Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3094

Chamberlain Correspondence – to, from and about John Chamberlain, 840 N. Brookvale Road, Cheshire, Connecticut

1945-2000

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2992

Annotations by Chamberlain and Heath in Willis J. Ballinger, By Vote of the People, foreword by John Chamberlain. Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1946.

No date

xiv        /Chamberlain: I do not share his faith that government can do much of a positive nature to break up concentrated wealth; only the people themselves can do that, through the development of consumer cooperatives and mutualizing associations of their own./

 

/Heath: Why should wealth not be permitted to accumulate as capital? Don’t we want large-scale efficient production and employment?

 

/All efficient production comes from concentration of wealth under unified administration./

 

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2333

Typed page of advertising for PROGRESS & POVERTY REVIEWED

No date

 

Though property in land is a free society’s crucial, decisive barrier against savagery and slavery, that institution is perennially assaulted by the reformers and self-selected saviors of mankind. Henry George’s long influential PROGRESS AND POVERTY — an ingenious denigration of the institution of property in land — has remained largely undenounced, and even uncriticized, through the years.

Now … noted socionomist Spencer Heath has written a definitive review of PROGRESS AND POVERTY that does two things. First, it exposes its false premises and fallacies. Secondly, it goes on to disclose the vitally necessary functions which private property in land performs. The chief present function of private property is to keep the distribution of the earth’s surface out of the hands of politicians. “Strongly recommended reading,” is what John Chamberlain calls Spencer Heath’s PROGRESS AND POVERTY REVIEWED.

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2766..

Extensive penciling on 26 pages of notepad, beginning as a letter to “John” (presumably John Chamberlain). Note: the originals envelope contains on the last page a summarizing diagram that has not been transcribed. Should any of this be considered with reference to a new edition of CM&A?

No date

 

Dear John –

It has been on my mind for some time to write a supplementary chapter to follow Chapter /26/ on The Distribution of National Income and conclude the middle section of my book.

Chapter /26/ deals ______________ with the almost certain changes in the pattern of distribution upon the liberation of private capital into full and free productivity. This happy result is predicated on the public capital being administered through a community-wide organization of the owning interest in its sites and resources which, together with all the artificial improvements bordering and between them constitute the public capital of the community. The distinction is this:

Property is whatever is by common action or consent appropriated to a proprietor. Private property consists of all land, all fixed improvements on land and all movable things produced from or made out of land, — all of these three kinds of properties the ownership and title to which is vested in specific entities or persons. This private ownership consists in the protected or unopposed authority to exercise both a physical and a social jurisdiction over the property owned. The physical jurisdiction is exclusively a physical relationship. The physical jurisdiction involves none but physical relationships or control between the owner and his property and between him and other owners or persons.

The social jurisdiction transcends all the physical. Its exercise involves a free and voluntary, a non-violent and therefore social relationship and process between the owner and other owners or persons with respect to the thing owned. This relationship and process is call contract. A contract is an exchange one part of which is deferred and in the interim only symbolically by a token or promise performed, and all exchanges are fundamentally exchanges of services, both social and physical, inasmuch as most services are incorporated and accumulated in things that are property. The process of incorporating them is physical; the process of exchanging them is social. When no services have been accumulated, a thing of nature only being exchanged, then only social services are performed — the service of making the exchange. Such exclusively social services are performed only in the sale or lease of land that is wholly unimproved — in which no physical services have been incorporated and to which therefore only the social services of exchange are applied.

The incorporation of merely physical services does not of itself establish or make any contractual or social relationships, for these exist only between persons and cannot exist between a person and a thing.

Taking private property as all those natural and artificial things to which specific entities or persons are entitled, only a small portion of this is held under mere physical jurisdiction, that is, merely for the use, consumption or gratification of the owner. Not only is such private property small in amount, it is entirely negligible as playing any part in those social relationships of contract and exchange that distinguish a society from a large family or tribe. Every atom of such private property has either never entered the exchange system or having entered it has passed out as users or consumers property and is no longer the subject-matter of any contract—of any distinctive relationship between the members of a society. On the other hand, the great preponderance of private property is not in course of being used or consumer by its owners but is owned for the use of others, either itself as property in the course of exchange or as instruments contributing to the use and service of others. All such properties are private capital, being, directly or indirectly, the subject matter of the social or contractual relationships among men that alone distinguish them as a society. The great preponderance of the private property — all that is used as capital — is therefore, properly speaking, socialized property.

There is a marked and fortunate tendency of private capital to concentrate under the ownership of individuals and especially of corporate entities. It flows automatically into the jurisdiction of such owners as give it highly specialized and the most efficient and productive administration. This forming of efficient organizations for mass-production of amenities and the mass-serving of populations is the social technology, only empirically developed so far, that puts into social effect the rational technologies that have sprung from the great advances in the physical sciences. As these social and contractual relationships and processes come to be analyzed objectively, as the physical processes have been, the present empirical technology will become superseded by a rational. Mankind will thus attain to a rational dominance in the field of social phenomena to correspond with that he now has in the physical field. Meantime we must discover and observe such uniformities of successful operation as we may and thus anticipate their extension, whether rationally and rapidly

We have noted that private property is preponderantly private capital — socialized property. It has long been estimated that there exists in every community, in addition to all the private capital that is administered by its owners directly for the benefit of the general public by way of particular persons through the processes of contract and exchange (benefiting its owners only consequentially and thus secondarily), there exists also a corresponding amount of public capital that by custom and tradition is administered politically by conquerors or similarly by their accepted and elected successors.

This public capital consists of what are commonly regarded as public improvements provided and maintained by the political public appropriation of private property by taxation in its many forms and by public borrowings similarly maintained. It includes also those public improvements provided from private property under political franchises granting to dependent corporate bodies the exclusive privilege of levying permissory charges upon the population in proportion to their use of the public facilities so provided.

Now, a peculiar character of the public capital is that it does not come into being through new contributions being made to the general market as private capital does, but by transfer and diversion out of the general market mainly by the levying of taxation but also by political guarantees of interest on public loans and of adequate returns on the tolls and charges permitted to be levied upon the users of the so-called quasi-public service facilities. The public capital is in all cases diverted from the free and fluid /?/ administration of the market through voluntary contractual relationships into the closed economy of the political state or of corporate bodies created by and either __________ or dependent on it.

This governmentalizing of private capital has three effects: First, that which is appropriated by taxation ceases at once to yield any revenue. It is not an investment but an expropriation. It not only fails to produce a revenue, it is an outgoing stream of capital consumed. If any public advantage, above disadvantages, should result from it, this does not flow back proportionately to those from whom it was seized; at best it could only add to the desirability (or diminish the undesirability) for occupancy of particular locations where such advantages might appear.

Second, the portion of public capital that is provided by _________ borrowing is likewise unproductive, for the interest on public debt is not paid out of the returns of any public enterprise financed by the debt. The principal of the debt is expended in public works and activities that yield no return. Interest on it is paid out of current tax seizures or by false money printed for that purpose and principal finally is liquidated in the same manner, if ever paid.

Third, the public capital administered by quasi-public corporations under dominance of the political authority does, indeed, yield a return, but it is a public monopoly revenue. The rate and amount of the revenue is not determined in accordance with the excellence and efficiency of administration and by democracy of the market. It is prescribed unilaterally by the political authority that tends always either to permit the privilege of maximum monopoly prices or to use the inferior and subordinate corporation as an instrument for the collection of taxes from those who are obliged to use the particular public services. Thus does the political power seriously either impair the proper recompense to owners and administrators of the “quasi-public” facilities or cancel out in large measure the benefits of these services by the taxation superimposed.

Further, there have more recently developed a tendency to establish non-profit governmental commissions and corporations for the building and operating of public projects for the use of which fees or tolls can be charged. Construction bonds are sold with covenants pledging future tolls to the payment of interest on the bonds — the interest received being exempted from taxation. Such exemptions are peculiarly advantageous where there are two or more conflicting authorities as in the case of the New York Port Authority constructing and operating bridges, tunnels etc.

Notwithstanding the many __________ and conceptions that have attended the establishment of quasi-public corporations, it can hardly be denied that the modicum of private enterprise for profit permitted in their administration has placed them far in advance of the wholly political or “publicly owned” corporations as agencies providing public services without the imposition of an equal or greater amount of public disservices. Yet in none of the forms under which the public capital is administered, and least of all under the wholly political form, is the recompense and return for the administration of public capital determined by and limited to the actual earnings themselves. The return to investors (if any) and administrations is determined by legislative and executive decrees or exempted from levy or cancellation only by political promises certainly not beyond the possibility of denial or repudiation. Under wholly political administration there is no capitalization of revenue for there is no revenue, only a reverse or de-capitalization of funds into expenditures, and under quasi-public administration the revenues are, in general, prescribed and are not the true expression of actual earnings. It follows from this that the funds administered by or under control of political authority are only potential capital and not, strictly speaking, any capital at all for they produce either no revenue at all or the earnings ascribed to them are politically limited or prescribed. The designation of public capital by that term is therefore more by anticipation than by present actual fact.

The anticipation is that with the continual growth and refinement of the highly cooperative form for the unitary administration of large private capital, — the savings, earnings and properties of many separate persons administered by a single corporate person — there is an unheralded and unobserved approach towards a wholly proprietary, non-political administration of public services by the amalgamation in corporate form of the kind of property and ownership that is so specially and uniquely appropriate to that purpose or end.

The first characteristic of a corporation is continuity. That perhaps is why the first corporations (other than political; a king or kingship — any rulership — is a corporation) were ecclesiastical and eleemosynary. A second characteristic, looking to effectiveness and efficiency, is unity. Later came the admiralty, trading and transportation corporations in which many owners could achieve unity of administration over large properties essential to shipping and trading on seas and land. Then great manufacturing corporations became possible. These incorporate their services into materials of the earth which are thereby transformed into commodities. These, in turn, become the subject-matter of contractual services whereby the ownership and use of these commodities pass to the public at large and the owners of the corporations are automatically recompensed with profits in exchange for the services, both physical and contractual or distributive, performed by the owners of the corporation through officers and employes acting in their name. Of these commodities, some are immediately consumed and thereby returned to the earth. Others, called consumers’ durable goods, have been so created that they afford more or less continuous services for periods of time before their use is exhausted and they are replaced or removed. Food for example, when it passes its final exchange, is almost immediately consumed. The services of clothing can continue for moderately long periods. The services of housing and shelter are much further prolonged. And much other production, such as factory equipment, serves no one directly as consumers etc., but only in the production of further producers’ or of consumers’ goods.

Consumers’ commodities and properties are supplied and their services afforded not alone by their sale outright at the end if their being produced and exchanged but also by the sale of their use only, without any ownership of or title to them passing to those who receive and enjoy the use of them. Under these arrangements only the uses of them and not the properties or goods themselves are sold. Under the former arrangement the properties or goods pass at the point of sale out of the system of exchange. Their ownership becomes exclusively individual and no longer social; they cease being capital, for they are out of the social system of exchange and no longer the subject-matter of any contractual relations. All further responsibility for their maintenance and care now falls upon the purchaser. He has their full and unlimited use but on him falls all the responsibility for their maintenance and care as well. This is a duty and necessity upon him that he cannot always conveniently or efficiently or even economically perform. If he is a highly specialized or professional person, it is a distraction from his services to others or at least it is an impairment of the leisure he has for devotion to creative and cultural or recreational affairs. Many of those who obtain the use of properties and goods by purchase delegate their maintenance and care to servants and employes, but in this they must still retain the care and responsibility of supervision over them.

As a more efficient arrangement, there has developed with the growth of society the device of administering property continuously as capital. By selling to the user and consumer of property not the property itself but the use of it for specific and usually successive periods of time, the property itself is retained under administrative ownership as capital within the general system of contract and exchange.

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1432

Carbon of a letter to John Chamberlain,

Time and Life Magazines, Rockefeller Center, New York City

June 13, 1945

 

Dear Mr. Chamberlain:

I remembered your suggestion, when we were at break­fast in Washington at the Dodge Hotel, that if I would write a reply to Lawrence Frank’s long article in the Saturday Review of Literature you might be able to use it or its substance as a basis of an interview with me. I have accordingly set out my negative reactions to Mr. Frank’s article and cast of thought on the several typed pages that I enclose herewith.

I will be glad if you can use this material in the way you suggested. You will notice that my comments are wholly critical. Mr. Frank’s article does not afford a substantial basis for constructive criticism nor for any positive exposition of the much abused social order in the practice of which the modern world has been trans­formed and the span of life so greatly enlarged. My current reflections on this, occasioned by my examination of Frank’s article, I have kept in separate notes.

With high personal regards,

Sincerely,

 

You have the copy of SRL containing Mr. Frank’s article.

 

Flight from Freedom

Recent literary events are significant. The Uni­versity of Chicago Press, in The Road to Serfdom by Professor F.A. Hayek, takes time out to post a well timed warning against the lures and enchantments of the totalitarian Utopia. Reader’s Digest breaks precedent and prints a brilliant condensation of Hayek’s warnings as its leading feature. Book of the Month Club issues some millions of copies in pamphlet form. Self-styled “liberals,” the pink prophets of protectionism, and perfectionism by laws, almost pause to give thought; and The Saturday Review of Literature opens its front pages to a fourteen column article by Lawrence K. Frank in attempted disparagement of the position and premises whence Hayek’s warnings proceed.

The bane of governmentalists, the legislationists, is their profound pessimism. They are blind to the pro­cesses within the social heritage and to much that it has, so far, attained. They are acutely conscious only of the conflicts, of the violences and strains, carried over from barbarism, perpetrated and perpetuated by govern­ments, that the social organism has not yet transcended and outgrown. Oblivious to society’s growths and its gains, they count all or most as loss and exhibit the characteristic primitive infantile reactions to their frustrated sympathies and desires. But their secret urge is to rule and control. They confuse sympathy with purity and righteousness, become moral avengers, and thus are self-endowed with an exalted motivation to rule and destroy. Calling themselves “liberals,” they are out not to give of their own, but to take from others; not to serve but to rule and master other men, all whom they think less righteous and more unfeeling men than they. To do this there is but one effective instrument and power: the sovereign state. Not to society but to government goes their appeal. If there is a wrong it must be righted by law. The sovereign state, the men who for the moment are supreme in power, can do no wrong. Sovereignty, especially popular or accepted sovereignty, is sacrosanct.

It is a cold fact for the attention of those calling themselves realists that sovereignty is the enforced mastery of men by other men. At all levels of action its technique rests on coercion; from its oppression of citizens or slaves to its supreme activity as the sole agency of war. Sovereignty is physical and not social. That is why governments have physical limitations, boundaries and frontiers. There are no social frontiers. In theory government has power only to protect and to serve; in cold fact and practice it is to tax and destroy. Yet it is the most cherished and most popular of all superstitions that a body of citizens, all the members of any large community, must first be taxed and ruled in order to be publicly served.

State stands for status; sovereignty means servitude; a strong state means a weak people; its ultimate corre­lative is slavery. The greater its power the less its responsibility. It takes from the oppressed many or it takes from the opulent few, and gives to the privileged few. Whom the state directs it cannot protect. Freedom it does not and cannot create but only confines and destroys. Peoples feed governments, maintain them out of their subsistence, and in wars protect them with their lives. Governments never protect anything but themselves, their sovereign powers. There are no other powers to whom liberty can be lost. Despite all its propaganda, freedom is always from government, never by means of govern­ment. History stands witness to this basic truth in every age. Yet supposedly educated minds are still too dull to heed. With the lure of a pigsty pottage, a glorified slave-pen existence, under the deceptive tinsel of, “ social security,” they would decoy whole peoples, sheep-­like, deeper and deeper into the totalitarian net.

When there is a call to council, if not to arms, when there is voice among all the murmurs of fear and doubt, such a voice as that of Hayek’s in The Road to Serfdom, then those who pander to the sheep-like weak­nesses of men are shocked and pained.

Lawrence K. Frank’s five pages published in The Saturday Review of Literature illustrate perhaps the best and the most that can be said against Doctor Hayek’s warning. He says that from the standpoint of assuming that the psychological quality of men who conduct enterprises mainly, at least, by the mutually selective tech­nique of voluntary contract must of necessity be inferior to the personal qualities of the “self-disciplined individuals” to whom at the end of his article he would en­trust the planned political administration of what he calls our “amazing new resources for human conservation.”

Mr. Frank is patently a scholar. He is highly literate in the language and traditions of other writers, reflects them with a liberal hand, quite complaisant towards their obvious confusions and contradictions, from whence he assumes, “These shifts in economic think­ing show that most of our classical economic theory is but an elaborate metaphor and the assumption of an economic ‘system,’ as a part of nature is gratuitous and misleading.”

Having thus virtually denied that there is in nature any such thing as an economic system, he proceeds in his very next sentence to add to the scholarly confusion by declaring the existence of a number of them, to wit:

“Moreover, the cumulative observations on other societies, built upon different cultural traditions, with their peculiar assumptions and values, show that each society has its own economic “system,” its historically developed institutions and practices and arrangements.”

Here we have, besides the contradictions, the fine literary admission that all is confused and misleading. Yet after some further paragraphs of unkind commentary on the personal characteristics of “those who want to do what they please in business and industry” he proceeds with his own gratuitous assumptions as to a social order as follows:

“As the evidence increasingly shows, social order is not given as a part of nature; it is not a system or mechanism out in space. Social order is in man; it is that which man himself creates and maintains by what he believes and assumes, what he has selected in nature and human nature for cultivation and elaboration (and has rejected or ignored). Social order is man’s self-chosen design for living; what he values and how he feels toward himself and other members of the group are directive in his conduct and so constitute his social order. Social order is not given; it must be achieved. It can be maintained by self-disciplined, responsible conduct of each member of society who can and will respect the rights and needs of others. This is what we mean by a free democratic society which for its continuation de­mands the highest standard of individual and group ethics, not submission to mythical forces or powers. If indi­viduals are to be accorded freedom of action, speech and belief, the power to contract and to engage in self-chosen activities, then, of necessity they must observe in their individual and group activities, in their personal re­lations and professional practices, the ethics which will make such freedom compatible with social order and our enduring human values and our persistent aspirations toward human dignity.”

Here we at least discover that the social order is in man; also that it must be achieved, but we are not told what it is. If it is to be achieved, it must be something not within man, but among men. Whatever it is, we are told that it can be maintained in either of two ways: by authority of the ruler, the state, or “by self-disciplined responsible conduct of each member of society,” and that in either case (apparently optional, as Mr. Frank sees it) if individuals are to be accorded freedom of action they must observe “the ethics which will make such freedom of action compatible with social order.”

Passing the obvious circularity of thinking, we find Mr. Frank sitting on both stools. On the one he sits with the “planners” who would enforce their idea of a social order by brute power of the state. On the other he sits with Dr. Hayek who purposes to depend on the responsible conduct of each member of society (not of the state) who can and will respect the rights and needs of others. This is indeed equivocal. Mr. Frank tells us that this latter is what we mean by “a free democratic society which for its continuation demands the highest standard of individual and group ethics,” yet this he in no way defines.

Dr. Hayek finds freedom in the impersonal contractual processes of the market. This is precisely where and only where we do witness the responsible conduct of each member of society who can and will respect the rights and needs of others. One wonders if Mr. Frank thinks no standard of individual and group ethics is practiced or prevails in the marts of trade. How otherwise does he think we have achieved any social order and progressed thus far? Would he prefer to have the market governed and its functions performed by the elected denizens of the City Hall?

Mr. Frank goes into moral and emotional tailspins by assuming the identity between the “impersonal forces of competition,” the system of voluntary contracts and balanced exchanges that constitute the market — and the highly personal eccentricities of certain neurotic indi­viduals who he says struggle ruthlessly against each other in “seeking to dominate and exploit social life for their own personality needs.”  Yet he cites Dr. Hayek himself to prove that these are precisely the individuals who, so far from submitting to the “impersonal forces of competition,” are through devious methods “interfering with the forces of competition” by resorting to the brute power of the state to establish cartels and other forms of privilege and monopoly by the hand of government, wholly subversive of competition and leading to its oppo­site, the wholly planned system of the totalitarian state.

Mr. Frank mixes his categories when he tries to make Dr. Hayek seem an apologist of precisely that aban­donment of competition and resort to the arbitrary, per­sonal and invidious monopoly power under authority of the state against which he so gravely warns. It seems little short of malicious to suggest that Dr. Hayek’s book is being promoted by those neurotic irresponsibles who, as Mr. Frank admits, are doing all they can to destroy competition by the establishment of state monopoly powers in their private behalf. This in itself is an example of the social perversions habitual to every type of governmental power with which the otherwise free demo­cracy of the market is beset. Mr. Frank’s article dis­plays enormous literary agility. He runs with the hare and hunts with the hounds. In the end he vanishes up an­other road. Of this he tells us nothing; only that it is not the road to serfdom nor is it the one down which “Sammy runs.”

Dr. Frank’s first thesis is, in effect, “it can’t happen here.” He tells us that the national planning and totalitarian regimes cited and warned against by Dr. Hayek have sprung up only in lands that had no such traditions of freedom as England and the United States. He states that those policies of national planning and the coercion and regimentation of all activities were accepted by the people generally (a few dissenting) as an expression of their ideals. Yet he assures us that in our freer Western lands current proposals for the same kind of governmental control proceed from a quite opposite set of traditions and ideals and will therefore, so he argues, lead to entirely different results. He relies on these traditions expressing other “beliefs and intent” to save us from the results that have come to other peoples from the same proposals and policies going into effect. With them regimentation is accepted because those people never believed in or expected anything else. We, how­ever, can accept it without menace to our liberties be­cause we have come to conceive government not as an authoritarian power, which it certainly is if it governs, but as an agency for the common good, to be invoked when people need help, protection and assistance.  This, he asks us to believe, is the American and English liberal tradition! — that government is the self-sacrificing Good Samaritan that comes to the relief of people who need help, protection and assistance and binds up their wounds when they have been robbed and abused.

Mr. Frank reflects the very antithesis of the Amer­ican or democratic tradition and ideal. It is the ideal of all slavish peoples, the ideal of Asia and of Continen­tal Europe, and especially the ideal or ideology of those parts that are least Western and most Asiatic — the homelands of this kind of ideals. He ignores the obvious fact that throughout history it is only by governments that peoples have ever been systematically robbed and abused. Men aspiring to freedom have never had anything else against which to contend or prevail. Defense against the encroachments of government, not seeking relief and protection under it, has always been the duty — the necessity — of men who would be free.

 

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1434

Carbon of a letter to Eugene Davidson,

Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut

August 29, 1945

 

Dear Mr. Davidson:

Following the kind suggestions made by you and Mr. Chamberlain, I placed, shortly thereafter, a copy of my MS., Citadel, Market and Altar, in the hands of Mr. John Davenport, Irwin Edman and Max Eastman.

Mr. Davenport indicated a very earnest — almost an eager — interest in what I told him about it and volunteered the suggestion that it might be made the basis of an article for his magazine. He purposed to spend a week or more on it and then report to me.

Professor Edman preferred to postpone discussion until after reading. John Chamberlain had written him quoting Edman as having said that Aristotle called pro­perty the surrogate of virtue but that in his view my contribution had made property the instrument of virtue and might therefore be taken as the “Deweyization of Aristotle.” Edman’s reaction, as a follower of Dewey, should be interesting.

I did not succeed in making personal contact with Max Eastman; so, after some days, I sent copy of the MS. to his summer address, Chilmark, Massachusetts, by registered mail, with notes from Mr. Chamberlain and myself enclosed.

Another carbon copy I am hoping to place in the hands of either Dr. Geoffrey Brunn, who I believe is eminent as a historian, or Dr. Will Durant. I will be lunching with Dr. Brunn tomorrow. He is quite taken with Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine. (I dare to hope he will find Citadel, Market and Altar going forward from where she left off — showing how energy, truly socialized, flows creatively out of the administra­tion of property contractually by its owners, as capital, and that the owners of communities, large or small, when enlightened and organized for the purpose, can become fountains of creative energy as public services, both positive and protective, and be rich in their spontaneous revenues, voluntary recompense, therefor.)

I am indebted to you and Mrs. Davidson for your personal as well as intellectual hospitalities and look forward to encouraging responses and gratifying events.

Sincerely,

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2297

Extracts from letter of Heath to Eugene Davidson,

Yale University Press, New Haven 7, Connecticut

September 21, 1945

 

 

/Will Durant’s/ volume, PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM, certainly does bring to a focus the need for some basic generalizations in the social realm before there can be in that field either a science to describe it or a philosophy to correlate it with other fields.

 

I thought our friend Chamberlain’s note to Erwin Edman was striking. After recalling Edman’s remarks that to Aristotle property was the surrogate of virtue, he stated that in this manuscript property is made the instrument of virtue. He then suggests that Edman, as a Deweyite, should give good welcome to this “Deweyization of Aristotle.”

 

My mind hungers for thoughtful criticism, either to accept if need be, or justly to refute.

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Letter to John Chamberlain

June 17, 1946

 

Dear John Chamberlain:

I have been thrilled at your wonderful mission to England and safe return. Peggy told me much of it in Washington and I hope to hear — and read — more. It was good to see her and the wee ones on the eve of your happy return. She is always delightful — and they, charming too.

I have remembered, of course, your suggestion of my coming up to your pleasant region again and have looked forward to it eagerly. .. And I am hoping by your encouragement to make some contacts through publication and otherwise that will insure competent attention to the new type of thinking now acknowledged as imperative if incomes and values are to be produced instead of destroyed in the administration of community and public affairs.

The social implications of physical science increas­ingly persist. More and more widely there is arising among the thoughtfully articulate a hope — even a vague confidence — in what Duane Roller, head of Physics Dept., Wabash College, calls “the new pattern of thinking that is emerging from the physical sciences.”

All this bespeaks of growing timeliness in my own discernments of this pattern and of its specific and thoroughgoing application. It livens thought that my own time may not be too short to see a strong turning of interest towards this fertile approach, so sweetly alluring to the perceptive mind and so hugely promising to the heart of mankind — to the remnants of its age­-long yet imperishable hope.

I feel you share much of this with me — a quiet intellectual enthusiasm, not without its esthetic sensi­bilities. This is to me a great personal attraction and bond, giving a peculiar delightfulness to your association, your encouragement and aid.

Do let me hear from you soon.

Sincerely,

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2309

Carbon of letter from John Chamberlain, LIFE, Editorial Offices,

Time and Life Building, New York City 20, to Richard Walsh, Sr.,

John Day Company, 40 East 49^th Street, New York City

June 26, 1946

 

Dear Dick:

This is to introduce Spencer Heath’s Citadel, Market and Altar manu­script which I spoke to you about.

 As I tried to intimate over the telephone, its power to stir up the animals ought to appeal to the publisher of Horses and Apples and Rose Wilder Lane. The book contains the only reasoned answer to Henry George that I have ever seen, and after all these centuries I believe that some­one has at last discovered and formulated the true functions of private property in land.

 But there is a lot more to the book than this. Mr. Heath’s general philosophy is a widely creative one. A lot of people will disagree with him but he’ll catch most of them off base, for his arguments are not in the least conventional.

 As one who has ceased to believe in the beneficence of the politico, I’d like to commend this manuscript to your attention.

 

Yours,

/s/ John Chamberlain

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1472

Letter to John Chamberlain,

Cheshire, Connecticut

Spring, 1953

 

Dear John:

I never heard anything from Henry Regnery since my letter of December 12, 1953, with your personal note attached. Seems he must have his mind made up about my mss. What do you think? Do you suppose there is any competent publisher to whom I could really “sell” the mss ideologically and then go ahead on the “vanity” plan?

I wrote to Russell Kirk commending his work and urging the great need of a “dynamic non-political con­servatism.” He replied very cordially saying he was about to write along that line for Regnery to publish in the fall. Here is the second paragraph of his pretty long letter:

“Aye, conservatism greatly needs a positive program; and I am going to try to outline just that in a little book of mine which I shall write soon; which Henry Regnery expects to publish in the fall. I shall be grateful for all your suggestions regard­ing an enlightened and dynamic conservatism. Perhaps I shall be able to send you chapters of this book from time to time, since some portions may be pub­lished in periodicals before the book appears.”

I have written him at considerable length and with some reference to my own mss, thinking he may ask to see it.

Is this “Land question” really a dead horse or are there editors who can see its timeliness and would like to expose it? Seems to me all it needs is some published writer’s name behind it or similar sponsorship. I am spoiling to get something started and spend time and money on it.

Formation of the Science of Society Foundation, as per enclosed statement of purpose, is in the hands of Attorney Louis Solomon in New York for attention to legal formalities. Would you be one of its trustees? And can you suggest some others who would be suitable and might consent?

And what about Regnery?

I left New York in late January. Grandson went with me for a nice visit at Sewanee, Tennessee. He went back to Princeton (Art and Religion major) and I came on down here for the cold spell. I surely do miss seeing you and you-all, as we-all say it. It is a rare kind of pleasure to have friendship with a mind so crystal clear of fog and fixations and a personality so free from self-serving stratagem and petty personal egoism. (How much better had I stated your qualities in the positive!) Tell me something about the ideas you have had in mind and what doing about them. All my best also to Peggy and to the heart charming charges under your happy nurture and care.

 

Sincerely,

 

Enc. Statement of Purposes

 

_____________________________________________________________________________

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1484

Letter to Mr. Arthur S. Madsen,

4 Great Smith Street, London, S.W.I.

June 15, 1953

 

My dear Arthur Madsen:

I thank you very much for your letter of last December 22, in care of The Freeman. I don’t know why yours of October 2 failed to reach me at my home address in Mary­land, but I spend a good deal of time in and out of my New York address as above and most of my mail has been coming here of late.

I infer from your caption over Mr. Gaffney’s article in your December issue that at your last writing you had not read very far into my review of Progress and Poverty and that your impressions of it must have been gained from the first part of Mr. Gaffney’s perfervid remarks upon it.

It was only a short time ago that Mr. Gaffney’s article first came to my attention. John Chamberlain thought, the misleading quotations and imputations in his first para­graph notwithstanding, that on the whole some rejoinder from me would be in order and well worthy of equally conspicuous even if much smaller space in your columns.

Accordingly, I have set down my best-considered comments, and John Chamberlain has been kind enough not only to pro­pose but also to forward them to you.

I was very well pleased at the mostly serious temper of Mr. Gaffney’s last two pages. I can only hope (for the sake of truth) that you and other Henry George men will go as far as Mr. Gaffney in entertaining basic con­ceptions so far contrary from his long cherished ones, and that whatever of the “whole discussion” you may publish may be as among friends holding to the same ideal even though choosing quite contrary roads to reach the common goal.

As far back as the early thirties I began to believe in the providence of a far more realistic than the poli­tical and coercive method of seeking the ends towards which Henry George aspired. The enclosed leaflet entitled, “Why the Henry George Idea Does Not Prevail,” written in 1938, is but one evidence of my many urbane attempts towards a more creative (and thus spiritual) mode of approach.

Until this current review my emphasis was always on the constructive side of Henry George’s philosophy, in spite of his proposed political methods identical with those of all the Marxians whom he hoped to oppose and defeat.

Needless to say, it was not until I ceased exalting his ultimate aims and challenged his proposed enforce­ment and his logic underlying it, that any such serious attention to constructive ideas could be obtained. It seems just too bad that we must have so much heat in our journey towards the light. If I have in some degree followed Mr. Gaffney’s temper I hope he will soon forgive me, as I have forgiven him.

I cordially reciprocate your kind sentiments and recollections of my visit to you and your dear colleague, John Paul, and the very learned and kindly Mr. Lester, all of whom were so very lovely to me in London some twenty years ago. And I remember also with pleasure your visit here in 1933.

I can assure you my sympathy for the goal of Freedom through rent coming to be recognized as the legitimate recompense for public services, and through the automatic creation of rent by performing services instead of taking taxes by force without reference to any corresponding services.

It is pleasant to be again in communication with you and in the cordiality of friendship, however diverse may be the roads we choose – the means we seek to see employed — to reach the common goal.

Sincerely,

 

SH-s

Enc. “Private Property in Land Explained”

“Questions for Land Owners”

“The Administration of Property as Community Services”

“Why the Henry George Idea Does Not Prevail”

 

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­_____________________________________________________________________________

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1499

Letter to Dr. Russell Kirk,

c/o Henry Regnery Co., 20 West Jackson Boulevard, Chicago 4, Illinois

November 23, 1953

 

 

Dear Dr. Kirk:

I have just finished going through your admirable work, The Conservative Mind, and with a great deal of pleasure. It is certainly a timely contribution to a kind of scholarly thinking that has been too much in abeyance for a good many years.

Two or three years ago my friend, John Chamberlain, in discussing a popular novel written intensely from the individualistic point of view (The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand), wondered if that might not be a fore-runner to a spate of publications in reaction against the so-called Liberal but really socialistic trend current for so many years. Between Henry Regnery, Devin Adair Garrity and the Caxton Press it may be that something like that is being brought about. I truly hope so and predict that in this your most excellent volume will be outstanding for a long time to come.

There is a tendency among many to evaluate Conservatism in purely negative terms. I do not share that, but I do believe Conservatism has, or will come to have, a great deal more to offer mankind than it has exhibited historically thus far.

My own reflections on this are expressed in the note with which I inscribed a copy of your book before sending it to a very thoughtful and scholarly friend who I know will appreciate the gift. I am setting them down here as well:

As human society evolves, all unconscious, now in triumph, now in decline, towards its destined or­ganic norm, two tendencies, one to save, the other to waste and destroy, appear. The one is called conservatism, the other radicalism.

In times of growth and gain conservatism stands motionless on guard. In times of fear and loss, when growth declines, radicalism rides high and conservatism only seeks to retard the downward trend.

Conservatism saves and conserves. Its power is in the brake, for it is the stator, not the motor, of social organization and advance. Radicalism, born of frustrations, is explosive. But for the brake of conservatism it would completely destroy.

Conservatism, inert and potential, affords no release, gives no forward guidance to the social power. The task of the “Conservative Mind” is to find the rationale implicit in the organic relationships among men. It must develop a positive non-political dynamism of its own.

Advance in social organization awaits a dynamic conservatism that will have motor power as well as braking power, that finds the forward way and sets foot in it.

All hail to an enlightened, to a rational, to a dynamic conservatism.

November 13, 1953                           S. H.

I would be greatly pleased to hear something of your views as to the future of conservatism as a positive social power.

To my mind one of the main camouflages under which radical liberalism has concealed its inherently subversive trend has been the so-called “Land Reform” idea — a kind of intellectual Trojan horse full of pinks and ultimately reds. This idea seems to be almost universally tolerated and even positively entertained by those in high places, both political and academic. For your pos­sible entertainment on this subject I am enclosing a small publication of my own in refutation of the land communist dialectic so greatly popularized for the last fifty-odd years by Henry George’s Progress &  Poverty and his single tax followers in most parts of the world. You will note the forward by John Chamberlain, and I hope will find something in it of more than negative value, particularly in the two pages following page twenty-one.

Could not this suggested proprietary administration of community services be the foundation for the possible technology of a dynamic, non-political conservatism? I would value your suggestions apropos of this.

Again complimenting you on your most noteworthy accomplishment, I am

Sincerely yours,

SH:m

Enc. “Progress & Poverty Reviewed” with supplementary discussion

“Why the Henry George Idea Does Not Prevail”

 

 

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1506

Letter to Devin Adair Garrity,

23 East 26th Street, New York 10, New York

December 13, 1953

 

Dear Mr. Garrity:

 

Some months ago, acting on the kind suggestion of my friend John Chamberlain, I enjoyed a pleasant luncheon hour in your cultured companionship.

We discussed how, away from earlier limitations, a new kind of thinking in the natural sciences had raised modern men into such wondrous material powers, and what vast rewards could await a similar rational understanding of the current system of contractual (non-political) interfunctioning among modern men. In this I made reference to the inspiring results of my long research in that field of non-coercive relationships, as reported in Citadel, Market and Altar, which I sent to you later in manuscript form.

Writings of grave warning and protest against the totalitarian political trend are almost innumerable now. They would at best only reverse or retard the vicious trend. Few propose any but legislative measures or means, and the legislative process, in its results, always vindi­cates the worst forebodings of “the Conservative Mind.”

It is high time in history for a creative conserva­tism, non-political and non-coercive, saving and conser­ving free enterprise, with forward direction and a self-sustaining dynamism of its own in virtue of the values it creates.

In a hurried interview last September, you were gracious to say that you would keep the manuscript before you and in the coming November give it the first hand examination that I was confident you would find worth while.

The voluntary human society, a new kind of Kingdom, is emerging slowly despite “dominations and powers,” needing only a dynamic, non-political conservatism to defend and speed it and to nobly serve. Citadel, Market and Altar is diagrammatic of this, — in principle, historically, and in practical detail. Its effective publication should bring much credit upon all parties concerned.

SH:sm                        Sincerely,

 

 

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2434

Letter to Heath from F.A. Harper, Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York December 8, 1955

November 18, 1955

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

Your perception of these matters of which you speak in yours of November 14 so far exceeds my own that I cannot help sinning in a personal elation over your agreement with my “Sequoyah” line of thought.

But my sole purpose must be the pursuit of truth, even in my own errors, wherever it may lead. So rather than accept your appreciation myself I shall pass it on, in turn, to those unknown many persons who must have brought these thought-ingredients to me in the first place.

And thanks for the enclosure, which I shall read with interest.

Sincerely,

/s/ F.A. Harper

 

P.S. John Chamberlain was one, much interested in your

general concept. Wonder how he thinks about “Sequoyah?”

 

 

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 912

Pencilings in a notebook while visiting at John Chamberlain’s home, of thoughts in anticipation of John’s promised foreword for Citadel, Market & Altar, Cheshire, Connecticut. Notebook is preserved in “Originals” envelope 912.

October 6, 1950

 

 

The subject-content of this book, its world-view and interpretation, is pertinent not to its present or to any particular decade or century merely, but to the whole era (or eon) through which the increasing practice of rational freedom shall carry mankind into the destined grandeur of its transcendent dreams. It is therefore both timely and timeless until it shall at last be cherished as a quaint relic from the nebulous past, both picture and prophecy of means and ends, of the universal human glory it foregleamed.

In their rational understanding of the physical world, its structures and processes, the modern man has gone far, and in the utilization of them to his ends and dreams.

This new science has no concern with anything in the natural world, save only man himself, the organized structures and processes among men. And in these it discusses those relationships which rest on compulsion and force and those that are voluntary and free. Of any others it makes no discovery, holds no concern.

____________________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2330

Carbon of letter from Robert Clancy to John Chamberlain,

Editor, The Freeman, 240 Madison Avenue, New York City 16

October 27, 1952

 

 

Dear Mr. Chamberlain:

 

The advertisement of Henry George’s “Progress and Poverty” in the November 3^rd issue of “The Freeman” can only be construed as an effort to arouse prejudice against the book.

 

     In the beginning of “Progress and Poverty,” Henry George quotes Ptolemy: “He that is to follow philosophy must be a freeman in mind.” Your magazine bears the name “Freeman.” Do you think that the tone of your ad was such as to contribute to free inquiry?

 

     Every serious student of Henry George knows that he was a champion of liberty, diametrically opposed to the ideas of a planned economy and totalitarianism. There is a genuine Communist menace today. It is necessary to examine basic principles to determine objectively and clearly the issues at stake. Crying “Communist” has been done too often, too thoughtlessly, too wrongfully, too harmfully, for too many different motives. Therefore, applying the epithet “Communist” to Henry George was an especially indiscriminate, false and cowardly thing to do.

 

     As for Spencer Heath’s “exposé” of “Progress and Poverty”, I have only a few words to say. It can easily be handled by any elementary student of George. Mr. Heath has had free access to the Henry George School for the past twenty years and has been unable to dent the logical structure of “Progress and Poverty”. If “The Freeman” chooses to endorse Mr. Heath’s proposal of a feudal society as against a democratic society, that is its own business. Your choice does not justify your unethical attack against Henry George.

Very truly yours,

                            Edward Clancy

                            Director

RC:ks

 

cc:  Forrest Davis

     Suzanne La Follette

     Kurt M. Lassen

     Spencer Heath

     Henry Hazlitt

Alex Hillman

 

 

____________________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2499

Carbon of letter to John Donohue,

c/o Knights of Columbus, New Haven, Connecticut

June 19, 1953

 

Dear Mr. Donohue:

 

My very good friend, John Chamberlain, tells me that you might be interested in an activity directed against so-called land reform, which of course means land taxation and ultimate “socializing” of land. This land reform is a Trojan horse loaded with land communism, which of course means total communism since government administration of land and resources carries with it control over everything derived from land including the people themselves.

 

Some time ago it occurred to me that the egregious economic fallacies contained in the land communists’ great manifesto, Progress & Poverty, ought to be thoroughly aired and exposed. Accordingly, with my friend Chamberlain’s encouragement, I got out the accompanying booklet, and The Freeman magazine undertook to publish and distribute it. The reaction of the Henry George forces has been violent and voluminous, and The Freeman, under its new editorship, refuses further to publish or distribute it.

 

The attached advertisement will give you an idea of the publicity as conducted by The Freeman. I would like to make similar arrangements with another publication or publications.  The copies of Progress & Poverty referred to in the advertisement are obtainable by publishers from the Schalkenbach Foundation, 50 E. 69^th Street, New York City, at as low as 40 percent discount on retail price.

 

This advertisement in The Freeman was producing very good results up to the time of its discontinuance. The present Freeman editor writes me that he is personally and editorially opposed to the single tax and he takes no exception to the content of my review of Progress & Poverty, yet he refuses to have The Freeman further publish or distribute it.

 

All that I am doing in this connection is solely in the interest of public enlightenment and the very important subject of land administration, and entirely at my own personal expense. I do need, however, some organized cooperation in order to give this matter the publicity that it deserves.

 

Being assured of your opposition to all kinds of communism from the ground up, I feel confident of your sympathy and cooperation.

 

Very truly yours,

 

 

________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2352

Letter to Devin Adair Garrity,

23 East 26^th Street, New York City 10

December 13, 1953

 

 

Dear Mr. Garrity:

 

Some months ago, acting on the kind suggestion of my friend John Chamberlain, I enjoyed a pleasant luncheon hour in your cultured companionship.

We discussed how, away from earlier limitations, a new kind of thinking in the natural sciences had raised modern man into such wondrous material powers, and what vast rewards could await a similar rational understanding of the current system of contractual (non-political) interfunctioning among modern men. In this I made reference to the inspiring results of my long research in that field of non-coercive relationships, as reported in Citadel, Market and Altar, which I sent to you later in manuscript form.

Writings of grave warning and protest against the totalitarian political trend are almost innumerable now. They would reverse or retard the vicious trend, yet few propose any but legislative measures or means. And the legislative process, in its results, always vindicates the worst forebodings of “the Conservative Mind.”

It is high time in history for a creative conservatism, non-political and non-coercive, saving and conserving free enterprise, with forward direction and a self-sustaining dynamism of its own in virtue of the values it creates.

     In a hurried interview last September you were gracious to say that you would keep the manuscript before you and in the coming November give it the first-hand examination that I was confident you would find worthwhile.

     The voluntary human society, a new kind of Kingdom, is emerging slowly despite “dominations and powers”, needing only a dynamic non-political conservatism to defend and speed it and to nobly serve. Citadel Market and Altar is diagrammatic of this — in principle, historically, and in practical detail. Its effective publication should bring much credit upon all parties concerned.

Sincerely,

SH/m

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2377

Carbon of letter from Heath to John Chamberlain

Cheshire, Connecticut

July 14, 1954

 

Dear John,

Spencer and I are on our way out to Michigan to visit Russell Kirk who was kind enough to invite us, and then down to Sewanee again — University of the South. You really should know a lot about Dr. Edward McCrady, head of that institution. He is doing much for the fundamental unity of science and religion and the development of free society.

Attached to this is copy of notes I made to you in Florida last spring and which it seems did not get transcribed and mailed to you until now. I am sending it to you now because it still seems pertinent to all that it refers to. Regnery really ought to know something about the content and substance of Citadel, Market and Altar for he seems to me like a man who would like to promulgate something of the positive philosophy of Conservatism in addition to his very wonderful work on the purely critical side.

I was only briefly in New York this spring but did stop in at Barron’s one afternoon in hopes of seeing you. I certainly do miss the pleasure of our occasional visits and discussions, and knowledge of how you are progressing professionally and in your personal affairs.

Again with all best wishes and happy recollections.

Sincerely

 

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2388

Letter to Heath, 11 Waverly Place, New York City, from William S. Schlamm, Green Mountain Meadows, R.F.D. East Wallingford, Vermont

September 17, 1954

 

Dear Mr. Heath, —

How very nice and kind of you to write me that generous note of September 10, 1954! Just as rare as the writer who can use irony is the reader who appreciates it; and if that rare reader happens to be a man of your wisdom and knowledge, the writer’s joy is unlimited.

Of course I’ll “keep on giving them hell.” In fact, right now there is some serious talk of starting an important new weekly magazine, a hard-hitting journal of opinion (our opinion, of course), with which I’d be closely con­nected. If anything comes out of it, I’ll let you know in time. (Our friend, John Chamberlain, is in on it, too.)

Thanks for sending me that moving statement of Dr. McGlynn.

With my best wishes and kindest regards,

 

Sincerely yours,

/s/ Willi Schlamm

 

_____________________________________________________________________________

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2500

Letter from John Chamberlain, Cheshire, Connecticut,

to the Editors of Land & Liberty,

4 Great Smith Street, London, S.W. 1, England

June 15, 1955

Gentlemen:

My attention is lately called to the leading article in your issue of December 1st, 1955 under the display heading: “VITUPERATION WELL ANSWERED,” signed by Mr. Mason Gaffney of Berkeley, California and in answer to Mr. Spencer Heath’s 26-page essay entitled “Progress and Poverty Reviewed and its Fallacies exposed.

Noting your concluding remark under the heading of Mr. Gaffney’s article: “As we regard the whole discussion as illuminating we gladly afford the space in our columns which it deserves” and relying on your sincerity and good faith, Mr. Heath has asked me to submit the enclosed brief, temper­ate and, I think, well reasoned rejoinder.

Very sincerely yours,

/s/ John Chamberlain

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2501

Letter to J.T. Flynn

3511 222nd Street, Bayside, Long Island, NY

June 15, 1955

 

 

Dear Mr. Flynn:

I tremendously admire your work in exposing the Roosevelts, Lattimores, Services, and am indignant at the apparent conspiracy of suppression that you have encountered but that I feel sure you will surmount in one way or another.

As a fellow victim in a small way, and anticipat­ing your interest, I’m sending you a 26-page booklet entitled, “Progress & Poverty Reviewed and Its Fallacies Exposed,” with forward by our mutual friend, John Chamberlain. As you can see, John thinks this a very competent job of debunking, in a place where it is high time some debunking should be done. I wish you would let me know briefly your reaction to this. For your convenient reference in checking up citations I’m sending you a copy of Progress and Poverty in the current propaganda edition.

      I also enclose copy of the advertisement which was run a few times in The Freeman Magazine with apparently good effect. It has provoked such furor among the land communists, both here and abroad, that the present editor of The Freeman (succeeding John Chamberlain), without objection to its form or content refuses to further publish or distribute it.

 Out of your experience will you kindly give me some suggestion as to how I can get this essay, with or without the accompanying copy of Progress and Poverty, into good circula­tion again.

      Again complimenting your work, I remain

Yours very truly,

SH-s                         Spencer Heath

 

________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1557

Letter to John Chamberlain

August 20, 1955

 

 

Dear John:

 

It was good seeing you today after so long a time. I hope Peggy will be delighted with her presents as I am at the opportunity of sending her something.

In reference to the McGlynn “Doctrinal Statement” and my comments thereon, I enclose three copies for you under the title, “The Trojan Horse of ‘Land Reform’”. Hope you will find them interesting and some possible value. I also enclose a recent leaflet, “Shorter Criti­cism of the Economic Argument of Henry George,” copies of which were sent to the 135 principal officers of the “International Union for Land Value Taxation & Free Trade” at their recent pow-wow in Scotland.  I also sent to them the McGlynn article and “Private Property in Land Explained.”

So far as the negative side is concerned, I think my criticisms of land communism are now at an end unless some active controversial issue should arise.

Remember me to those nice young ladies of yours.

 

                               Sincerely,

SH/m

Enc:  3 “The Trojan Horse….”

            6 “Shorter Criticism…”

 

_______________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2440

Pencil dictation by Spencer MacCallum from Heath on note paper as was usual practice, this for a letter to John Chamberlain, marked “Sent 9/10/55”

September 10, 1955

 

Dear John,

I’ve just been shocked and astonished to learn by telephone that Peggy has left us. I had no ideas that she was even ill. Only a few days ago I received from her a very warm and lovely note referring to the little present that I added to yours for her birthday and hoping to see me before very long again.

Nor have I any idea what to say to you beyond the fact of my deep sorrow with and for you and for those charming young ladies who are now left so much alone. I wish I had some happy thought for you, but we can remember that time softens all things and the blessedness of the past reaches forward indefinitely into the time to come.

I have always admired you and had great pleasure in your company. I wish I could hold your hand now.

Sincerely,

Spencer

­­­­­­­­­

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1562

Letter to John Chamberlain,

Cheshire, Connecticut

November 18, 1955

 

 

Dear John:

 

Here is that layman’s explanation of Planck’s quantum principle in terms of the quantum of energy and quantum of action as the basic operational element in all physical energy such as erg-seconds, horsepower-hours, kilowatt-hours and so forth, including the human life-year. I have tried to make it clear and explicit and believe I have done so even to minds far less perceptive than yours.

Cordially,

SH/m

Enc:  “Prefatory Note Concerning the Quantum, the Erg-second, the Horsepower-hour and the Life-year”

 

 

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2452

Carbon of letter to John Chamberlain,

840 N. Brooksvale Road, Cheshire, Connecticut

(See Item 2456 relevant to Beacon Press referred to here.)

July 27, 1956

 

Dear John:

Here is a copy of my recent letter to the Hertz Company. I have already sent a copy of it to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal, thinking he might like to use it.

My Foundation, as per caption above, is now duly incorporated. The Printing Office of Yale University Press is setting up my Citadel, Market and Altar, and Mr. Boyden says he will have galley proofs in the mid­dle of August. Designing of the book has been in the hands of John O.C. McCrillis of the Yale Press.

I have just returned from a ten-day trip to New England looking after the publication side of C.M.& A. I had a fine afternoon by appointment in Worcester with Dr. Walter Donald Kring, top officer of the Beacon Press, who arranged to have their new editor, Thomas Bledsoe, formerly with Putnam, drive down to Worcester for the meeting. Both these men showed an interest, I might almost say enthusiasm, for the manuscript (and its author), considering their short acquaintance with it. I will hear from them.

I made a similar and, if possible, more favorable impression upon John Howland Snow, of Wilton, Connec­ticut, who publishes libertarian and similar stuff. He calls his organization The Long House. He was sug­gested to me by Dr. Floyd Harper of Irvington-on-Hudson. He is certainly a dynamic personality with, I think, a good deal of a record. Would you be good enough to give me or direct me to where I can get a longer line on him?

While in New Haven, I tried to get in touch with you, but found you were on vacation, in Canada I think. I do hope you have been having a wonderful and refresh­ing time and that it will not be too long before I see you again.

     Best regards to you and to the young ladies,

Sincerely,

 

 

 

___________________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2467

Carbon of letter to WHO’S WHO IN AMERICA, Marquis Publications Building, Chicago 11, Illinois

October 18, 1956

 

Gentlemen:

I am writing to express my astonishment that the name of John Chamberlain does not appear in WHO’S WHO IN AMERICA. He is certainly very well known in the literary and journalistic world. But he is a shy fellow, and quite possibly he neglected to supply you with the information regarding himself that your public ought to have.

If such is the case, please let me know, and I will undertake to put some friendly pressure on him, if necessary. He of course does not know that I am writing to you about him.

Sincerely,

Spencer Heath

SH/m

______________________________________________________________________

Letter to Heath from Gertrude Hendricks, Service Department, WHO’S WHO IN AMERICA, Marquis Publications Building, Chicago 11, Illinois

October 22, 1956,

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

Thanks you for your letter of October 18^th.

We welcome nominations for any of our publications, including WHO’S WHO IN AMERICA and are referring to the Editors the name of John Chamberlain for their consideration.

 It is not always possible to reach all who are currently appropriate and the Editors are therefore grateful to you for your interest and cooperation.

                                 Sincerely,

/s/ Gertrude Hendricks

Service Department

_____________________________________________________________________________

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2486

Carbon of letter to Henry Regnery,

20 West Jackson Blvd., Chicago 4, Illinois

December 17, 1956

 

Dear Mr. Regnery:

It was kind of you to entertain my grandson and me at your office on that Saturday morning a fortnight ago. I have long been interested in the books you publish, and was glad of the opportunity of discussing them with you.

It is interesting to note that our very wonderful friend, John Chamberlain, is taking on a new assignment with The Princeton Panel, a new organ­ization with which you are probably familiar. I hope his prediction about a new spate of libertarian literature being bell-weathered by Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead is coming to be true. The signs are not wanting, and I must congratulate you on being in the forefront in an ideology of freedom which certainly has the room and, I trust, also the vitality, to grow.

After leaving you, I gave Professor Hayek a ring by way of paying my respects, and he was kind enough to invite us down to the University for lunch with him, which he made a very cordial occasion indeed.

It was nice meeting those young sons of yours and to note their bright reactions to what they saw and heard. Anent the violin lessons, I am enclosing copy of Sam Walter Foss’ poem entitled “Ownership,” the sentiment of which I feel sure you will approve.

Cordially yours,

SH/m

Encl.

________________________________________________________________

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3180

Carbon of letter to John Chamberlain

January 8, 1957

 

Dear John:

Here’s hoping all goes well with you, and that I will have a chance to see you either in New York or New Haven on my next visit soon after the 14th, if not before.

It will soon be time to make up the dust-jacket for CM&A, so I have been trying my un­practised hand at a blurb to go with this, follow­ing up some suggestions you were kind enough to make.

Regarding the note “To the Reader,” intended to be placed opposite the Table of Contents, I have made two or three new versions of this as per copies enclosed. I am sending these, thinking you may make some suggestion concerning the desirability of this, or the most suitable form.

The galley proofs that I sent to you were just as they came from the printer. They have since been considerably corrected and improved, even to the substitution of new and improved paragraphs in some places, as for example the 6th paragraph on galley 64, reducing the number of words in most

cases.

I am wondering how things are going with your new assignment at Princeton. Seems like a fine pro­ject, and surely it could not have a finer or more capable mind at the helm or in the line. Your looking into physical science, as you must have done to write, among other things, your article in Barron’s about atomic energy, puts you in fine position to show how the fundamentals of physical science carry forward in the biological field and in the fundamentals of our

free-enterprise society as well — notwithstanding the fact that human mind and spirit is here involved. It seems to me that with the benefit of your guidance, the Princeton project may blaze a fine trail.

It will surely be a pleasure to see you and talk with you some more.

Sincerely,

 

SH/m

Encls: 2

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1605

Carbon of a letter to William S. Schlamm,

Green Mountain Meadow, R.F.D., East Wallingford, Vermont

February 26, 1957

 

Dear Willie Schlamm:

My Holiday Greeting to you, for want of correct address, was returned. Time was when the Post Office took pride and a lot of trouble to find an addressee.

I like your rollicking razzing of the stupid and commonplace in the realm of entertainment and the arts, for I seem to sense deep undertones that make it playfully profound. Keep it going about as is, and always with that good old libertarian slant.

I think we know each other more through mutual friends such as John Chamberlain, although I remember a very pleasant visit with you at Time and Life some years ago when you and John and the late Russell Daven­port were getting out for Henry Luce a new magazine that died a-borning.

Again best wishes for all the seasons,

SH/m

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2848

Typed page over name of John Chamberlain, 840 N. Brookvale Rd, Cheshire, Connecticut, of his review of CMA (with considerable input from Heath, judging from the wording), and a quite different typed draft (whether earlier or later) heavily corrected in pencil by Chamberlain.

No date

We live in a “competitive system.” Such has been the superficial indictment of capitalism over the years. But in a deeper sense, as Spencer Heath brings out in his remarkable Citadel, Market and Altar (Science of Society Foundation, Baltimore 27, $6), capitalism is in reality the mutual co-operation that leads to ever more abundant life and length of days. In this mutuality of service, where there is no coercion (as by tariff, subsidy or other “squeeze”), all are served and none but the feckless can fail. To this author, the market is the great social pool of services and goods from which each receives according to his contribution — so far as no fraud or violence (by govern­ment or otherwise) is interposed. It is the Golden Rule in action, each serving, when he sells, in the same manner that he would be served when he buys.

     But there is remarkably much more: With great particularity and backed by histor­ical authority, Mr. Heath shows how this vital free enterprise in the field of private services is capable of vast extension into the whole public domain — so far as land and site owners in self-protection and in pursuit of worthy gain shall consolidate their properties in local regions and supply the inhabitants with general public services in the form of location advantages on the basis of payment according to value received.

     Drawn from the “natural” sciences, the author’s unique “energy concept of popula­tion” affords a surprisingly simple mathematical basis for his social analysis into the three categories represented in the strikingly symbolic title that this unusual volume bears. The adult society, says he, will have its citadel for security against violence, its market for all life-serving and life-advancing services and goods, and the altar for the periodic renewal of its spirit, all cultural advance. When the cit­adel adequately protects, and the altar sufficiently inspires, then will the market most richly nourish and serve. So far as any one of these fails all suffer, and men revert towards the kind of life that Thomas Hobbes called “mean, nasty and short”.

This fine book weaves the cosmic order of the physicist, the free capitalist order among Western men, and the Christian Golden Ethic for an ever more abundant life, these three, into a “seamless web” of reassurance for the future of mankind. All in all, it shows with lucid clarity how real social-ization (the author’s hyphen) blooms in the citadel-protected market under the altar-fostered inspiration of the Golden Rule — beauty rooted in the soil of practicality and flowering in the free sunlight of the Spirit — a far cry indeed from the so-called “socialization” (no hyphen) that re­sults when coercive government forces its brutal brand of collectivism on the lives

of men.

— John Chamberlain

 

_____________________________

 

We live in a “competitive system.” Such has been the chief indictment of capitalism over the years. But in a deeper sense, as Spencer Heath brings out in his remarkable Citadel, Market and Altar (Science of Society Foundation, Baltimore 27, $6), capitalism is not competitive at all.

 Mr. Heath speaks of the market as constituting a great pool which is continually being emptied and renewed as man transforms his environment by creative activity. The security of possessions and property are necessary, if energies are to go into creative channels; lacking security of ownership, man wastes himself in destructive practices which take from the pool without contributing to it. An enlightened people, understanding the processes by which they live, will abjure such anti-social practices as “coercion and slavery, tribute and taxation, government regulation and war” because they all tend to deplete the pool. In a truly intelligent society men will “go to market” in the spirit of the Golden Rule, knowing that by giving the best they may receive the best. Depending as he does on long-term contracts, the seller will first of all beware of himself, lest he cheat his own future (along with his client) by offering shoddy work for the “fast buck.” Shoddy workmanship may sell itself once; it will hardly sell itself twice over.

 The great value of this book is that it weaves the cosmic order of the modern physicists, the capitalist order of Western man, and the traditional order of the Christian church into a “seamless web.” But there is more to Mr. Heath’s book than ”philosophizing;” there is also a very realistic description of ways and means whereby the “mutuality of the services” can be extended and increased. The author wastes no time in denouncing. Taking his cue from the Chinese doctor who collected his fees for keeping his clients well and paid forfeit to them when they became sick, Mr. Heath prescribes a regimen for health, not an analysis of illness. As society is constituted at present, governments (and the large urban municipalities in particular) try (with most indifferent results) to provide many services. Looking about him at the waste and decay which seem to be intricately bound up with the “city hall” everywhere, this writer proposes that landlords pool their titles and take over the administration of such services as the provision of parks and parking space, garbage disposal, the cleaning of the streets, and police protection. What is now wasted in the “overhead” of tax collection and the support of political machines would redound to the private administrator as profit and to the tenant as service that is distinctly worth having.

 The true community, says Mr. Heath, is built on the “citadel” (for protection against marauders), on the “market” (for the creation and exchange of life-enhancing goods and services), and on the “altar” (for the periodic renewal of its spirit). It is when the “citadel” invades the “market,” or when the “altar” denies it, that the life-denying and life-destroying practices seep in. Then human existence, to adapt Hobbes’s phrase, becomes “nasty, brutish and short,” not the benign multiplication of creative moments that result when the individual life-unit can count on a long life span. Mr.  Heath’s “energy concept of population” depends for its unimpeded functioning on a true relationship between the three categories of his striking title.

 All in all, this is a book which shows how beauty may flower from practicality as social-ization (to spell the word with Mr. Heath’s hyphen) flows from the citadel-protected marketplace under the altar-fostered inspiration of the Golden Rule. A far cry indeed from the brute socialization (no hyphen) that results when collectivism is forced by government (the “citadel”) upon men.

John Chamberlain

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1606

Carbon of a letter to John Chamberlain

March 1, 1957

 

Dear John:

Thanks a big lot for your foreword copy delivered on time. I appreciate it and like it very much — for what it is. But would it be smart to spark the land communists into any hot controversy at the present time?

In the first place, the most that any mere con­troversy can do is to employ some of the cunning powers of the mind to expose nothing but the intellectual emp­tiness of the other side, and no knowledge or understand­ing can be extended or enlarged in that way. To give an impression that the book goes in for polemical pastime, however brilliantly, would be unfair to its true nature and purpose — to the only kind of value that it has.

It is true that in a controversy the communist arguments would be only wooden guns, unable to withstand real fire. But the general and sincere opposition to them so far is merely instinctive, oratorically unarmed, without any intellectual fire (a very small company excepted), and meanwhile the wooden ones are almost certain to prevail — so far as the public mind is concerned.

The book invites the reader to pursue (or peruse) an orderly setting out of much hitherto greatly neglected data concerning the human society, its organization and mode of operation, without taking account of any previous conceptions or beliefs. It is thus strictly objective to its subject matter and precisely the opposite from all that is critical or controversial — depending solely on its own rationality and esthetic appeal. If in doing this it gives grounds for opposi­tion to its predecessors in the field, that was not its intended purpose and can be only incidental to it. The purpose here is to set out wherein the true and practical is true; not to identify wherein the false is false. It seems that its first impression on the prospective reader should be that it offers substance, which it does, rather than controversy, which it does not. What do you think about this?

Cordially,

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1613

Carbon copy of a letter to John Chamberlain

April 10, 1957

 

Dear John:

Anent the need for exposing the widely current fal­lacies of land communism, we do make some progress, even though it be like the speed of a glacier. To wit, my good old friend, John S. Codman, after many years of resistance as a Henry George man, has at last practically capitulated. Years ago, and for a long time, I thought he might be sperate; for he was a very substantial man in many respects, mentally, morally and economically. He went so far as to invite me to present the positive aspect of land adminis­tration to the Real Estate Board in Boston, which I did. But all to no avail so far as he was concerned. So, I have been practically out of communication with him in recent years. His letter of February 22nd, copy of which I en­close, speaks for itself.

Then, there is Murray Rothbard, for a long time and happily a disciple of von Mises, now taking new views with respect to land communism. Murray seems to be heading a small group of von Mises students with similar new ideas. Maybe Rothbard et al are only concerned with the fallacies of land communism, and haven’t caught very much of the function of land ownership as the administration of community services. Nevertheless, this latter is implicit in their revolt against the old ideas, and progress is being made. This is especially apparent in the fact of Leonard Read taking up Rothbard’s attack on land communism and publicizing it, after being for some years indifferent to my own exposure (and yours) in Progress & Poverty Reviewed.

Also, young Hugh P. King writes that he sent a copy of the new version of “Why the Henry George Idea Does Not Prevail” to his father, Dr. Wilford King, and re­ceived back a very favorable comment on it.

Well, here goes for now; hoping to see you before too long. CM&A is on the press.

Sincerely,

 

Enc:  Rothbard article on Single Tax

      Codman letter 2/22/57

      “Why the H.G. Idea Does Not Prevail” (revised)

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2557

Letter to John Chamberlain

April 24, 1957

 

Dear John:

Thanks a lot for your suggestion of having lunch next Wednesday, May 1^st. I overlooked the fact that I am to talk at the annual meeting of the Christian Freedom Foundation at 11:30 that day and have lunch with them. So here’s another long time no see.

But I am enclosing the list of names to whom we are thinking of sending gift copies of CM&A and copies to be reviewed. It will be very helpful to have you make notes and comments on this. Some, you will probably think should be eliminated, and will so mark them. Additional names may very likely occur to you, in which case I hope you will add them.

Delivery of bound copies of Citadel, Market and Altar is promised for May 3^rd. Book jacket has been designed, and printer’s copy for it is being set up. Our book promotion man seems to have good ideas and is all set to proceed, with official publication date June 1^st.

Glad to know your Princeton Panel work is going on well. Mighty sorry I can’t see you next Wednesday. Remember me to Ernestine and all the juniors.

Cordially,

SH/m

Encls: Name list

       Stamped return envelope

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2570

Letter to John Chamberlain

May 18, 1957

 

Dear John:

I am happy to send you one of the first copies of Citadel, Market and Altar. I am very much pleased with the job done by Mr. Boyden and the designing by Mr. McCrillis. Altogether I think the format, like your Foreword, is a credit to the content — perhaps the first well articulated Philosophy of freedom and free enterprise.

 Looking forward to seeing you at the lunch hour Wednesday.

Sincerely,

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1624

Carbon of a letter to John Chamberlain,

840 N. Brooksvale Road, Cheshire, Connecticut

June 4, 1957

 

Dear John:

Members of the Christian Freedom Foundation gave quite cordial response to the paper on “The Practice of Christian Freedom,” which I read at their Annual Meeting a month ago. I am sending you a copy of this thinking you may like it and that it might suggest a possible religious foundation for libertarian support of free-enterprise capitalism and all that it implies. I have long felt that the libertarian movement was handicapped for want of emotional fire and enthusiasm as well for want of a transcendent ideal.

What I have written is from the peculiarly Chris­tian point of view without being denominational in any other respect. I think this is as it should be, since the whole totalitarian movement is avowedly anti-Christian — and quite consistently so.

Cordially,-

SH/m

Enc: “The Practice of Christian Freedom”

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2684

Carbon of letter to John Chamberlain, Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, plus carbons of related letters of same date to Leonard E. Read and Edmund A. Opitz at same address.

August 22, 1957

 

Dear John:

I believe the selection of book reviewers for The Freeman is part of Ed Opitz’ regular job. By way of underground and mouth-to-ear, it seems that for want of anyone else, he has been trying himself to write the review of CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR.

     I understand he has been working on it, but some­what reluctantly — and no wonder, since I understand he has a theological background stressing total depravity and calling for strong measures to counteract original sin. Beside this, he is an avowedly determined Henry George man and could hardly be expected to sympathize with any realistic conceptions in that field.

     One of his associates writes that Virgil Jordan was suggested only a few days ago, and says, “Ed has been working away at a review, but seems happy to find another to give it a go.” I think Virgil Jordan might be ideal, but there some reasons (of a personal character, reported­ly) that might cause him to refuse.

     How about you getting in on this? I remember you spoke about reviewing the book for one of the larger magazines if they would take it (you being a co-author, as it were), but that you felt that The Freeman might have no hesitation on that score. I am of course very anxious to have it competently reviewed, and from the standpoint of competency, very preferably by you.

 If you are on vacation, I hope it will be a happy one for you both, and that I shall see you again before too many days.

Cordially,

SH/m

Comments re CMA

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2684

Carbon of letter to Leonard E. Read,

Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York

August 22, 1957

Dear Leonard Read:

I hope it is not too late to thank you for the fine hospitalities of F.E.E. to my grandson and me during the June Seminar. We have been wondering if perhaps in the future you might be having a Seminar of Seminars, that is, inviting especially those who have in past sessions contributed significantly or have most benefited by them.

 It is gratifying to find my CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR cordially received by some of the persons who I had most hoped would find it of value and interest. I enclose extracts from some of their letters. I hope you also will enjoy reading it, and that you will be stimulated — perhaps also inspired — by some of its unusual points of view.

 I understand that CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR la going to be reviewed in The Freeman. If it has not already been determined otherwise, I think it would be most happy to have it reviewed by John Chamberlain, who I happen to know is very willing to do so if it could be arranged. He would, of course, at the outset make some engaging reference to his possible disqualification.

 Trusting the Seminar now in progress is no less successful than the one in June, I am

Cordially yours,

SH/m

Enc: Comments re: CMA

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2684

Carbon of letter to Edmund Opitz, Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York

August 22, 1957

Dear Dr. Opitz:

I understand the selection of writers for the reviewing of books in The Freeman is part of your activity. If you have not already de­finitely selected a reviewer for my CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR, I hope it will be in order for me to suggest three seasoned writers, all of whom have some familiarity with my volume and I think might be happy to review it.

 There is Virgil Jordan, who among other things I believe is an accomplished reviewer, and there is Rose Wilder Lane, a wonderful libertarian writer in close sympathy with F.E.E. and its publication. Beyond these two, I hap­pen to know that from the beginnings, John Cham­berlain has definitely looked forward to review­ing CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR. His only difficulty was that the larger magazines might make a point of his being both reviewer and part author, as it were, from his having written the Foreword. He was confident, however, that this would not apply to The Freeman. He would, of course, make some engaging reference to his pos­sible disqualification.

 Spencer mentions to me that he enjoyed seeing you again, though only briefly, on Monday, but regretted there was no opportunity of talking with you about the article of yours that you were kind enough to give him and which he read very thoroughly and with great interest.

     With many best wishes,

Cordially yours,

SH/m

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2684

letter of August 26, 1957 to Heath from Edmund A. Opitz, Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York

August 26, 1957

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

As an aftermath of Spencer’s visit here last week, I got the impression that Virgil Jordan might make an excellent reviewer for Citadel, Market and Altar, so I wrote to him. He has not replied to my letter and I assume that he would be willing to have his review here in the pages of The Freeman. If not, I will go on to the others you suggest.

 It seems to me that it would take a man of well-rounded knowledge to do an adequate job on your book, and I have been casting about in my mind for some such person. So, many thanks for your suggestions.

 I was very much interested in Professor Hocking’s appreciative comments for I think highly of his abilities in several fields.

 I’m attaching a few comments of mine on the single tax for whatever interest it may have for you.

     With all good wishes,

Yours sincerely,

/s/ Edmund A. Opitz

Enclosure

P.S. (Penned) Leonard has just shown me his letter. Having you

and Spencer at the June seminar was a pleasure. The other

matter is covered by the above. E.

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2861

Carbon of letter to John Chamberlain

February 12, 1958

 

Dear John:

Your letter to Ayn Rand is a jewel of intellectual discrimination. I say with Plato, “He shall be as a god to me who can rightly define and divide.” Analysis must precede synthesis, discrimination before integration — creation. Would that there were more of it. It may be that Ayn Rand’s playing down of religion in her opus may provoke enough controversy to offset the prejudice without too much distorting her theme. I hope so.

 In re-writing my form letter to accompany the jacket circular, I can’t decide whether to include a minimum of reference to the content of the book (like No. 1) or to make it more extended like No. 2 or to be more comprehensive as to content as in No. 3. Please comment and say which of the three seems best — or would a different approach be better? I am wondering if in No. 3 too much is attempted. The opening paragraph refers to the natural sciences as giving basis for the objective research in history and social anthropology reported in Part I of the book. The second paragraph gives hint of the practical appeal to business-minded men in Part II and of the realization of aesthetic ideals as played up in Part III. Is this No. 3 really suitable for enclosure with the jacket circular or is it too much like an attempted review?

 I am happy to note the announced new policy of the National Review to promote ideas looking to “Fabianism in Reverse” and your first contribution to that department. Also, in Leonard Read’s current brochure, “The Study of Freedom,” I am happy to note his concern for “basic research” and for “more understanding and better explanations” rather than mere agitation for more “limited” government. I hope eventually he will give serious thought to the question: If we ever get government properly limited how shall we keep it that way unless we envision some qualitative growth or change?

 Your recent articles in National Review are about the best ever — with stronger and stronger philosophic undertones, or is it overtones?

 I trust all goes well with you and all of yours — and special congratulations to Ernestine and good wishes to her.

Cordially,

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3094

Letter to Heath from George S. Montgomery, Jr.,

488 Madison Avenue, New York 22, New York, enclosing

referenced letter of same date to John Chamberlain

May 27, 1960

 

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

 

Your Suez Canal Plan is admirable and deserves all of the splendid comments that it has received from such worthy sources.

 

Under separate cover I have sent you copy of letter to John Chamberlain which will be explanatory. I am sure that you see the Freeman.

 

With every best wish,

 

Sincerely,

 

/s/ George S. Montgomery, Jr.

GSMJr:F

________________________________________________________________  

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3094

Carbon of a letter from George S. Montgomery, Jr.,

488 Madison Avenue, New York 22, N.Y. to John Chamberlain,

3400 North Brooksvale Road, Cheshire, Connecticut,

enclosed in his letter to Heath of same date

May 27, 1960

 

Dear John:

I have been reading many excellent messages from your pen, the latest being your Review in the May Freeman of Hayek’s “The Constitution and Liberty”. I hope I can find the time to get to this book.

I was particularly interested in your reference to Spencer Heath. I believe you know him personally and will agree with me that he has a remarkably incisive mind with some of the most practical solutions in a baffling area of politics and economics plus a most delightful sense of humor.

Looking forward to the privilege of more of your good work, and with best wishes,

Sincerely,

/s/ Geo. S. Montgomery, Jr.

GSHJriF

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3094

Letter from Heath to John Chamberlain

August 24, 1960

 

 

Dear John:

 

I am right sorry I was not able to see you on the first Wednesday or two after your return. I hope you and all yours had a good vacation, with all the young ones well tanned by the sun instead of by their pater familias.

 

Following your kind acceptance in advance, the Science of Society Foundation on August 18^th held a meeting at which you, along with Dr. Pound, Dr. Hocking and Dr. F.A. Harper, were elected members of its Board of Trustees.

 

Spencer and I expect to be in New York again in a few days, and I am hoping to have an opportunity to see you before going to California again. I would like you to know a good deal about what Spencer has been doing this summer. In addition to gathering data for his thesis in social anthropology, he has been engaged this summer in some very important work for the Founda­tion for Voluntary Welfare. They engaged him to make a study of downtown rehabilitation on the basis of pool­ing the real estate titles and redeveloping the whole property under single proprietary administration. He found that in Knoxville, Tennessee, a project of this kind is already under way. And through Spencer, the Foundation for Voluntary Welfare is now contributing technical help with a view to this project becoming a success and thereby a model or example for many other cities.

John, I wonder how much you know about this nation­wide growth and development of shopping towns outside of the cities, and the corresponding tendency towards a somewhat similar unitary operation of real estate complexes in the centers of the cities. This whole big business movement I think must be of great interest to the publish­ers of Barron’s and the Wall Street Journal, and also most likely the publishers of Fortune and other business magazines. Spencer has gathered and indexed a wealth of information in this field. I wish you could have a talk with him about it and know something of his sources and compilations.

 

I think the whole movement towards proprietary community administration is likely sometime soon to break into the public consciousness as big news. Perhaps we can have a luncheon session on it before very long or Spencer could send you some written material on the sub­ject if you would like him to.

Well, enough of this for now.

 

Cordially,

 

 

______________________________________________________

 Connecticut

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3094

Carbon of letter from Heath to John and Ernestine Chamberlain

August 26, 1961

 

 

Dear John and Ernestine:

 

Out here in California, I have been so happily remembering some of the wonderful visits I enjoyed with you and all of yours in the not very distant past that I am prompted to depart from my perennial delinquency in matters of correspondence and send a line to you by way of off-season greeting.

 

Spencer has just received his master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Washington, and I think the thesis upon which it was quite favorably awarded is going to attract a lot of attention among anthropologists and probably also in much wider fields. Its title is Proprietary Community, treating of it in its far past, its present and its prospective future.

 

During the last two years or more that I have spent mostly in California, I have made contact with quite a number of persons of our general cast of mind, both from the East and of the West. I have, however, very much missed seeing you and all yours. I continue to keep in touch through such media as the freeman, to the back pages of which I always immediately turn. I think perhaps the greatest charm of the Reviewer’s Notebook is in the arresting reflections with which each review is introduced. This introductory material is often so fine and complete in itself, it seems almost to steal the show, until after one has gone on.

 

However, not to be too impersonal, let me again remind you of my warm appreciation in many ways and hopes of seeing you in times to come.

 

Many, many affectionate sentiments to you both

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2967

King Features Syndicate newspaper article

by John Chamberlain, obituary for Heath

1963

 

 

THESE DAYS:

Stamp of Integrity Was His Hallmark

 

                 By JOHN CHAMBERLAIN

 

THE “IMAGE” of the American businessman and industrialist, as projected by our intellectuals, has generally been one of a cheater who would sell his own mother into slavery for a fast buck.

  The meat packers, according to the fiction of Upton Sinclair, made money out of poisoned beef; the airplane manufacturers, as depicted in a recently popular Broadway play, have been willing to risk their own aviator sons in defective planes in time of war.

  In the days when I was doing a column of book criticism, this     sort of stuff came over my desk regularly. Like any cliché, it got to be a bore. It also happened to be a tremendous distortion of the truth, as I came to know when I deserted the book world to write corporation stories for a business magazine.

  The world of business is like any other world, a mixture of elements. It has produced villains, no doubt, but it has also produced saintly characters, such as my friend Spencer Heath.

  Mr. Heath died last week at the age of 86 in his native Virginia, and was buried in a family plot in the Shenandoah Valley town of Winchester. The news of his death caused only the faintest of ripples, for he had been a quiet man for many years. There were only a few to remember that he was one of the great originating pioneers in the field of aviation manufacturing, and I doubt that there were ten people in the country who recalled the details of his effort to force manufacturing rectitude on the United States government in its aviation program for World War I.

  Spencer Heath was the first man in the United States to develop a machine for the mass production of airplane propellers. His factory in Baltimore was turning out some 250 propellers a day when the United States entered World War I in 1917. Naturally, the government depended almost entirely upon the celebrated “Paragon” propellers that came from the Heath factory.

  No American-made plane was produced in time to carry such aces as Eddie Rickenbacker up over the German lines, but manufacturers like Mr. Heath gave it a good try, and if the war had lasted a little longer the “Paragon” propeller would surely have made an enviable wartime record.

*   *   *

AS LONG as Mr. Heath made propellers to his own specifications, they were good ones. But at one point during the war the government ordered a type which Mr. Heath felt was quite unsound. When he presented an alternative design, he was informed, “Mr. Heath, this is wartime. You make those pro­pellers, or we’ll shoot you.”

  With a federal gun at his head, Spencer Heath complied with government orders. He was, after all, under military discipline. But before shipping the propellers out he had a rubber stamp made which read: “Made under protest. Condemned by manufacturer.” This warning was stamped on every de­fective propeller that left the factory. The stamp is still in the proud possession of the Heath family.

  When he tried to trace the fate of the defective propellers he had made under duress, Mr. Heath was told they had wound up in a warehouse in Texas.

  After World War I Spencer Heath made the first practical engine-powered, controllable and reversible pitch propeller. This did for aircraft what the gear shift did for the automobile. Without it, the airplane would not have been adaptable to commercial use.

  I knew Mr. Heath in the days of his retirement, long after he had sold his patents and technical facilities to the Bendix Aviation Company. In his book, “Citadel, Market and Altar,” printed by. the Yale University Press for his own Science of Society Foundation, Inc., Mr. Heath developed some remark­able theories bearing on inventive creativity that have been commended by Roscoe Pound, former dean of the Harvard Law School, and philosopher William Ernest Hocking.

  An original man always, Spencer Heath doubted that the Western nations were menaced by the higher birth rates of countries such as China and Soviet Russia. Since the populations of the high birth-rate nations have short life expectancies, the fund of experience in those countries never deepens. Mr. Heath worked it out mathematically. “If you have half as many people who live twice as long,” he used to say, “they will live to do something more than merely eat, grow to adolescence, reproduce their kind, and die.”

Copyright, 1963, King Features Syndicate, Inc.

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2968

Photocopy of a newspaper column by Heath’s friend, John Chamberlain,

King Features Syndicate, as it appeared in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner

June 26, 1967

 

Solving the Suez Issue

by John Chamberlain

If the UN is really looking to a solution for the problem of users’ access to the Suez Canal, why not recur to the proposition of non-political owner­ship?

  Interestingly enough, Christopher Stone, a young law professor at the University of Southern California, thinks that a proprietary corporation might be a good approach to resolving all the great problems of the oceans, providing navigational services, regulating fishing rights, and developing underseas resources.

  Professor Stone happens to be the son of I. F. Stone, the leftist editor of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, a Washington, D.C., publication which would scarce­ly find anything to commend in the proprietary idea. But the son, who is just as radical as his father, only in an opposite direction, may be on the track of something that could be applied as a starter to the Suez waterway.

Propeller Manufacturer

As a matter of record, proprietary non-political ownership of the Suez was proposed back in the middle nineteen fifties by a retired airplane propeller manufacturer named Spencer Heath.

  Mr. Heath’s blueprint makes interesting read­ing today. It called for “the leading shipping interests who use the canal to form a canal owners corporation to be chartered by each one and all” of the eighteen or more governments, including Egypt, which were “most interested.”

  According to the Heath outline, the powers and limitations of the proprietary corporation were to be defined and agreed upon by the various governments, with Egypt being handsomely re­warded for its participation in a joint territorial sovereignty with cash payments from funds raised by the new corporation.

  Mr. Heath’s suggestion, in the fifties, called for the issue of new Suez corporation shares to pay for taking over the old equity rights in the canal. As of 1967, the equity rights, presumably, would be purchased from Egypt itself.

  Arrangements could be made to diffuse stock ownership in the new corporation to the ends of the earth, with allotments for sale in all the maritime nations. Mr. Heath thought a proprietary canal corporation would “make such profits that it could duplicate the canal,” thus allowing for “one-way traffic both ways.”

  As a “solvent and stable business corporation,” said Mr. Heath, “its shares would come into very wide demand . . . especially among those persons and corporations most engaged in commerce among the nations.” There would be a “covenant of non-aggression against any of the tangible or intangible properties and rights of the new corpora­tion.”

Nourishing a Dream

Mr. Heath’s proposition was dismissed as a pipe-dream in the fifties. Presumably, it won’t get anywhere as long as Nasser nourishes the dream of pushing Israel into the sea.

  Eventually, however, the Egyptians may get tired of Nasser’s pursuit of glory. The Indonesians put up with Sukarno, their own Nasser, until he had run a potentially rich island empire into complete bankruptcy. Then they decided to get rid of him.

  When disillusion sets in over Nasser’s inability to put Egypt on the path to an economic development that will feed its steadily increasing population, some subsequent leader might be interested in creating a proprietary canal company that would take the issue of access to an international waterway out of politics.

  There would be plenty of room for both Jew and Arab in the Middle East if only the political feuding could be brought to an end and commercial and industrial development be allowed to take over.

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2209

Review of CM&A

2000

 

 

EXTRACTED FROM A READER’S JOURNAL

Citadel, Market, and Altar – Emerging Society

by Spencer Heath

Published by The Science of Society Foundation/Md in 1957  Book Notes by Bobby Matherne ©2000

/ think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be, that man may have cosmic destinies he does not understand.

– Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes                                                     [quote from the title page of Part I

     Science, page 1.]

And one of those cosmic destinies is peace, OWH says in the end of the quote on page 1 of this book. And how are we going to achieve this peace? Thereupon hangs a tale, and the story teller is Spencer Heath, a lawyer, a businessman, an inventor, and a horticulturist according to John Chamberlain in his Foreword:

[page v] A believer in the de novo approach, he developed basic propeller patents and special machinery for propeller manufacture which were much in demand during World War I. Indeed, some seventy per cent of the propellers used by American planes in that conflict came from Mr. Heath’s factory.

A propeller allows a plane to rise from the ground and to offer its pilot a view of the earth from a high perspective. Above the teeming multitude of people, animals, plants and minerals certain patterns evolve that are not visible from the ground. Take the teeming masses of India or China today, close to a billion in each country. Are you worried about these billions of people taking over the world by their sheer wealth of numbers? John Chamberlain was, before he read about Spencer Heath’s “energy concept of population.”

[page v] Mr. Heath’s idea is that a high-birthrate people with a short average life-span must constitute a low-energy society, whereas a people with a lower birthrate and a greater life-expectancy utilizes its energy to the maximum.

What Heath shows is that if you add up the productive years of a population, those not devoted to growing up and reproducing, a smaller population with a longer life span will produce in material goods, arts, science and culture much more than larger countries with a shorter life span. For example, a life-span of thirty amounts to about ten years productive life. A life-span of 70 amounts to fifty years of productive life. Thus the latter can match productivity in all phases of endeavor with a country that is otherwise five times bigger than it is! Heath also points to hotels as a model for community services. Just imagine a world in which the local government employees treat you as nicely as does a bell hop at the Waldorf-Astoria, as a valuable customer whose any desire deserves prompt and courteous attention. Heck, you might even want to tip such a “public service” employee and it might even be legal to do so, as it is in any hotel in America today. Chamberlain tells us how Heath would go about this conversion to a proprietary administration of public services.

[page vi] He predicts that property owners will some day pool their titles and take over the administration of such community services as water supply, garbage removal, highways, parks, tennis courts and the policing of local areas. Community life thus administered would soon rise to the cleanliness, order and pleasantness associated with a vacation period in a good resort hotel.

“What balderdash!” some of you may be thinking. “Imagine running a community without a state or local bureaucracy! It would never work! The very idea!” Yes, and that very idea is currently working in one place where we happen to own property, in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas. There are no state or county facilities provided to this community of 175 square miles and about 15,000 population. All roads, utilities, and other public services are supplied by a Property Owners Association. The one Post Office is situated outside of the property line, which is extremely important because that allows access to the village to be restricted to owners and guests of owners. You drive down newly surfaced roads and notice no litter anywhere. You drive up to boat docks and picnic areas near the beautiful lakes and notice there’s no graffiti anywhere. After a while you have the novel experience, in this new century, of feeling comfortable leaving your car and your house unlocked. The entire village looks the way you would keep your own estate groomed. This a community that was designed to be this way over thirty years ago and it continues to grow and prosper. The seventh golf course was just completed. A new auditorium and community center is a jewel. The large indoor swimming pool overlooks a scenic lake. My nominal county property tax is about $50 a year and I think the only service that provides is the county sheriff deputies who provide patrol and assistance on the streets. People live and thrive in this community in the middle of an otherwise backwoods area of rural Arkansas, which, while scenic and rustic, still has the rusting cars in front yards, the old fridges on the porch, and the baleful hound dogs under the porches. If you are open to have your assumptions about what’s possible challenged, visit Hot Springs Village, live or over the Internet and see for yourself the future of America in bright array. Who would trash a place where they are owners or guests of owners? This seems easy to comprehend, but difficult to imagine how to implement. In fact, so difficult that Chamberlain sees fit to stop short of implementing it.

[page vii] Nevertheless, Mr. Heath’s system does not have to be pushed to its logical extreme.

Having information not available to Chamberlain about Andrew Galambos’s work, I would most strenuously disagree. The benefits that Spencer Heath discusses will not accrue until all pockets of coercion are flushed out. But notice the presupposition of his phrase “to the extreme” and it is easy to recall what happened to the last person who ran for president of the USA back in 1964 who dared to use the word “extreme” – he scared the pants off of a large portion of the voters and was beaten badly by his opponent. Yet we citizens of this country are being pushed to the extreme currently. This is happening because of the increasing trend to utilize coercion for all solutions in the guise of freedom. “Free schools” is the label given to public schools which are fueled and fooled by the federal coercive bureaucracy. Force and fraud are the tools of coercive bureaucracies whose main goal is not so much the providing of services with a smile, but keeping their smiles in office as long as possible.

Personally I’ve had it with coercion in the guise of freedom – I’m ready for freedom in the guise of freedom from now on. Social movements which find their basis in set forms grow like weeds – they quickly spring up along the roadside, use up all nutrients available and die from starvation eventually. Meanwhile proprietary endeavors grow like cultivated plants that are carefully seeded, nourished and tended so they eventually bring their finished product, freedom, to fruition. We have lived long enough in a forest of weeds, where every year brings a de-weeding of the old weeds, and new ones springing up. It’s time to recognize the essentials of freedom, to cherish the tenets of freedom, rightly understood, and to nourish those plants that grow in freedom, while starving those that do not. If one were to seriously undertake that endeavor, one could do no better than to study the transcript of Andrew Galambos’s monumental introductory lectures series in Volitional Science as embodied in his book, Sic War Ad Astra, which translates into Thus is the Way to the Stars.

Spencer Heath attended that lecture series once when Dr. Galambos was giving the lectures in person. He told Dr. Galambos about this book he had written, saying it was about many of the things in the lectures. After reading Heath’s book, Dr. Galambos gave Heath credit in subsequent lectures for the parallel development of how to implement the ideas of freedom, the only other person so credited. In the 1968 lecture series I heard on tape in 1981, I first heard about Spencer Heath and this fine book. I read it back then and this constitutes my second reading and first chance to review it in detail publicly.

There was another brilliant mind of the 20th Century who gave a lot of thought to how humans can live in freedom, Rudolf Steiner. In his lectures and books in the first quarter of last century, Steiner wrote about a threefold order that once implemented would lead to peace and prosperity for the human race. His threefold order required that the three spheres of society, the regulatory, the economic, and the cultural be designed and implemented so as to operate independently of each other. That meant, for example, that law makers could not make laws to regulate the economy. That law makers could not attempt to stimulate the arts. That business owners would not interfere in the cultural lives of their employees or customers. If you inspect what Spencer Heath means by the terms in the title of this book, citadel, market, and altar, you will find that these are the same three spheres of human endeavor that Steiner referred to in his threefold order.

The citadel is the regulatory, law enforcement, defense organization of the society. The market is the economic sphere and all that it entails in every kind of production and service enterprise. The altar is the cultural sphere that encompasses all the areas of human endeavor outside of regulation and economic activities. Here they are in Heath’s own words:

[page 56] The social organism, like its constituent individuals, also has three great and fundamental institutions, the separate functions of which are coercion, cooperation and consecration. Their symbols are: Citadel, Market, and Altar—the department of physical force, a department of services measured and exchanged, and a department of the free and spontaneous life of the individuals. The Citadel repels assault from without, subversion from within. The Market is an outgrowth of the Citadel; the Altar arises from the interaction of the Citadel and Market. In point of function, the Market supplies all service energy to the Citadel.

Galambos agreed with Heath except he showed Heath and the rest of us in no uncertain terms that coercion was not a necessary function of government—that the defense aspects of the Citadel may be provided on a volitional basis, which is absolutely necessary if one is to keep the cold, wet nose of the coercion-camel from peeking under the edge of the tent of freedom. If you allow that, as any camel jockey will assure you, soon you will have a huge, smelly camel living inside the tent with you. If you want an image of how big it is, visualize the 1800 pages of the internal revenue code stacked three feet high. If you want to know how it smells, listen to a friend talk about being forced to sell his family farm in the USA to a large Japanese company to pay this parents’ death taxes.

In another bit of synchrony, Heath divides the basic structures of the human being into three systems which map directly into the limbic, rhythmic, and neural systems of Steiner.

[page 57] The three basic structures of the individual man are: the mechanical, consisting of the skeleton, muscles, tissues, etc., the chemical, including the nutritional, circulatory, reproductive and internal glandular tracts, and the quasi-electrical or neural system of energy transfers, with its necessary structural parts.

Heath explains that we require a “high differentiation of these structural systems”, that even though they depend upon one another, they operate independently within themselves. They have what he calls, “reciprocal relations” within their “functional unity.”

[page 57] The nutritional and nervous systems are dependent on the muscular and mechanical for their ponderable means of operations; the mechanical and neural depend for their subsistence upon the nutritional; and the mechanical and nutritional depend upon the neural for their functional coordination.

Why does Heath go to such lengths to describe these three spheres of operation of the human body? For the simple reason that the operation of human society involves a similar division into three coordinated and yet independent spheres of operation: citadel, market, and altar. The Citadel, he says, must stop interfering with the Market; it must rather “engage itself only with the prevention and punishment of force or equivalent fraud, and to accept the advantages of the contractual process in the performance of its public and community services.” (Page 62)

Heath points out that the personal enslavement of individuals has eventually given way to mass enslavement in a less obtrusive way, by taking away their property by force, and the imposition of taxes and tariffs. I would add to that the invisible tax called inflation, by which money is taking stealthily from one’s bank account by a reduction in its buying power, all of which lost buying power is thereby transferred to the coercive state.

Is it inevitable that proprietary means of governing ourselves will replace the current coercive means? Heath warns us what our lot is until that blessed day arrives:

 

[page 67] Until service and not force becomes the instrument of government, while war continues to be the only consummation of governmental power, a population must lose at last even in victories all that it ever feared to lose in defeat.

 

The land lords and their serfs who farmed the land for them in Saxon England were all free men for over three hundred years of prosperity. They were free, that is, until they suffered defeat by the Normans who imposed the Roman taxation and servile feudalism that most people consider characteristic of serfdom in England, up until now.

Surely we in the United States, “the freest country in the world,” do not suffer from force and fraud, do we? Let’s review Heath’s description of what characterizes force and fraud and you decide. Do you personally know of “transfers without owner consent?”

[page 129] Transfers without owner consent, such as taxation or other violence or by crimes, cannot be sales, for such transfers can be accomplished only by force or fraud.

Given that such transfers or takings occur, surely the more they occur, the more people would get up in arms and vote the non-owning, so-called public servants out of office that do the takings, wouldn’t they? Paradoxically, the opposite occurs, such is the power of the fraud portion of the equation as it appeals to the all-too-human greed of the electorate.

[page 131] Throughout all history, the practice of such non-owning and therefore quite irresponsible community servants has been to expand beyond measure their predatory processes, using their takings to subsidize the dependence and the poverty that they cause and thus induce tolerance of and even popular demand for further extensions of their coercive powers.

Translated into popular jargon “subsidize the dependence” means taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, or what is called progressive taxation. In an inversion of logic that would cause a philosophy professor to pale, they take the most money from the very people in the best position to bring prosperity by investing in new enterprises to the poor that the takers say that they wish most to help! But if the poor are taking it on the chin, consider what the non-poor are subjected to: a federal bureaucracy that prints money to create inflation which results in rising wages and higher prices of things to buy. That’s not just a jab to the jaw, but a knockout punch! How does this escape the notice of these more affluent members of society?

[page 163] Government finance creates the illusion that money is wealth, and wealth, in terms of money, seems to increase.

If everyone has more money, they want to buy more things, but nobody wants to sell except at a higher price. Soon the feverish boom fed by inflation leads to a drying up of buying and a chill sets in. Everybody wants to sell, but nobody wants to buy except at a lower price. (Paraphrase of page 163) The economy goes from chills to fever like a human being that is sick. This mirrors the characteristics of a harmonic oscillator, such as a weight on a spring. When you stretch the spring by pulling the weight down and releasing it, the force of the spring pulls back strongly at first, and then weaker as the spring returns to an un-stretched condition. Then gravity pulls the weight back down re-stretching the spring. The weight continues to oscillate up and down, and so does an economy in the face of so-called “government” finance involving force and fraud. This is the simplest explanation for why our economy goes from boom to recession and back again ad infinitum, up until now.

During the nineteenth century America experienced “a full century of unexampled freedom, unrestricted production, rising land values and lengthening life.” (Page 173)

[page 173] But the twentieth century reintroduced the Old World ways. Government came to be worshipped more than feared and confined, and constitutional barriers went down. Government began absorbing all liberty and property and is now itself so looked to for welfare and freedom that insecurity, uncertainty and anxiety widely prevail.

This is a powerful book. Not an easy read by any means. Will never be a best seller. But it is packed with insights that are as powerful as they are original. Let me close with the title page from Part III General Survey on page 191, subtitled “Spiritual and Psychological Implications”:

[page 191] When a seeker after knowledge of the earth discovers a whole new continent or world his first concern is that its parts shall be well described, the pattern of their relationships and configurations well disclosed, their plant and animal riches, rainfall and fertility, mineral and other resources made plain. He may then propose that mankind take over this new possession, avail themselves of its riches and bounties and build in it for themselves a world of affluence and abundance for all men—a milk-and-honey—flowing land. So it is with him who discovers a new world of man, a new continent of conceptions, fresh knowledge and thought. He is at pains to describe its parts, delineate their conformations and point out their relationships and their potentialities. He may then well propose an application of them, a utilization of the new knowledge, the practice of its potentialities, the building of new values through new sciences, a new fellowship in production and creation and, incidentally peace. But having thus acquitted himself in the manner of the discoverers of material worlds, he may be permitted to stand on the pinnacle of his own thought and from this vantage point survey to its furthest horizon the world of nature and of mankind.

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