Spencer Heath Archive

Item 282

Penciling by Heath on page 41 of a pocket notepad (originals envelope of Item 274) containing many names of people met and notes from classes probably at Teachers’ College, Columbia University.

December 1933?

Why is Governmentalism Rampant?

     For a thousand years under its eagle sign the Roman Power imposed its rule and at last its ruin on the Western World.

     For another thousand years the ruins seethed in chaos. Amid confusions men seek permanence and peace. The sense of unity within the conscious mind forbids the fortuitous and compels persistent faith in a unity of origin and destiny. This faith must attach itself to an instrumentality with a will to believe in its resolving and its unifying power.

     In the ages of darkness the one symbol and instrument of unity was the Universal Church. The Papacy had taken the garments of the Empire. Youth and valor found in her a ground of purpose and unity to justify power and give aspiration meaning. Defeat and sorrow found solace, hope and salvation in her ministrations. With this easy allegiance of defeat, credulity and fear, the authorities of the Church found themselves without discipline and without restraint until the blossoming of trade and intelligence and the rise of Kingly power. The corrupted church by slow degrees gave way to these new and growing forces and the Reformation was the result. With disintegration of the Universal Church came a slow but sure weakening of the faith, the reliance, the refuge that it had been to the masses of men.

     The Empire had destroyed its populous centers and its productive organization by ruinous taxation. Industry and agriculture alike were destroyed. Gibbon /Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire/ states that in Gaul alone more than a hundred cities (not counting a like number of military centers) were destroyed by imperial taxation, their inhabitants joining the Barbarians in preference to Roman rule. With the bonds of the Empire dissolved there arose local chieftains, lords and nobles. From these the masses of men sought protection and to them they gave allegiance in return. Thus slowly and in variously modified forms arose the Feudal System — a crude but entirely natural form of government sprung into being by the need and the utter confusion of the times.

 

     Meantime, the Church having taken the garments of the Empire but without its civil and military power, the allegiance of mankind was divided. For physical safety and immunities they perforce relied upon their superior lords; for solace of their sorrows and their future hopes they relied on the spiritual Church, and for its blessings all

classes, high and low gave freely of their wealth and service to cathedrals and crusades, monasteries and martyrdoms.

The Church in its field became relatively fixed and permanent, but among the barons and noble families the old human drama went on. Slowly the stronger absorbed or destroyed the weaker and at last in the 16th and 17th (?) centuries nationalism was born and the struggle between the long corrupted Church and the new kingly power was on. The kings had two allies whom the Church spurned — trade and the new learning.

     The nobles lost to the kings (and later to elected parliaments) most of their political power while retaining the revenues of land. Thus they (and their successors) fell heir to the basic revenues of the government without corresponding administrative duties to perform. The State, bereft of its basic revenues must needs fall upon the resources of industry and trade for its support. Nor did these fail. The progress of invention and discovery and the growth of organization and expansion of territory and population were for a long period almost up to our present time more rapid than the increasing costs and complexities of the governments ..

                                          /Breaks off/