongst the Romanized populations of western and southern Europe, his thought was led captive by the conceptions of the Roman law, as all subsequent thought that has known it has been, and his habits were much modified by those of his new subjects; but this strong element of individualism was not destroyed by the contact.”[1]

 But the Romanizing of the barbarian political mind, although widespread and practically immediate on the Continent was in England much delayed. The Anglo-Saxon tribes were the least and the last affected by absolute and imperial conceptions of community rule. The patriarchal and proprietary relationship of responsible services through contractual relationships between proprietors and free men had respite of a full half-millennium to take its origin and growth and flower in the Alfredian renaissance.

 Nothing in history is more certain than that the Teutonic tribes generally had none of the Roman concept of an absolute mystical or transcendent state. They had no ten-millennial tradition of slave subservience, of loyalty to an abstraction under cover of which potentate and priest alike sought sanction for concrete force and conquest of arms. They gave their sufferance to leadership and service, to personal worth, and not to investiture of office or arbitrary power.

 They “stamped out the Roman state” and organized “according to the immemorial fashion of their own politics, on the basis of freehold tenure of the land and local self-administration.”[2] But on the Continent government gradually worked its way out from the individualism inherent in the habits of the German races back into an absolutism not unlike that of the Roman Empire. The isolation of England, however, delayed this process during several centuries of normal development and functioning of the free proprietary and contractual pattern of public administration especially of local affairs in which the only public revenue was the rent voluntarily paid by the recipients of public services upon their own individual appraisements of the protection and other advantages by each enjoyed. This development of proprietary and responsible administration was gradual. Doubtless there were communities in various stages of evolution but all public service and authority was based on the ownership of land and maintained out of the dues or revenue, whether in services, coin or goods, that the protection and public-servicing of the land brought forth. Slaves were not unknown, but slavery, as an institution, in this land and under the proprietary system did not take root. The delayed Roman influences became manifest in the rivalries and wars between regional kings, as under the Heptarchy and after Alfred and came to its full fruition only under the absolutism imposed by the Norman William — a predatory political state whose compulsive and predatory powers and processes have passed from kings to predatory lords thence to cabinets elected or supported by popular votes.

 This British state and its younger prototypes throughout the world are among the least rapacious and the most sensitive to popular protest. This gives probability to their being the first that shall evolve into proprietary service communities. Notwithstanding that their people are now immersed in the compulsions of war, there has been and still is under them a larger measure of contractual freedom under them than elsewhere in the world. Under this freedom their peoples have created the most wealth and values and achieved the highest quality and greatest duration of their average lives. These are the conditions under which human energy is least constrained into necessitous actions and most released to the spontaneous endeavors of the intellect, imagination and the creative arts. Among them will the known sciences expand, their basic unity be  revealed and the new Science of Society be adopted into the service of mankind. The new knowledge of the very old proprietary technique of community service performed for recompenses contractually determined and voluntarily made will draw the ablest administrators in the world into extensive ownership of community lands and resources and into the servicing of them with protection against governmental restrictions on their use. This sound enterprise will liberate economic production and exchange into _________ growth and afford the proprietary enterprisers incomes and increments beyond all present dreams. This will lay foundations /for/ proprietary public service communities, small perhaps at first but, by their prosperity and profit to their proprietors, growing in number, size and scope upon a state and national scale. Interrelations will spring up among them respecting joint and reciprocal projects and services that eventually will constitute them into the world-wide integration of public services for which the heart of mankind so deeply yearns but so dimly dreams, in lieu of the world-wide tyranny of government by force that it so rightly fears.

 Rulership will become service-ship — which is, in reality, the rulership of love.

 From the review and forecast just _______

 

/On the reverse of the penultimate page a penciled diagram of the history and future of human communities:/

 

 

Familial and Tribal – Pre-Societal

Patriarchal and Proprietary

In Easy-Living Lands              In Rugged Lands

        Proprietary Slave States         Slavery non-existent                                        or little practiced

Predatory Political States

Proprietary Service Communities

World Integration