Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3155

Typed draft of letter from Heath in Winter Park, Florida, to Gilbert Tucker. Never sent.

Spring, 1954

Dear Mr. Tucker,

I have to thank you indeed for your generous feelings and your continued patient attention to my efforts towards an understanding of our basic social institution in terms of the present necessary function it performs.

I am sure that we are in complete and friendly accord in our feelings towards each other and in the ideas and ideals towards which we for ourselves and for mankind aspire. We only diverge with respect to what kind of means must be employed.

I am sure you will agree with me that God, or Nature, who has ordained the Good, the True and the Beautiful of which we dream, has ordained also the manner in which we must act, the kind of behavior we must adopt, if we are to enter into the progression of the Divine. This we call virtue, for it is strength and virility — vitality — and its reward, inherent in it, is ever-growing abun­dance of life. Any contrary action or behavior, whether ignorant or willful, must lead us in the contrary direc­tion away from the abundance of life. It is called sin and its wages is death.

Virtue and vice are in one respect precisely alike, in that they or either of them may be practiced in either of two ways — that is, either ignorantly and without understanding or with knowledge and with under­standing.

The consequences following upon either kind of con­duct or of means employed are determined solely by the positive or negative character of the action itself, and not at all by any consequence that may be ignorantly or arrogantly imputed to it or by any pious hopes or good intentions with which it is proposed or pursued. The end cannot be imputed to the means because, as Emerson admonishes, “The end is implicit in the means.”

I believe that we differ as to what are the legiti­mate and thereby the effective means because of our entirely different approach to the matter.

You seem to hold that the land owner’s rent or capi­tal increment is “unearned” because, as the slogan goes, “the landowner performs no service to society”. This is indeed the moral dogma of all who propose to “socialize” or communize the gifts of God to man. Yet they do not wholly believe it; for even you would fix the value of the land owner’s services at five percent of what he receives. This is because you recognize that he does perform some service which you call “trivial.” It seems not to occur to you that he may perform other services, other than the mere mechanics of collection, that are not trivial to account for the other ninety-five percent.