Spencer Heath Archive

Item 181

Typescript of an incomplete essay. The poem by Velma West Sykes, opening with a verse of Heath’s (Item 940) which would seem to have been inspired by Sykes, has been added to the prefatory material at the beginning.

1930s?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Egypt, Assyria, Greece and Rome were none of them civilized. Always, predominately, they were slave states. And the otherwise enlightened world has, as yet, no enlightened governments. For all modern states follow classic models and function in the classic mode. They exist by forced labor and not by service or exchange. Upon the earnings and wages of their subjects they levy tribute. And with this tribute they wage and levy wars.

     History records only one civilization that did not perish from its own decay — Saxon England — essentially without forced labor, tribute or taxation, a government of service by exchange. It was perverted and then assassinated from without. Its successors are repeating Rome; they still follow the rule of force, predominant above the democratic practice of voluntary exchange. Thus they repeat the ruin wrought by Rome.⁶²⁹

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

              

               THE HILL-BRED

 

Thank God for rugged men in rugged lands,

Where dwell the simple and the strong,

For hearts of oak and horny tender hands,

For homely dreams in homespun song.

 

The hill-bred have a courage all their own.

With vision that perceives beyond a ridge,

A second sight, miasmic mental bridge

Connecting with experience unknown.

 

They know the patience of the weary climb

Traversing miles that leveled would be rods.

They know what man may claim and what is God’s;

And make no foolish compromise with time.

 

No soft, flat-countried heritage is theirs,

No smooth, unstubborn soil accepts the plough,

No lush, wide fields their granaries endow,

Grim hardihood each seed surviving shares.

 

Though valley folk are valiant to the bone

The hill-bred have a courage all their own.

 

Velma West Sykes[1]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

 

 By Spencer Heath[2]

 

The proper study of mankind is man. —Alexander Pope

 

 

     Everything in nature above the single electron or quantum of energy is composite and organized. This is what makes science possible — the fact that all things are organized in definite relationships that make them organic and in that sense alive.

     Nature manifests herself in forms of organization — in forms of life. When any form attains internal stability, Nature treats it as a unit for organization into higher and more complex forms. This is Nature’s progression.

     Man is a unit composite of myriad living cells which are themselves composite of organized molecules and atoms. He has the most complex structure and the greatest internal stability against the widest range and variety of external conditions. He is therefore qualified and, in fact, is being organized into a still higher structure and relationship called Society, or MAN. As the proper study of man is the structure and organization of the individual man, so the proper study of mankind is the structure and organization of Society as a high form of life.

     Man is the longest living animal. His perfection depends on the lengthening of his days. Meantime, he must die and be renewed in successive generations. So it is with man as mankind. The growth and perfection of the social organization, of the Society of men, depends upon the lengthening of its term. Until it practices completely the law of its own life and being, it must die and decay, to be renewed only in the birth and dawn of a new age and civilization out of the intervening dark.

     Societies live and grow by the organic interfunctioning of their individuals and parts. Such functioning is called service. Its mode is called exchange. By this mode, the peculiar genius and capacity of each becomes the endowment of all. Thus civilizations arise.

    Societies die and decay by the dis-organization or mis-functioning of their individuals and parts. The mode of this is called coercion, compulsion and force. When it is permitted or perpetrated by the state, all peculiar genius and executive capacity is repressed, service by exchange becomes impossible, social bonds disintegrate and reciprocal service degenerates into attack and defense. Thus a war-like state is maintained and barbarism nourished in the heart of an otherwise civilized community.

     The emergence of man has been by slow advance from a state of dependence on the bounty of nature to a state of mutual dependence on the bounty of each other through services exchanged. In the social primordial, this dependence was unrelieved; man could live only where conditions were mild and fruit or game almost fell into his hands. Even through the pastoral and into the primitive agricultural state, men could not exist in large numbers except in fertile valleys or plains with climate so mild that only a minimum in food, clothing or shelter was required. Under these favoring conditions, and with only a moderate advance in agriculture, it became possible for two men to live on the labor of one, and thus a slave-state could be maintained. Moreover, the great fertile and unbroken terrains best favored the support and the marching and marshalling of armies under kings and emperors of war. Until man learned how to trade and practice the efficiency of division of labor through exchange of services, such were the only geographic and social conditions under which large populations could exist.

    Ancient Mediterranean and European culture was founded on this, their societies highly stratified and their masses enervated by climate and degraded by servitude. Hardy tribes from the more rigorous north penetrated southward, adopted the slave technique, and there were born first the brief, exotic flowers of decaying Greece, then the system of iron order that was Rome, and at last the death and darkness of a thousand years.

     The rugged, less fertile lands of the north could support only sparse, primitive populations, nor could large armies be maintained or maneuvered to enslave them. The land would not support two by the labor of one; nor would the labor of both support them separately and apart, but only as they gave each other cooperation and mutual aid in the basic essentials of life. The north was no place for the anchorite or pariah. Small village groups were the rule, and high activity, industry and frugality were imposed, not by the dominance of masters but by the natural conditions themselves. Nature herself drove men out of slavery and into a rude freedom that only mutual aid and dependence upon each other could sustain.

    This free but rigorous relations bred rugged character and social virtue that were impossible among slaves. Moreover, the variability and vicissitudes of climate and other natural conditions stimulated to higher activity of all kinds and bred a versatility of physiological adjustment and capacity for external adaptations and improvements that only such changing conditions could require and bring forth. This was not without its psychological effect. Confidence in personal power and individual effort arose in contrast with the tropic fatalism of long and hopeless submission. Qualities of enterprise and leadership were encouraged and rewarded, both in migration and in war. Personal power was sustained more by the homage of the brave and strong than by submission of the timorous and weak.

     The great conquerors and builders of all lands have usually descended from the north. The age-long oriental tyrannies have been southern fatalistic submission to northern dominance and competence. The historic turmoil of Europe has been its writhings and resistance to the slave technique of the south being alike imposed and resisted under leadership of northern race or extraction. Charlemagne and William were of northern breed, and the Corsican was a waif of the crusades.

     The world holds two distinct types or tendencies of social organization. Its conflicts arise from their incongruous blend. The slave technique and despotic relationships indigenous to the fertile south are vastly the older. There are no such antiquities of the north. It is probable that all life originated in sunny lands and men moved to the inclement north only by slow migration — perhaps as they preferred the rigors of the north to the despotisms of the south. This would set the social organization of the north later in time just as the new conditions would set it higher in type. Socially and politically, the south was old and hardened before the north began; and in Europe, there was in the north little more than a tendency towards social integration under rude freedom without compulsions and under relationships of specialized service and mutual exchange.

     It was a virility from the north that suckled on the she-wolf of the seven hills and rose to a fierce and independent vigor that, corrupted by tribute and slavery, gave Rome her dominion of the ancient world. In her the ancient despotism culminated and in her collapsed against the barbarian wall. The civilization of the north had not developed; it was still only a tendency. As its hordes broke over the south, it could only destroy. In the ensuing dearth and darkness all over Europe it began slowly to build anew its small, free communities under personal leadership and protection and held together by voluntary ties of mutual service and obligation. Thus, as a necessary convenience and by spontaneous desire and consent, the simple feudal and manorial communities arose so that men could make their livelihoods under the protection and security and by the aid of the public services that only community life and organization could afford.

     The small community, with its voluntary engagements and obligations, was the all unconscious gift of the northern barbarians to the post-Roman reorganization of the world. Always theretofore, public authority was instituted to govern and to rule by force and seizure and without consent• Here were public authorities pledged to protection against force and seizure. And in exchange for this and for other community services, the inhabitants of these communities voluntarily rendered up to their proprietors and public authorities their feudal and manorial dues to an amount fixed by custom and agreement or by the market, as we would now say of rent.

     These small communities, with all obligations, both public and private, based on service and consent and carried out by exchange, were the nuclei of an authentic society — the integration of individuals in a free community relationship of public and private responsibility and exchange of services without coercion or force, but all things for value received. They were like biological organisms fundamentally capable of symbiotic relationships and integration into higher and more complete and complex forms such as the higher animals and man. They were like individual men who, though fundamentally social and symbiotic towards each other, have not yet learned to enter fully into these relationships in preference to the parasitism and conflicts of slavery and war.

     Small wonder these new-born babes of the social yearnings and needs of men could not grow up into relations of brotherly service and love. They came under bad influence and example. Individuals still loved to exercise destructive power — that was their animal endowment — and the Church, after earning its authority as spiritual exemplar, had put on the “garments of the Empire,” endorsed its technique of tribute and enslavement and itself practiced government by deception and force. The lords of these free communities, not content with protection and service to their own, set out to subdue one another and enslave or, generally in the north, to hold their people under the ransom of tribute and taxation.

     It is a long story how they fought and “liquidated” each other until the communities were (finally) bereft of all their original freedom under the iron rule of military lords, who used them only as instruments of war and gave the essential feudal relationships a horrid repute extending mistakenly into modern times.

    As these petty despotisms were captured and consolidated, the European national states arose under the equivocal headships of Cardinals and kings, with the kings finally in chief command over the persons and properties of their populations. Thus, the small communities of service by exchange failed to practice the exchange and service relation with each other, as among their own members, and did not integrate into any general society under that relationship. The northern spirit of social organization by service and exchange became perverted by the southern spirit of servitude and force, and modern national states raised themselves upon the Classical foundations of tribute and slavery, taxation and war. But one small part of Europe was unique as to the manner and order in which this development took place.

     At the beginning of the Christian Era, there was one outpost of Rome inhabited by a race of barbarians of relatively southern extraction, probably in part at least a Mediterranean race, and thought by some to be of Punic origin. At any rate, they were of a racial spirit more easily subdued and enslaved than that of the north. These were the Britons, probably descendants from Mediterranean exiles and slaves from the tin mines of Cornwall. The Romans in Britain placed them again under a subjugation from which they never in the least emerged through the three centuries until the legions were withdrawn to bulwark the nearer defenses of the tottering Empire*

    But in this fifth century, some of the Germanic tribes, instead of descending on the Roman confines, moved westward and crossed the North Sea to British shores. These were the Angel-ish, Saxon and Jutish tribes, whom Caesar, Tacitus and Suetonius all described as having the least knowledge of the laws and institutions of Rome. They moved into England to stay. The miserable Britons that the Romans left behind, except in the west, they slew or enslaved. But they ignored the Roman cities and towns with their fine houses, temples and baths and set up their crude, small communities in the rural wilds. Their enslavement of Britons seems to have been rather by exclusion from communal rights than by forced labor, and slavery tended to die out rather than to grow into an institution upon which a master class would depend.

     The Saxons had developed no technique for the regimentation of slaves. They did their own working as they did their own fighting. They were loyal to leaders for their rude valor and virtue and followed them by choice more than compulsion and command. They would not submit to personal power and dictation. Even crimes were proved and punished only by community condemnation and consent.

    Insulated alike from the Roman tradition of seizing personal power and the slave religion of present submission for sake of a future emancipation, the Saxon villages slowly evolved in the free pattern set by social habits and instincts acquired under northern geographic and climatological conditions. The manorial communities grew and developed upon the basis of protection and other services rendered by exchange and under obligations fixed by accepted custom or contract.

     Under this economy, the proprietary lords of the lands had no political power to tax or of personal rule, but were obligated to provide and maintain the customary public services and rents that those who held under them rendered and paid. The lord’s proprietary interest in his revenues prompted him to support the agricultural and other production of his community by maintaining peace and civil order; to preside over justice (or revenge), either personally or by his paid subordinates, in accordance with community desires; to maintain public facilities in roads and bridges; and to guarantee the common rights in the forests, pastures and streams under his ownership or jurisdiction that were not held in private possession and to him sources of rent. The lord, with those employed by him, took substantially the form of a modern business organization in which the owner administers all the property, supervises his employes, and out of the sales returns on their combined services or products maintains his employes and his properties and in the profit or surplus remaining finds recompense for his own administrative and supervisory work. The lord, in effect, provided and sold to his people all such services as appertained to the land and served the common needs of his community, and the rent coming to him by custom or contract from occupancy of his community lands balanced all his costs and expenses, including his own labor, as a going concern.

    It is not urged that this was carried on with all modern refinements; but, however rude, it was in principle the same. But in some respects it was superior. Not the lord nor any under him had power to tax and seize, nor were tenants bound to the land.[3] And just as tenants were under no compulsion of their lords, so the lords were not tributary to any king. Kings they had, to be sure, but they were chosen by the lords for their service, paid by them and by their authority alone prescribed and proclaimed the rules and regulations for their common conduct and performed the services necessary for their common security and protection.

     The need of kingly services and protection became acute with the coming of the Danes. They came as the Saxons had come with fire and sword, but they also were of Germanic stock. The Saxon resistance resulted in treaties for the Danish to hold the eastern regions occupied by them, and here, in accordance with their racial instincts aided by the Saxon example, they adopted the same type of community organization and service as the Saxons before them.

    As there were many tribes and regions all needing protection from the remnants of Britons on the west and the invading Danes on the east, so there were many kingdoms and kings and internecine wars; but the Saxon kingships did not include any right or accepted power to seize property or levy taxes. Life was rude in a rude age, but the form and spirit of the social organization did not encourage or admit of forced labor, tribute and taxation or slavery in any guise. From the Roman evacuation at the beginning of the fifth century, the social development that took place in England was free from the power and influence of southern despotism for nearly six hundred year. During this period, in the very midst of the Dark Ages of Europe, in this isolated isle there grew up a civilization, indigenous to its northern peoples and races, that climaxed in the character of Alfred and his almost golden time.

     Out of this prosperity and the humane spirit of Alfred the practice of buying peace from the Danish invaders grew up, and under the brief supremacy of Canute took the form of tribute, laid chiefly on the earls and lesser lords. But the devout Saxon Edward soon after rescinded this taxation as a device of the devil•

    However, this example by the Danish marauders, and the general Norman influence that was seeping into England by intermarriage and otherwise, excited the covetous ambitions of contending earls to attempt the levying of taxes on their tenants, so that under Edgar /?/, the Saxon spirit of personal freedom and aversion to tribute again arose and by national enactment it was forbidden that any lord should take from a freeman any more rent than he was willing to pay. But this prohibition seems to have been ineffective, for the earls continued fighting at their tenants’ expense until their much divided house almost tottered into the hand of the Norman William.

     From this point on, the formation of a despotic state in England paralleled the erection of nationalized kingdoms on the Continent. But in England, a social growth and tradition of six hundred years so resisted the new Roman despotism that it took yet four centuries more (Tudor Henry VII, 1485) for its full weight to be imposed. Resistance to these centuries of Norman, Tudor and Stuart encroachment on life and property is what brought forth Magna Carta and all the so-called charters of liberty which we suppose to be the origin of Anglo-Saxon freedom and the foundation of the pseudo-democratic “liberty” now vanishing from the earth. The truth is that the Normans Romanized the Saxon social system from one of service and exchange into one of servitude and taxation, and the charters, one and all, were but the desperate defiances or cringing petitions for relaxation of the enslaving power.

    The power to command and exact tribute or taxes is only dimly seen as being identical with ancient forced labor and personal slavery so far as its ultimate and economic effects are concerned. As the ancient wise and learned believed in slavery then, so they accepted taxation in later times.

     In most of Europe this transition was imperceptible. But in isolated England, in the centuries between the early Roman rule and its return under Norman banners, there grew up among people of social instincts and habits molded by northern conditions a free pagan society of service, obligation and exchange. This social polity was the last to assimilate the despotic ideology of Rome. Its men were freemen and not hopeless slaves grasping at hopes of future salvation. Though the missionaries of Rome pressed them from east, west and north, in this land alone it was the kings who first gave them ear and saw in the new Valhalla surer promises of a continuation of the joys of life. As these free pagans were the last to accept Romanized religion, so were they the last to submit to Romanized politics. From the Conquest it took four centuries of turmoil to win their submission to absolute kings.

    English liberty was not being won from her kings; it was being defended against them. Charters and constitutions, then as now, were really but barricades against despotic power. But then as now it was not against the acts of despotism but against the persons or parties in power that the revolt came. Always it is their masters and not their slavery that men seem to hate and against whom they rebel. The crimes of kings and governments have always been that they seized the property of their subjects and used this property to tyrannize over them and their affairs. The revolutions that overthrow kings do not abolish the power they abuse. They only transfer this power to new kings, dictators, cabals, oligarchies or the leaders of popular factions under other names. Only the outward form changes. The right of public seizure still remains, the social obligations of ownership and exchange are impaired, distress engenders violence and revolution again shifts the center of anti-social power.

     The Saxon kings had been chosen servants without autocratic power. The Normans came as Roman masters by right of might and divine sanction. The new nobility, now beholden to the king and under forced contribution to him, could not perform their age-old obligations of community service, and the levies of the king upon their people (Statutes of Westminster, etc.) pressed down voluntary rent and impaired the local revenues. The property and service thus extorted from both high and low the king employed for war abroad or against his own lords and their people, while the lords, with their natural revenues impaired and weakened at the source and largely seized out of their hands, became themselves robber barons seizing the property and services of their people and warring against each other when not pressed into common cause against the encroachments of the king.

     Under the strong and ambitious kings they stood, as at Runnymede, united against tyranny. Under mild kings they fought each other for power and for the crown itself until they became few in number as their lands fell into the hands of a lesser nobility (knights of the shire, etc) and absolute power into the hands of the king. As the old, great barons curbed the tyranny of John, so the new and lesser ones for the same cause brought Charles to the block. The revolution “liquidated” Charles but preserved the tyrannical power that cost him his head. The Great Council of the king became the House of lesser Lords. To this new center went the power to seize property and compel services.

     Corrupted by centuries of turmoil and tyranny, these new lords were not content to be lords of the land to provide public and governmental services out of the rent of land in the Saxon manner. Despite such warnings as Locke and Wyndham gave they practiced the same despotic power as the Tudors and Charles. Vainly, thinking they could preserve their rents intact to themselves, they laid the wealth and commerce of the nation under burdens of taxes that became again the public despair. This politically perverted, predacious landlordism with its levies on property and controls over elections frustrated the king only by its own succession to his tyrannies in a century of grotesque parasitism on industry and commerce.

 

     Again imputing evil to its perpetrators and not to their acts, the rising commercial and industrial classes clamored for participation in what was being done and won the reform of the voting franchise and its extension to them. Under this wider suffrage the power of the Lords declined as the Commons rose, and the authority to levy tribute on production and trade and enslave business in a growing bondage of taxation and restraint passed entirely to the popular House.

     However, the expansion of industry and growth of world trade — the so-called Industrial Revolution, in which there was no revolt — was so great that it was not until the Great War and its burdens that the democracy of production and exchange was fully borne down under the old-time enslavement to political force. The nations became so “democratic” in their employment of taxation and other violence against the economic democracy of business that they did not know they were breaking it down. They supposed that seizures by tyrannies of kings and lords would be harmless when imposed under “democratic” forms.

    This almost universal error was fostered by the worldwide expansion of population and trade in the 18th and early 19th centuries in which economic values were created far more rapidly than they could be politically destroyed. The great growth of business values beyond the lengthening reach of tribute and taxation during this whole period is what made speculative enterprises so very profitable and conservative investments so certain and secure. Of this great expansion the peopling and economic rise of the Western World was the most significant part.

     The inherent trend of social organization into despotic slave states in the mild and fertile south as against free communities based on obligation and exchange in the rugged north — this tendency under which European social and political growth has ever been and still remains a restless compromise in which northern freedom resists the despotic spirit of the south even after it accepts its coercive technique, whether under democratic or despotic forms — in a measure repeated itself in the New World.

     When the seventeenth century began, England was low bowed under the yoke of despotism the Normans had brought from Romanized France and beyond. Her government was the same as had been that of Egypt and Rome. Her Coloni, like those of Rome, sweated for the enrichment of Imperial Masters. The dominance of the royal, power gave rise to a theory that the king, by some divine dispensation, was the sole original owner and all lands were held of and under him. Accordingly, all authorized settlements or conquests were in the royal name and the inhabitants were under the dominion of the king or of proprietors under and authorized by him.[4]

 

     All colonial government, especially in southern lands, was, in theory at least, despotic. Slavery was recognized and proprietors and governors were under no restraint save that of a distant king, and the king even assumed to grant absolute dominion in cases where he desired to confer special favors or cancel obligations. Even the grant of Pennsylvania to William Penn, for example, was in absolute dominion. A tendency towards Saxon ownership and administration was frequently manifest, but for the most part the proprietors assumed no responsibility for community services. Neglecting the function of ownership, they lost ownership itself: as absolute states grew up the lands passed into many hands under systems of slavery and taxation that became general and in substance still persist.

     But by a striking parallel a different form of settlement occurred in the north. Across the North Atlantic went daring shiploads of the dissatisfied. They went as their ancestors on the Romanized mainland a thousand years before had braved a northern ocean for an unknown land. They sailed unsponsored and not to extend but to escape despotic rule and organize their lives on freer lines. Again they subdued and drove westward the wild inhabitants, re-established the folk-moots of their ancestors and founded community responsibility and administrative authority upon the ownership of land. Nor did they set up the relation of master and slave that prevailed, except for a few northernmost, in all settlements under auspices of states and kings; but as of old it was not the rigors of conscience but of climate and geography that forbade gross bondage and imposed the more efficient relationships of freer exchange.

     And so the Old World stamped upon the New its historic pattern of slave states in the south with relatively free communities in the north based upon free enterprise under voluntary obligations and exchange. But the exchange relationship was by no means wholly free; always it came under dominion and tributary to the Roman type of absolute state, itself practicing no exchange and exercising none but compulsive powers under whatever forms.

    The National Period in the New World began with the same kind of revolt against taxation without representation that brought on the reform laws in England under which the power to tax became vested in the Commons as it was wrested from the Lords who earlier had divested the King.

    America was settled by people whose wages and property had borne all the burdens of ancient tyrannies and wars. The labor and capital with which they braved the distant and unknown land was free from ancient bondages and but lightly taxed to supply few and simple public needs. The revolt was against distant taxation and restrictions on immigration and trade, but it was not to abolish these. The seizing and restricting power must again be centered in new and nearer hands, but otherwise carefully preserved.

     The Constitution framers were wise in classic lore. The ancient slave democracies of Greece and Rome were their inspiration and example. Their nearer Saxon heritage was neglected and lost in their more ancient view. There was no tradition of a free society by voluntary exchange of protection and services without taxes or slaves. The new central state must be given the dangerous power of taking taxes and making wars at home and abroad. To guard against it tyrannical use, power must be divided three ways and in a trinity of departments the jealousy of two would restrain the other one, while the great Charter would bind them all. Among the reasons urged to adopt the Constitution, none stood out like the need to lay taxes and regulate trade. In this, the basic cause of the great civil conflict, as of all other conflicts, was laid.

     Slavery is forced labor — the denial to men of freedom to own and exchange their labor, for, except as to what is being consumed, nothing can be owned but by exchanging it or as an instrument of exchange. Taxation is forced contribution of labor products — denial of ownership and exchange, for, except as consumed, no products are owned but to be used in or in aid of exchange.

     The irrepressible conflict was not between a slave South and a free North; it was between the enslavement of labor and the enslavement of exchange. The South needed to exchange its products for the products of the world. By its special type of taxation, the North shut out the products of the world. This compelled the South to forego the abundance of the markets of the world and made her tributary and enslaved to a monopolistic North. While the South enslaved the negro, the North was enslaving the South. The slavery of labor came under the slavery of exchange. The War only widened and deepened the conflict between agriculture and industry which still goes on.

     Just as the taxation and restriction of Colonial trade for the supposed benefit of British manufacturers brought on the Revolution, so the exclusion of world goods from the South in exchange for its products was a basic cause of the Civil War. The Revolution drove out the British Tarquins of trade, and under the “Industrial Revolution” the Republic, by its Roman manacles on foreign and domestic trade, set up a patrician industrial class to monopolize manufactures, destroy the landed aristocracy of the South, depress an unprivileged plebeian agriculture into the servitude of debt and reduce the artisan classes into the dependent industrial proletariat that Jefferson foresaw.

     At the beginning, the burden of business was light and easily borne. Labor and capital in this new land were unyoked from the debts and deficits that European wars and tyrannies had entailed. Local government was simple and inexpensive, and the future Great Bureaucracy was as the she-wolf’s nursling or a lion’s cub. Never before had enterprise been so unfettered, and so much labor and capital so nearly free. Production arose with prodigious increase to heights of wage and profit that became the marvel of the world.

     A full century witnessed the rise, but the rate of rise declined. The burdens of taxation and restrictions, so light at first, steadily increased. Myriad monopoly interests appeared, and endless legislation arose to bind and burden the general economy to favor and privilege them to the cost and loss of all. These mounting restraints on business and employment, on the production of goods for wages to labor and profits to capital, gave a false appearance of /to?/ values and induced recurrent periods of speculation and prostration. The steeply rising curve of taxation and restriction has implacably drawn down the curve of production to a lower rate of increase with frequent reversal and collapse.

     The old Roman and pre-Roman curse of compulsory tribute and taxation continued to bear down on the employment of labor and capital. An age of applied sciences, improved business methods and organization and mechanized industry multiplied productive power, but the governmental penalties on ownership and exchange increased at an accelerating rate. And taxation was not imposed for revenue alone, but to injure and depress the general population or numerous groups to the immediate benefit of concentrated minority groups exercising political influence and commanding governmental power.

     The whole theory of government (public service) getting its revenues by force and in devious hidden ways, whether by popular sanction or not, is, in its economic and social effects, quite indistinguishable from the tribute-taking policies of the ancient and southern world. When force is the instrument, it is not possible for the levy to be equable or just. Its immediate effect is to demoralize its victims into evasions and collusive practices that shift the entire or greater burden on the forthright and simple to the relative advantage of the cunning and corrupt. This tends to divide the population into masses of depressed on the one hand, and special classes of exempt and relatively advantaged on the other. These favored classes attribute their merely relative good fortune to the depression of the masses, and in this narrow sagacity develop a theory of national prosperity by legislation to further penalize ownership and exchange and make business and employment insecure in ways that give exemptions, subsidies and monopolies and thus a merely relative prosperity to them.

Government is a willing partner to this alliance with special interests, for increasing levies and revenues put more and more economic power and control into political hands. Public “servants” in office and political parties in power thus have vast favors and patronages to dispense, not merely in appointments to offices and appropriations of funds but also in the extension and multiplication of restrictive laws and the bureaus, offices and agencies for their enforcement that the special interests demand.   The growth of governmental power to penalize, rather than to facilitate by public services, the normal operations of employment and trade is accompanied by increasing demand for its pernicious exercise. Personal corruption of officials, though widespread, is dwarfed by whole political parties, recurrently before popular elections, selling out in advance their governmental powers, both legislative and administrative, to the special and monopoly interests that have grown large and affluent under previous beneficences.

    This continued process of depressing and penalizing general business and inflating monopolies, especially from the Civil War onward, became a serious drag on the rapid economic growth going on in America as compared with Europe under its older and heavier burdens of taxation and debt. America thus took full membership in the world league of periodic depressions. Here the production of wealth rose more rapidly and to higher actual values, but so also did the capitalized anticipations of wealth being produced and of monopolies being created rise to enormous speculative values whose deflation in the periodic recessions made them especially severe.

     These speculative values have risen highest during the rapid replacement of destroyed capital goods following the great wars. Each purely speculative gain to one person or interest was not any increase of wealth but was, in reality, either a loss or, more generally, a debt or obligation upon other persons or interests.

     These so-called values rise rapidly and are converted into bonds, mortgages and other fixed obligations that mount up to an inverted pyramid of debt far beyond what the production of actual wealth can sustain. The saving and investing classes are engulfed in the same whirlpool with the less productive and the less affluent. As the burdens on property and production increase, small competitive and unprivileged businesses must liquidate their capital and reduce operations. This disemploys and reduces incomes in perfect coincidence with decline in production and consequent advance in retail prices due to the lessened flow of finished goods. The flow of raw materials is checked, and unexchangeable surpluses appear. Falling wages and other incomes reduce purchase demand and finished goods must presently fall in price.

                                      /Drops off/