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Transcriber's note:

  I discovered this essay about a year ago, almost by accident. I had
heard of Albert Jay Nock, and understood him to be one of the great
thinkers underlying current so-called libertarian thought, but had no
personal familiarity with him, when I was searching a library computer
for subject references to the American economist, Henry George. To my
surprise, under this heading came a book of the same name by Nock. I
obtained and perused it, and found his insights to be profoundly close
to my own. I was then immediately impelled to devour what other books he
had written that I could lay my hands upon. Having read the book on
George (which I recommend highly to those interested in the subject, but
not as a general essay for those not interested in the man or his times,
or for those seeking a political or economic treatise; for the latter I
would refer the primary source himself) the next item I read in sequence
was what you now find before you.

  Far from being a tract of modern libertarianism, Our Enemy, the State
puts forward a view of the State far removed from the common positions
advocated by libertarians, or by liberals, conservatives, socialists, or
any other of the well-known political groupings which presently exist,
for that matter. Indeed, it is a vision of liberty, of freedom from
State coercion, as the title suggests, but a far more radical and
fundamental vision than any modern movement promotes. It is also a
vision of social justice, of eliminating oppression by the so-called
private sector, which is made possible under the auspices of the State.

  This essay should be read by all those who value freedom, whether left
or right on the political spectrum. Nock is often considered right of
center, but this is entirely due to the context of his times, and his
opposition to the State programs of the New Deal. He spares no vitriol
for the conservatives of his day, either.

  Aside from his somewhat dry and often discursive manner (a fault I
certainly share), the only serious criticizm which I would offer is his
essential pessimism. Nock believes nothing can be done at all; he offers
his opinions merely as an interested observer, and expects his readers
to share his perspective. Indeed, if one hopes to reduce or eliminate
the State through political means, one will quickly come to realize the
futility of his course, especially by the end of this essay. But the
solution, too, is buried within this text, albeit imperceptible to its
author. Economic means, being in all cases directly opposed to the
political, are the necessary tool of the latter's recession.

  I shall say no more of this now, lacking the context which this essay
provides. If you are inclined to express an opinion, or if you wish to
contact me for any reason, my electronic address follows. Thank you for
your interest, and please distribute this text as widely as possible.

               Mike Goldman, [e-mail]

                         December, 1994

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

            O U R   E N E M Y ,   T H E   S T A T E

                       by Albert Jay Nock

                              1935

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

                                1

  IF WE look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can
discern one fundamental fact, namely: a great redistribution of
power between society and the State. This is the fact that
interests the student of civilization. He has only a secondary
or derived interest in matters like price-fixing, wage-fixing,
inflation, political banking, "agricultural adjustment," and
similar items of State policy that fill the pages of newspapers
and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these can be
run up under one head. They have an immediate and temporary
importance, and for this reason they monopolize public
attention, but they all come to the same thing; which is, an
increase of State power and a corresponding decrease of social
power.

  It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the
State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own.
All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it
confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there
is no other source from which State power can be drawn.
Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or
seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never,
nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a
corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

  Moreover, it follows that with any exercise of State power,
not only the exercise of social power in the same direction, but
the disposition to exercise it in that direction, tends to
dwindle. Mayor Gaynor astonished the whole of New York when he
pointed out to a correspondent who had been complaining about
the inefficiency of the police, that any citizen has the right
to arrest a malefactor and bring him before a magistrate. "The
law of England and of this country," he wrote, "has been very
careful to confer no more right in that respect upon policemen
and constables than it confers on every citizen." State exercise
of that right through a police force had gone on so steadily
that not only were citizens indisposed to exercise it, but
probably not one in ten thousand knew he had it.

  Heretofore in this country sudden crises of misfortune have
been met by a mobilization of social power. In fact (except for
certain institutional enterprises like the home for the aged,
the lunatic-asylum, city-hospital and county-poorhouse)
destitution, unemployment, "depression" and similar ills, have
been no concern of the State, but have been relieved by the
application of social power. Under Mr. Roosevelt, however, the
State assumed this function, publicly announcing the doctrine,
brand-new in our history, that the State owes its citizens a
living. Students of politics, of course, saw in this merely an
astute proposal for a prodigious enhancement of State power;
merely what, as long ago as 1794, James Madison called "the old
trick of turning every contingency into a resource for
accumulating force in the government"; and the passage of time
has proved that they were right. The effect of this upon the
balance between State power and social power is clear, and also
its effect of a general indoctrination with the idea that an
exercise of social power upon such matters is no longer called
for.

  It is largely in this way that the progressive conversion of
social power into State power becomes acceptable and gets itself
accepted.[1]

----[1]
  The result of a questionnaire published in July, 1935, showed
  that 76.8 per cent of the replies favourable to the idea that
  it is the State's duty to see that every person who wants a
  job shall have one; 20.1 per cent were against it, and 3.1 per
  cent were undecided.
----[1]

When the Johnstown flood occurred, social power was immediately
mobilized and applied with intelligence and vigour. Its
abundance, measured by money alone, was so great that when
everything was finally put in order, something like a million
dollars remained. If such a catastrophe happened now, not only
is social power perhaps too depleted for the like exercise, but
the general instinct would be to let the State see to it. Not
only has social power atrophied to that extent, but the
disposition to exercise it in that particular direction has
atrophied with it. If the State has made such matters its
business, and has confiscated the social power necessary to deal
with them, why, let it deal with them. We can get some kind of
rough measure of this general atrophy by our own disposition
when approached by a beggar. Two years ago we might have been
moved to give him something; today we are moved to refer him to
the State's relief-agency. The State has said to society, You
are either not exercising enough power to meet the emergency, or
are exercising it in what I think is an incompetent way, so I
shall confiscate your power, and exercise it to suit myself.
Hence when a beggar asks us for a quarter, our instinct is to
say that the State has already confiscated our quarter for his
benefit, and he should go to the State about it.

  Every positive intervention that the State makes upon industry
and commerce has a similar effect. When the State intervenes to
fix wages or prices, or to prescribe the conditions of
competition, it virtually tells the enterpriser that he is not
exercising social power in the right way, and therefore it
proposes to confiscate his power and exercise it according to
the State's own judgment of what is best. Hence the
enterpriser's instinct is to let the State look after the
consequences. As a simple illustration of this, a manufacturer
of a highly specialized type of textiles was saying to me the
other day that he had kept his mill going at a loss for five
years because he did not want to turn his workpeople on the
street in such hard times, but now that the State had stepped in
to tell him how he must run his business, the State might jolly
well take the responsibility.

  The process of converting social power into State power may
perhaps be seen at its simplest in cases where the State's
intervention is directly competitive. The accumulation of State
power in various countries has been so accelerated and
diversified within the last twenty years that we now see the
State functioning as telegraphist, telephonist, match-pedlar,
radio-operator, cannon-founder, railway-builder and owner,
railway-operator, wholesale and retail tobacconist, shipbuilder
and owner, chief chemist, harbour-maker and dockbuilder,
housebuilder, chief educator, newspaper-proprietor,
food-purveyor, dealer in insurance, and so on through a long
list.[2]

----[2]
  In this country, the State is at present manufacturing
  furniture, grinding flour, producing fertilizer, building
  houses; selling farm-products, dairy-products, textiles,
  canned goods, and electrical apparatus; operating
  employment-agencies and home-loan offices; financing exports
  and imports; financing agriculture. It also controls the
  issuance of securities, communications by wire and radio,
  discount-rates, oil-production, power-production, commercial
  competition, the production and sale of alcohol, and the use
  of inland waterways and railways.
----[2]

It is obvious that private forms of these enterprises must tend
to dwindle in proportion as the energy of the State's
encroachments on them increases, for the competition of social
power with State power is always disadvantaged, since the State
can arrange the terms of competition to suit itself, even to the
point of outlawing any exercise of social power whatever in the
premises; in other words, giving itself a monopoly. Instances of
this expedient are common; the one we are probably the most
acquainted with is the State's monopoly of letter-carrying.
Social power is estopped by sheer fiat from application to this
form of enterprise, notwithstanding it could carry it on far
cheaper, and, in this country at least, far better. The
advantages of this monopoly in promoting the State's interests
are peculiar. No other, probably, could secure so large and
well-distributed a volume of patronage, under the guise of a
public service in constant use by so large a number of people;
it plants a lieutenant of the State at every country-crossroad.
It is by no means a pure coincidence that an administration's
chief almoner and whip-at-large is so regularly appointed
Postmaster-general.

  Thus the State "turns every contingency into a resource" for
accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social
power; and with this it develops a habit of acquiescence in the
people. New generations appear, each temperamentally adjusted --
or as I believe our American glossary now has it, "conditioned"
-- to new increments of State power, and they tend to take the
process of continuous accumulation as quite in order. All the
State's institutional voices unite in confirming this tendency;
they unite in exhibiting the progressive conversion of social
power into State power as something not only quite in order, but
even as wholesome and necessary for the public good.

                               II

  In the United States at the present time, the principal
indexes of the increase of State power are three in number.
First, the point to which the centralization of State authority
has been carried. Practically all the sovereign rights and
powers of the smaller political units -- all of them that are
significant enough to be worth absorbing -- have been absorbed
by the federal unit; nor is this all. State power has not only
been thus concentrated at Washington, but it has been so far
concentrated into the hands of the Executive that the existing
regime is a regime of personal government. It is nominally
republican, but actually monocratic; a curious anomaly, but
highly characteristic of a people little gifted with
intellectual integrity. Personal government is not exercised
here in the same ways as in Italy, Russia or Germany, for there
is as yet no State interest to be served by so doing, but rather
the contrary; while in those countries there is. But personal
government is always personal government; the mode of its
exercise is a matter of immediate political expediency, and is
determined entirely by circumstances.

  This regime was established by a coup d'Etat of a new and
unusual kind, practicable only in a rich country. It was
effected, not by violence, like Louis-Napoleon's, or by
terrorism, like Mussolini's, but by purchase. It therefore
presents what might be called an American variant of the coup
d'Etat.[3]

----[3]
  There is a sort of precedent for it in Roman history, if the
  story be true in all its details that the army sold the
  emperorship to Didius Julianus for something like five million
  dollars. Money has often been used to grease the wheels of a
  coup d'Etat, but straight over-the-counter purchase is
  unknown, I think, except in these two instances.
----[3]

Our national legislature was not suppressed by force of arms,
like the French Assembly in 1851, but was bought out of its
functions with public money; and as appeared most conspicuously
in the elections of November, 1934, the consolidation of the
coup d'Etat was effected by the same means; the corresponding
functions in the smaller units were reduced under the personal
control of the Executive.[4]

----[4]
  On the day I write this, the newspapers say the President is
  about to order a stoppage on the flow of federal relief-funds
  into Louisiana, for the purpose of bringing Senator Long to
  terms. I have seen no comment, however, on the propriety of
  this kind of procedure.
----[4]

This is a most remarkable phenomenon; possibly nothing quite
like it ever took place; and its character and implications
deserve the most careful attention.

  A second index is supplied by the prodigious extension of the
bureaucratic principle that is now observable. This is attested
prima facie by the number of new boards, bureaux and commissions
set up at Washington in the last two years. They are reported as
representing something like 90,000 new employes appointed
outside the civil service, and the total of the federal pay-roll
in Washington is reported as something over three million
dollars per month.[5]

----[5]
  A friend in the theatrical business tells me that from the
  box-office point of view, Washington is now the best
  theatre-town, concert-town, and general-amusement town in the
  United States, far better than New York.
----[5]

This, however, is relatively a small matter. The pressure of
centralization has tended powerfully to convert every official
and every political aspirant in the smaller units into a venal
and complaisant agent of the federal bureaucracy. This presents
an interesting parallel with the state of things prevailing in
the Roman empire in the last days of the Flavian dynasty, and
afterwards. The rights and practices of local self-government,
which were formerly very considerable in the provinces and much
more so in the municipalities, were lost by surrender rather
than by suppression. The imperial bureaucracy, which up to the
second century was comparatively a modest affair, grew rapidly
to great size, and local politicians were quick to see the
advantage of being on terms with it. They came to Rome with
their hats in their hands, as governors, Congressional aspirants
and such-like now go to Washington. Their eyes and thoughts were
constantly fixed on Rome, because recognition and preferment lay
that way; and in their incorrigible sycophancy they became, as
Plutarch says, like hypochondriacs who dare not eat or take a
bath without consulting their physician.

  A third index is seen in the erection of poverty and
mendicancy into a permanent political asset. Two years ago, many
of our people were in hard straits; to some extent, no doubt,
through no fault of their own, though it is now clear that in
the popular view of their case, as well as in the political
view, the line between the deserving poor and the undeserving
poor was not distinctly drawn. Popular feeling ran high at the
time, and the prevailing wretchedness was regarded with
undiscriminating emotion, as evidence of some general wrong done
upon its victims by society at large, rather than as the natural
penalty of greed, folly or actual misdoings; which in large part
it was. The State, always instinctively "turning every
contingency into a resource" for accelerating the conversion of
social power into State power, was quick to take advantage of
this state of mind. All that was needed to organize these
unfortunates into an invaluable political property was to
declare the doctrine that the State owes all its citizens a
living; and this was accordingly done. It immediately
precipitated an enormous mass of subsidized voting-power, an
enormous resource for strengthening the State at the expense of
society.[6]

----[6]
  The feature of the approaching campaign of 1936 which will
  most interest the student of civilization will be the use of
  the four-billion-dollar relief-fund that has been placed at
  the President's disposal -- the extent, that is, to which it
  will be distributed on a patronage-basis.
----[6]

                               III

  There is an impression that the enhancement of State power
which has taken place since 1932 is provisional and temporary,
that the corresponding depletion of social power is by way of a
kind of emergency-loan, and therefore is not to be scrutinized
too closely. There is every probability that this belief is
devoid of foundation. No doubt our present regime will be
modified in one way and another; indeed, it must be, for the
process of consolidation itself requires it. But any essential
change would be quite unhistorical, quite without precedent, and
is therefore most unlikely; and by an essential change, I mean
one that will tend to redistribute actual power between the
State and society.[7]

----[7]
  It must always be kept in mind that there is a tidal-motion as
  well as a wave-motion in these matters, and that the
  wave-motion is of little importance, relatively. For instance,
  the Supreme Court's invalidation of the National Recovery Act
  counts for nothing in determining the actual status of
  personal government. The real question is not how much less
  the sum of personal government is now than it was before that
  decision, but how much greater it is normally now than it was
  in 1932, and in years preceding.
----[7]

In the nature of things, there is no reason why such a change
should take place, and every reason why it should not. We shall
see various apparent recessions, apparent compromises, but the
one thing we may be quite sure of is that none of these will
tend to diminish actual State power.

  For example, we shall no doubt shortly see the great
pressure-group of politically-organized poverty and mendicancy
subsidized indirectly instead of directly, because State
interest can not long keep pace with the hand-over-head
disposition of the masses to loot their own Treasury. The method
of direct subsidy, or sheer cash-purchase, will therefore in all
probability give way to the indirect method of what is called
"social legislation"; that is, a multiplex system of
State-managed pensions, insurances and indemnities of various
kinds. This is an apparent recession, and when it occurs it will
no doubt be proclaimed as an actual recession, no doubt accepted
as such; but is it? Does it actually tend to diminish State
power and increase social power? Obviously not, but quite the
opposite. It tends to consolidate firmly this particular
fraction of State power, and opens the way to getting an
indefinite increment upon it by the mere continuous invention of
new courses and developments of State-administered social
legislation, which is an extremely simple business. One may add
the observation for whatever its evidential value may be worth,
that if the effect of progressive social legislation upon the
sum-total of State power were unfavourable or even nil, we
should hardly have found Prince de Bismarck and the British
Liberal politicians of forty years ago going in for anything
remotely resembling it.

  When, therefore, the inquiring student of civilization has
occasion to observe this or any other apparent recession upon
any point of our present regime,[8]

----[8]
  As, for example, the spectacular voiding of the National
  Recovery Act.
----[8]

he may content himself with asking the one question, What effect
has this upon the sum-total of State power? The answer he gives
himself will show conclusively whether the recession is actual
or apparent, and this is all he is concerned to know.

  There is also an impression that if actual recessions do not
come about by themselves, they may be brought about by the
expedient of voting one party out and another one in. This idea
rests upon certain assumptions that experience has shown to be
unsound; the first one being that the power of the ballot is
what republican political theory makes it out to be, and that
therefore the electorate has an effective choice in the matter.
It is a matter of open and notorious fact that nothing like this
is true. Our nominally republican system is actually built on an
imperial model, with our professional politicians standing in
the place of the praetorian guards; they meet from time to time,
decide what can be "got away with," and how, and who is to do
it; and the electorate votes according to their prescriptions.
Under these conditions it is easy to provide the appearance of
any desired concession of State power, without the reality; our
history shows innumerable instances of very easy dealing with
problems in practical politics much more difficult than that.
One may remark that in this connexion also the notoriously
baseless assumption that party-designations connote principles,
and that party-pledges imply performance. Moreover, underlying
these assumptions and all others that faith in "political
action" contemplates, is the assumption that the interests of
the State and the interests of society are, at least
theoretically, identical; whereas in theory they are directly
opposed, and this opposition invariably declares itself in
practice to the precise extent that circumstances permit.

  However, without pursuing these matters further at the moment,
it is probably enough to observe here that in the nature of
things the exercise of personal government, the control of a
huge and growing bureaucracy, and the management of an enormous
mass of subsidized voting-power, are as agreeable to one stripe
of politician as they are to another. Presumably they interest a
Republican or a Progressive as much as they do a Democrat,
Communist, Farmer-Labourite, Socialist, or whatever a politician
may, for electioneering purposes, see fit to call himself. This
was demonstrated in the local campaigns of 1934 by the practical
attitude of politicians who represented nominal opposition
parties. It is now being further demonstrated by the derisible
haste that the leaders of the official opposition are making
towards what they call "reorganization" of their party. One may
well be inattentive to their words; their actions, however, mean
simply that the recent accretions of State power are here to
stay, and that they are aware of it; and that, such being the
case, they are preparing to dispose themselves most
advantageously in a contest for their control and management.
This is all that "reorganization" of the Republican party means,
and all it is meant to mean; and this is in itself quite enough
to show that any expectation of an essential change of regime
through a change of party-administration is illusory. On the
contrary, it is clear that whatever party-competition we shall
see hereafter will be on the same terms as heretofore. It will
be a competition for control and management, and it would
naturally issue in still closer centralization, still further
extension of the bureaucratic principle, and still larger
concessions to subsidized voting-power. This course would be
strictly historical, and is furthermore to be expected as lying
in the nature of things, as it so obviously does.

  Indeed, it is by this means that the aim of the collectivists
seems likeliest to be attained in this country; this aim being
the complete extinction of social power through absorption by
the State. Their fundamental doctrine was formulated and
invested with a quasi-religious sanction by the idealist
philosophers of the last century; and among peoples who have
accepted it in terms as well as in fact, it is expressed in
formulas almost identical with theirs. Thus, for example, when
Hitler says that "the State dominates the nation because it
alone represents it," he is only putting into loose popular
language the formula of Hegel, that "the State is the general
substance, whereof individuals are but accidents." Or, again,
when Mussolini says, "Everything for the State; nothing outside
the State; nothing against the State," he is merely vulgarizing
the doctrine of Fichte, that "the State is the superior power,
ultimate and beyond appeal, absolutely independent."

  It may be in place to remark here the essential identity of
the various extant forms of collectivism. The superficial
distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern
of journalists and publicists; the serious student[9]

----[9]
  This book is a sort of syllabus or precis of some lectures to
  students of American history and politics -- mostly graduate
  students -- and it therefore presupposes some little
  acquaintance with those subjects. The few references I have
  given, however, will put any reader in the way of documenting
  and amplifying it satisfactorily.
----[9]

sees in them only the one root-idea of a complete conversion of
social power into State power. When Hitler and Mussolini invoke
a kind of debased and hoodwinking mysticism to aid their
acceleration of this process, the student at once recognizes his
old friend, the formula of Hegel, that "the State incarnates the
Divine Idea upon earth," and he is not hoodwinked. The
journalist and the impressionable traveller may make what they
will of "the new religion of Bolshevism"; the student contents
himself with remarking clearly the exact nature of the process
which this inculcation is designed to sanction.

                               IV

  This process -- the conversion of social power into State
power -- has not been carried as far here as it has elsewhere;
as it has in Russia, Italy or Germany, for example. Two things,
however, are to be observed. First, that it has gone a long way,
at a rate of progress which has of late been greatly
accelerated. What has chiefly differentiated its progress here
from its progress in other countries is its unspectacular
character. Mr. Jefferson wrote in 1823 that there was no danger
he dreaded so much as "the consolidation [i.e., centralization]
of our government by the noiseless and therefore unalarming
instrumentality of the Supreme Court." These words characterize
every advance that we have made in State aggrandizement. Each
one has been noiseless and therefore unalarming, especially to a
people notoriously preoccupied, inattentive and incurious. Even
the coup d'Etat of 1932 was noiseless and unalarming. In Russia,
Italy, Germany, the coup d'Etat was violent and spectacular; it
had to be; but here it was neither. Under covers of a
nation-wide, State-managed mobilization of inane buffoonery and
aimless commotion, it took place in so unspectacular a way that
its true nature escaped notice, and even now is not generally
understood. The method of consolidating the ensuing regime,
moreover, was also noiseless and unalarming; it was merely the
prosaic and unspectacular "higgling of the market," to which a
long and uniform political experience had accustomed us. A
visitor from a poorer and thriftier country might have regarded
Mr. Farley's activities in the local campaigns of 1934 as
striking or even spectacular, but they made no such impression
on us. They seemed so familiar, so much the regular thing, that
one heard little comment on them. Moreover, political habit led
us to attribute whatever unfavourable comment we did hear, to
interest; either partisan or monetary interest, or both. We put
it down as the jaundiced judgment of persons with axes to grind;
and naturally the regime did all it could to encourage this
view.

  The second thing to be observed is that certain formulas,
certain arrangements of words, stand as an obstacle in the way
of our perceiving how far the conversion of social power into
State power has actually gone. The force of phrase and name
distorts the identification of our own actual acceptances and
acquiescences. We are accustomed to the rehearsal of certain
poetic litanies, and provided their cadence be kept entire, we
are indifferent to their correspondence with truth and fact.
When Hegel's doctrine of the State, for example, is restated in
terms by Hitler and Mussolini, it is distinctly offensive to us,
and we congratulate ourselves on our freedom from the "yoke of a
dictator's tyranny." No American politician would dream of
breaking in on our routine of litanies with anything of the
kind. We may imagine, for example, the shock to popular
sentiment that would ensue upon Mr. Roosevelt's declaring
publicly that "the State embraces everything, and nothing has
value outside the State. The State creates right." Yet an
American politician, as long as he does not formulate that
doctrine in set terms, may go further with it in a practical way
than Mussolini has gone, and without trouble or question.
Suppose Mr. Roosevelt should defend his regime by publicly
reasserting Hegel's dictum that "the State alone possesses
rights, because it is the strongest." One can hardly imagine
that our public would get that down without a great deal of
retching. Yet how far, really, is that doctrine alien to our
public's actual acquiescences? Surely not far.

  The point is that in respect of the relation between the
theory and the actual practice of public affairs, the American
is the most unphilosophical of beings. The rationalization of
conduct in general is most repugnant to him; he prefers to
emotionalize it. He is indifferent to the theory of things, so
long as he may rehearse his formulas; and so long as he can
listen to the patter of his litanies, no practical inconsistency
disturbs him -- indeed, he gives no evidence of even recognizing
it as an inconsistency.

  The ablest and most acute observer among the many who came
from Europe to look us over in the early part of the last
century was the one who is for some reason the most neglected,
notwithstanding that in our present circumstances, especially,
he is worth more to us than all the de Tocquevilles, Bryces,
Trollopes and Chateaubriands put together. This was the noted
St.-Simonien and political economist, Michel Chevalier.
Professor Chinard, in his admirable biographical study of John
Adams, has called attention to Chevalier's observation that the
American people have "the morale of an army on the march." The
more one thinks of this, the more clearly one sees how little
there is in what our publicists are fond of calling "the
American psychology" that it does not exactly account for; and
it exactly accounts for the trait we are considering.

  An army on the march has no philosophy; it views itself as a
creature of the moment. It does not rationalize conduct except
in terms of an immediate end. As Tennyson observed, there is a
pretty strict official understanding against its doing so;
"theirs not to reason why." Emotionalizing conduct is another
matter, and the more of it the better; it is encouraged by a
whole elaborate paraphernalia of showy etiquette, flags, music,
uniforms, decorations, and the careful cultivation of a very
special sort of comradery. In every relation to "the reason of
the thing," however -- in the ability and eagerness, as Plato
puts it, "to see things as they are" -- the mentality of an army
on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence; it remains
persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile.

  Past generations of Americans, as Martin Chuzzlewit left
record, erected this infantilism into a distinguishing virtue,
and they took great pride in it as the mark of a chosen people,
destined to live forever amidst the glory of their own
unparalleled achievements wie Gott in Frankreich. Mr. Jefferson
Brick, General Choke and the Honourable Elijah Pogram made a
first-class job of indoctrinating their countrymen with the idea
that a philosophy is wholly unnecessary, and that a concern with
the theory of things is effeminate and unbecoming. An envious
and presumably dissolute Frenchman may say what he likes about
the morale of an army on the march, but the fact remains that it
has brought us where we are, and has got us what we have. Look
at a continent subdued, see the spread of our industry and
commerce, our railways, newspapers, finance-companies, schools,
colleges, what you will! Well, if all this has been done without
a philosophy, if we have grown to this unrivalled greatness
without any attention to the theory of things, does it not show
that philosophy and the theory of things are all moonshine, and
not worth a practical people's consideration? The morale of an
army on the march is good enough for us, and we are proud of it.

  The present generation does not speak in quite this tone of
robust certitude. It seems, if anything, rather less openly
contemptuous of philosophy; one even sees some signs of a
suspicion that in our present circumstances the theory of things
might be worth looking into, and it is especially towards the
theory of sovereignty and rulership that this new attitude of
hospitality appears to be developing. The condition of public
affairs in all countries, notably in our own, has done more than
bring under review the mere current practice of politics, the
character and quality of representative politicians, and the
relative merits of this-or-that form or mode of government. It
has served to suggest attention to the one institution whereof
all these forms or modes are but the several, and, from the
theoretical point of view, indifferent, manifestations. It
suggests that finality does not lie with consideration of
species, but of genus; it does not lie with consideration of the
characteristic marks that differentiate the republican State,
monocratic State, constitutional, collectivist, totalitarian,
Hitlerian, Bolshevist, what you will. It lies with consideration
of the State itself.

                                V

  There appears to be a curious difficulty about exercising
reflective thought upon the actual nature of an institution into
which one was born and one's ancestors were born. One accepts it
as one does the atmosphere; one's practical adjustments to it
are made by a kind of reflex. One seldom thinks about the air
until one notices some change, favourable or unfavourable, and
then one's thought about it is special; one thinks about purer
air, lighter air, heavier air, not about air. So it is with
certain human institutions. We know that they exist, that they
affect us in various ways, but we do not ask how they came to
exist, or what their original intention was, or what primary
function it is that they are actually fulfilling; and when they
affect us so unfavourably that we rebel against them, we
contemplate substituting nothing beyond some modification or
variant of the same institution. Thus colonial America,
oppressed by the monarchical State, brings in the republican
State; Germany gives up the republican State for the Hitlerian
State; Russia exchanges the monocratic State for the
collectivist State; Italy exchanges the constitutionalist State
for the "totalitarian" State.

  It is interesting to observe that in the year 1935 the average
individual's incurious attitude towards the phenomenon of the
State is precisely what his attitude was towards the phenomenon
of the Church in the year, say, 1500. The State was then a very
weak institution; the Church was very strong. The individual was
born into the Church, as his ancestors had been for generations,
in precisely the formal, documented fashion in which he is now
born into the State. He was taxed for the Church's support, as
he now is for the State's support. He was supposed to accept the
official theory and doctrine of the Church, to conform to its
discipline, and in a general way to do as it told him; again,
precisely the sanctions that the State now lays upon him. If he
were reluctant or recalcitrant, the Church made a satisfactory
amount of trouble for him, as the State now does.
Notwithstanding all this, it does not appear to have occurred to
the Church-citizen of that day, any more than it occurs to the
State-citizen of the present, to ask what sort of institution it
was that claimed his allegiance. There it was; he accepted its
own account of itself, took it as it stood, and at its own
valuation. Even when he revolted, fifty years later, he merely
exchanged one form or mode of the Church for another, the Roman
for the Calvinist, Lutheran, Zuinglian, or what not; again,
quite as the modern State-citizen exchanges one mode of the
State for another. He did not examine the institution itself,
nor does the State-citizen today.

  My purpose in writing is to raise the question whether the
enormous depletion of social power which we are witnessing
everywhere does not suggest the importance of knowing more than
we do about the essential nature of the institution that is so
rapidly absorbing this volume of power.[10]

----[10]
  An inadequate and partial idea of what this volume amounts to,
  may be got from the fact that the American State's income from
  taxation is now about one-third of the nation's total income!
  This takes into account all forms of taxation, direct and
  indirect, local and federal.
----[10]

One of my friends said to me lately that if the public-utility
corporations did not mend their ways, the State would take over
their business and operate it. He spoke with a curiously
reverent air of finality. Just so, I thought, might a
Church-citizen, at the end of the fifteenth century, have spoken
of some impending intervention of the Church; and I wondered
then whether he had any better-informed and closer-reasoned
theory of the State than his prototype had of the Church.
Frankly, I am sure he had not. His pseudo-conception was merely
an unreasoned acceptance of the State on its own terms and at
its own valuation; he showed himself no more intelligent, and no
less, than the whole mass of State-citizenry at large.

  It appears to me that with the depletion of social power going
on at the rate it is, the State-citizen should look very closely
into the essential nature of the institution that is bringing it
about. He should ask himself whether he has a theory of the
State, and if so, whether he can assure himself that history
supports it. He will not find this a matter that can be settled
off-hand; it needs a good deal of investigation, and a stiff
exercise of reflective thought. He should ask, in the first
place, how the State originated, and why; it must have come
about somehow, and for some purpose. This seems an extremely
easy question to answer, but he will not find it so. Then he
should ask what it is that history exhibits continuously as the
State's primary function. Then, whether he finds that "the
State" and "government" are strictly synonymous terms; he uses
them as such, but are they? Are there any invariable
characteristic marks that differentiate the institution of
government from the institution of the State? Then finally he
should decide whether, by the testimony of history, the State is
to be regarded as, in essence, a social or an anti-social
institution?

  It is pretty clear now that if the Church-citizen of 1500 had
put his mind on questions as fundamental as these, his
civilization might have had a much easier and pleasanter course
to run; and the State-citizen of today may profit by his
experience.


=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

                                2

  AS FAR back as one can follow the run of civilization, it
presents two fundamentally different types of political
organization. This difference is not one of degree, but of kind.
It does not do to take the one type as merely marking a lower
order of civilization and the other a higher; they are commonly
so taken, but erroneously. Still less does it do to classify
both as species of the same genus -- to classify both under the
generic name of "government," though this also, until very
lately, has been done, and has always led to confusion and
misunderstanding.

  A good understanding of this error and its effects is supplied
by Thomas Paine. At the outset of his pamphlet called Common
Sense, Paine draws a distinction between society and government.
While society in any state is a blessing, he says, "government,
even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst
state, an intolerable one." In another place, he speaks of
government as "a mode rendered necessary by the inability of
moral virtue to govern the world." He proceeds then to show how
and why government comes into being. Its origin is in the common
understanding and common agreement of society; and "the design
and end of government," he says, is "freedom and security."
Teleologically, government implements the common desire of
society, first, for freedom, and second, for security. Beyond
this it does not go; it contemplates no positive intervention
upon the individual, but only a negative intervention. It would
seem that in Paine's view the code of government should be that
of the legendary king Pausole, who prescribed but two laws for
his subjects, the first being, Hurt no man, and the second, Then
do as you please; and that the whole business of government
should be the purely negative one of seeing that this code is
carried out.

  So far, Paine is sound as he is simple. He goes on, however,
to attack the British political organization in terms that are
logically inconclusive. There should be no complaint of this,
for he was writing as a pamphleteer, a special pleader with an
ad captandum argument to make, and as everyone knows, he did it
most successfully. Nevertheless, the point remains that when he
talks about the British system he is talking about a type of
political organization essentially different from the type that
he has just been describing; different in origin, in intention,
in primary function, in the order of interest that it reflects.
It did not originate in the common understanding and agreement
of society; it originated in conquest and confiscation.[1]

----[1]
  Paine was of course well aware of this. He says, "A French
  bastard, landing with an armed banditti, and establishing
  himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is
  in plain terms a very paltry rascally original." He does not
  press the point, however, nor in view of his purpose should he
  be expected to do so.
----[1]

Its intention, far from contemplating "freedom and security,"
contemplated nothing of the kind. It contemplated primarily the
continuous economic exploitation of one class by another, and it
concerned itself with only so much freedom and security as was
consistent with this primary intention; and this was, in fact,
very little. Its primary function or exercise was not by way of
Paine's purely negative interventions upon the individual, but
by way of innumerable and most onerous positive interventions,
all of which were for the purpose of maintaining the
stratification of society into an owning and exploiting class,
and a property-less dependent class. The order of interest that
it reflected was not social, but purely anti-social; and those
who administered it, judged by the common standard of ethics, or
even the common standard of law as applied to private persons,
were indistinguishable from a professional-criminal class.

  Clearly, then, we have two distinct types of political
organization to take into account; and clearly, too, when their
origins are considered, it is impossible to make out that the
one is a mere perversion of the other. Therefore when we include
both types under a general term like government, we get into
logical difficulties; difficulties of which most writers on the
subject have been more or less vaguely aware, but which, until
within the last half-century, none of them has tried to resolve.

  Mr. Jefferson, for example, remarked that the hunting tribes
of Indians, with which he had a good deal to do in his early
days, had a highly organized and admirable social order, but
were "without government." Commenting on this, he wrote Madison
that "it is a problem not clear in my mind that [this] condition
is not the best," but he suspected that it was "inconsistent
with any great degree of population." Schoolcraft observes that
the Chippewas, though living in a highly-organized social order,
had no "regular" government. Herbert Spencer, speaking of the
Bechuanas, Araucanians and Koranna Hottentots, says they have no
"definite" government; while Parkman, in his introduction to The
Conspiracy of Pontiac, reports the same phenomenon, and is
frankly puzzled by its apparent anomalies.

  Paine's theory of government agrees exactly with the theory
set forth by Mr. Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.
The doctrine of natural rights, which is explicit in the
Declaration, is implicit in Common Sense;[2]

----[2]
  In Rights of Man, Paine is as explicit about this doctrine as
  the Declaration is; and in several places throughout his
  pamphlets, he asserts that all civil rights are founded on
  natural rights, and proceed from them.
----[2]

and Paine's view of the "design and end of government" is
precisely the Declaration's view, that "to secure these rights,
governments are instituted among men"; and further, Paine's view
of the origin of government is that it "derives its just powers
from the consent of the governed." Now, if we apply Paine's
formulas or the Declaration's formulas, it is abundantly clear
that the Virginian Indians had government; Mr. Jefferson's own
observations show that they had it. Their political
organization, simple as it was, answered its purpose. Their
code-apparatus sufficed for assuring freedom and security to the
individual, and for dealing with such trespasses as in that
state of society the individual might encounter -- fraud, theft,
assault, adultery, murder. The same is clearly true of the
various peoples cited by Parkman, Schoolcraft and Spencer.
Assuredly, if the language of the Declaration amounts to
anything, all these peoples had government; and all these
reporters make it appear as a government quite competent to its
purpose.

  Therefore when Mr. Jefferson says his Indians were "without
government," he must be taken to mean that they did not have a
type of government like the one he knew; and when Schoolcraft
and Spencer speak of "regular" and "definite" government, their
qualifying words must be taken in the same way. This type of
government, nevertheless, has always existed and still exists,
answering perfectly to Paine's formulas and the Declaration's
formulas; though it is a type which we also, most of us, have
seldom had the chance to observe. It may not be put down as the
mark of an inferior race, for institutional simplicity is in
itself by no means a mark of backwardness or inferiority; and it
has been sufficiently shown that in certain essential respects
the peoples who have this type of government are, by comparison,
in a position to say a good deal for themselves on the score of
a civilized character. Mr. Jefferson's own testimony on this
point is worth notice, and so is Parkman's. This type, however,
even though documented by the Declaration, is fundamentally so
different from the type that has always prevailed in history,
and is still prevailing in the world at the moment, that for the
sake of clearness the two types should be set apart by name, as
they are by nature. They are so different in theory that drawing
a sharp distinction between them is now probably the most
important duty that civilization owes to its own safety. Hence
it is by no means either an arbitrary or academic proceeding to
give the one type the name of government, and to call the second
type simply the State.

                               II

  Aristotle, confusing the idea of the State with the idea of
government, thought the State originated out of the natural
grouping of the family. Other Greek philosophers, labouring
under the same confusion, somewhat anticipated Rousseau in
finding its origin in the social nature and disposition of the
individual; while an opposing school, which held that the
individual is naturally anti-social, more or less anticipated
Hobbes by finding it in an enforced compromise among the
anti-social tendencies of individuals. Another view, implicit in
the doctrine of Adam Smith, is that the State originated in the
association of certain individuals who showed a marked
superiority in the economic virtues of diligence, prudence and
thrift. The idealist philosophers, variously applying Kant's
transcendentalism to the problem, came to still different
conclusions; and one or two other views, rather less plausible,
perhaps, than any of the foregoing, have been advanced.

  The root-trouble with all these views is not precisely that
they are conjectural, but that they are based on incompetent
observation. They miss the invariable characteristic marks that
the subject presents; as, for example, until quite lately, all
views of the origin of malaria missed the invariable
ministrations of the mosquito, or as opinions about the bubonic
plague missed the invariable mark of the rat-parasite. It is
only within the last half-century that the historical method has
been applied to the problem of the State.[3]

----[3]
  By Gumplowicz, professor at Graz, and after him, by
  Oppenheimer, professor of politics at Frankfort. I have
  followed them throughout this section. The findings of these
  Galileos are so damaging to the prestige that the State has
  everywhere built up for itself that professional authority in
  general has been very circumspect about approaching them,
  naturally preferring to give them a wide berth; but in the
  long-run, this is a small matter. Honourable and distinguished
  exceptions appear in Vierkandt, Wilhelm Wundt, and the revered
  patriarch of German economic studies, Adolf Wagner.
----[3]

This method runs back the phenomenon of the State to its first
appearance in documented history, observing its characteristic
marks, and drawing inferences as indicated. There are so many
clear intimations of this method in earlier writers -- one finds
them as far back as Strabo -- that one wonders why its
systematic application was so long deferred; but in all such
cases, as with malaria and typhus, when the characteristic mark
is once determined, it is so obvious that one always wonders why
it was so long unnoticed. Perhaps in the case of the State, the
best one can say is that the cooperation of the Zeitgeist was
necessary, and that it could be had no sooner.

  The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably
had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State
known to history originated in any other manner.[4]

----[4]
  An excellent example of primitive practice, effected by modern
  technique, is furnished by the new State of Manchoukuo, and
  another bids fair to be furnished in consequence of the
  Italian State's operations in Ethiopia.
----[4]

On the negative side, it has been proved beyond peradventure
that no primitive State could possibly have had any other
origin.[5]

----[5]
  The mathematics of this demonstration are extremely
  interesting. A resume of them is given in Oppenheimer's
  treatise, Der Staat, ch. I, and they are worked out in full in
  his Theorie der Reinen und Politischen Oekonomie.
----[5]

Moreover, the sole invariable characteristic of the State is the
economic exploitation of one class by another. In this sense,
every State known to history is a class-State. Oppenheimer
defines the State, in respect of its origin, as an institution
"forced on a defeated group by a conquering group, with a view
only to systematizing the domination of the conquered by the
conquerors, and safeguarding itself against insurrection from
within and attack from without. This domination had no other
final purpose than the economic exploitation of the conquered
group by the victorious group."

  An American statesman, John Jay, accomplished the respectable
feat of compressing the whole doctrine of conquest into a single
sentence. "Nations in general," he said, "will go to war
whenever there is a prospect of getting something by it." Any
considerable economic accumulation, or any considerable body of
natural resources, is an incentive to conquest. The primitive
technique was that of raiding the coveted possessions,
appropriating them entire, and either exterminating the
possessors, or dispersing them beyond convenient reach. Very
early, however, it was seen to be in general more profitable to
reduce the possessors to dependence, and use them as
labour-motors; and the primitive technique was accordingly
modified. Under special circumstances, where this exploitation
was either impractical or unprofitable, the primitive technique
is even now occasionally revived, as by the Spaniards in South
America, or by ourselves against the Indians. But these
circumstances are exceptional; the modified technique has been
in use almost from the beginning, and everywhere its first
appearance marks the origin of the State. Citing Ranke's
observations on the technique of the raiding herdsmen, the
Hyksos, who established their State of Egypt about B.C. 2000,
Gumplowicz remarks that Ranke's words very well sum up the
political history of mankind.

  Indeed, the modified technique never varies. "Everywhere we
see a militant group of fierce men forcing the frontier of some
more peaceable people, settling down upon them and establishing
the State, with themselves as an aristocracy. In Mesopotamia,
irruption succeeds irruption, State succeeds State, Babylonians,
Amoritans, Assyrians, Arabs, Medes, Persians, Macedonians,
Parthians, Mongols, Seldshuks, Tatars, Turks; in the Nile
valley, Hyksos, Nubians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks;
in Greece, the Doric States are specific examples; in Italy,
Romans, Ostrogoths, Lombards, Franks, Germans; in Spain,
Carthaginians, Visigoths, Arabs; in Gaul, Romans, Franks,
Burgundians, Normans; in Britain, Saxons, Normans." Everywhere
we find the political organization proceeding from the same
origin, and presenting the same mark of intention, namely: the
economic exploitation of a defeated group by a conquering group.

  Everywhere, that is, with but one significant exception.
Wherever economic exploitation has been for any reason either
impractical or unprofitable, the State has never come into
existence; government has existed, but the State, never. The
American hunting tribes, for example, whose organization so
puzzled our observers, never formed a State, for there is no way
to reduce a hunter to economic dependence and make him hunt for
you.[6]

----[6]
  Except, of course, by preemption of the land under the
  State-system of tenure, but for occupational reasons this
  would not be worth a hunting tribe's attempting. Bicknell, the
  historian of Rhode Island, suggests that the troubles over
  Indian treaties arose from the fact that the Indians did not
  understand the State-system of land-tenure, never having had
  anything like it; their understanding was that the whites were
  admitted only to the same communal use of land that they
  themselves enjoyed. It is interesting to remark that the
  settled fishing tribes of the Northwest formed a State. Their
  occupation made economic exploitation both practicable and
  profitable, and they resorted to conquest and confiscation to
  introduce it.
----[6]

Conquest and confiscation were no doubt practicable, but no
economic gain would be got by it, for confiscation would give
the aggressors but little beyond what they already had; the most
that could come of it would be the satisfaction of some sort of
feud. For like reasons primitive peasants never formed a State.
The economic accumulations of their neighbours were too slight
and too perishable to be interesting;[7]

----[7]
  It is strange that so little attention has been paid to the
  singular immunity enjoyed by certain small and poor peoples
  amidst great collisions of State interest. Throughout the late
  war, for example, Switzerland, which has nothing worth
  stealing, was never raided or disturbed.
----[7]

and especially with the abundance of free land about, the
enslavement of their neighbours would be impracticable, if only
for the police-problems involved.[8]

----[8]
  Marx's chapter on colonization is interesting in this
  connexion, especially for his observation that economic
  exploitation is impracticable until expropriation from the
  land has taken place. Here he is in full agreement with the
  whole line of fundamental economists, from Turgot, Franklin
  and John Taylor down to Theodor Hertzka and Henry George.
  Marx, however, apparently did not see that his observation
  left him with something of a problem on his hands, for he does
  little more with it than record the fact.
----[8]

  It may now be easily seen how great the difference is between
the institution of government, as understood by Paine and the
Declaration of Independence, and the institution of the State.
Government may quite conceivably have originated as Paine
thought it did, or Aristotle, or Hobbes, or Rousseau; whereas
the State not only never did originate in any of those ways, but
never could have done so. The nature and intention of
government, as adduced by Parkman, Schoolcraft and Spencer, are
social. Based on the idea of natural rights, government secures
those rights to the individual by strictly negative
intervention, making justice costless and easy of access; and
beyond that it does not go. The State, on the other hand, both
in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely
anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but
on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that
the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made
justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held
itself above justice and common morality whenever it could
advantage itself by so doing.[9]

----[9]
  John Bright said he had known the British Parliament to do
  some good things, but never knew it to do a good thing merely
  because it was a good thing.
----[9]

So far from encouraging a wholesome development of social power,
it has invariably, as Madison said, turned every contingency
into a resource for depleting social power and enhancing State
power.[10]

----[10]
  Reflections, I.
----[10]

As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that
the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but
only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime. In Russia and
Germany, for example, we have lately seen the State moving with
great alacrity against infringement of its private monopoly by
private persons, while at the same time exercising that monopoly
with unconscionable ruthlessness. Taking the State wherever
found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way
to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators
and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class.

                               III

  Such are the antecedents of the institution which is
everywhere now so busily converting social power by wholesale
into State power.[11]

----[11]
  In this country the condition of several socially-valuable
  industries seems at the moment to be a pretty fair index of
  this process. The State's positive interventions have so far
  depleted social power that by all accounts these particular
  applications of it are on the verge of being no longer
  practicable. In Italy, the State now absorbs fifty per cent of
  the total national income. Italy appears to be rehearsing her
  ancient history in something more than a sentimental fashion,
  for by the end of the second century social power had been so
  largely transmuted into State power that nobody could do any
  business at all. There was not enough social power left to pay
  the State's bills
----[11]

The recognition of them goes a long way towards resolving most,
if not all, of the apparent anomalies which the conduct of the
modern State exhibits. It is of great help, for example, in
accounting for the open and notorious fact that the State always
moves slowly and grudgingly towards any purpose that accrues to
society's advantage, but moves rapidly and with alacrity towards
one that accrues to its own advantage; nor does it ever move
towards social purposes on its own initiative, but only under
heavy pressure, while its motion towards anti-social purposes is
self-sprung.

  Englishmen of the last century remarked this fact with
justifiable anxiety, as they watched the rapid depletion of
social power by the British State. One of them was Herbert
Spencer, who published a series of essays which were
subsequently put together in a volume called The Man versus the
State. With our public affairs in the shape they are, it is
rather remarkable that no American publicist has improved the
chance to reproduce these essays verbatim, merely substituting
illustrations drawn from American history for those which
Spencer draws from English history. If this were properly done,
it would make one of the most pertinent and useful works that
could be produced at this time.[12]

----[12]
  It seems a most discreditable thing that this century has not
  seen produced in America an intellectually respectable
  presentation of the complete case against the State's
  progressive confiscations of social power; a presentation,
  that is, which bears the mark of having sound history and a
  sound philosophy behind it. Mere interested touting of "rugged
  individualism" and agonized fustian about the constitution are
  so specious, so frankly unscrupulous, that they have become
  contemptible. Consequently collectivism has easily had all the
  best of it, intellectually, and the results are now apparent.
  Collectivism has even succeeded in foisting its glossary of
  arbitrary definitions upon us; we all speak of our economic
  system, for instance, as "capitalist," when there has never
  been a system, nor can one be imagined, that is not
  capitalist. By contrast, when British collectivism undertook
  to deal, say with Lecky, Bagehot, Professor Huxley and Herbert
  Spencer, it got full change for its money. Whatever steps
  Britain has taken towards collectivism, or may take, it at
  least has had all the chance in the world to know precisely
  where it was going, which we have not had.
----[12]

  These essays are devoted to examining the several aspects of
the contemporary growth of State power in England. On the essay
called Over-legislation, Spencer remarks the fact so notoriously
common in our experience,[13]

----[13]
  Yesterday I passed over a short stretch of new road built by
  State power, applied through one of the grotesque alphabetical
  tentacles of our bureaucracy. It cost $87,348.56. Social
  power, represented by a contractor's figure in competitive
  bidding, would have built it for $38,668.20, a difference,
  roughly, of one hundred per cent!
----[13]

that when State power is applied to social purposes, its action
is invariably "slow, stupid, extravagant, unadaptive, corrupt
and obstructive." He devotes several paragraphs to each count,
assembling a complete array of proof. When he ends, discussion
ends; there is simply nothing to be said. He shows further that
the State does not even fulfil efficiently what he calls its
"unquestionable duties" to society; it does not efficiently
adjudge and defend the individual's elemental rights. This being
so -- and with us this too is a matter of notoriously common
experience -- Spencer sees no reason to expect that State power
will be more efficiently applied to secondary social purposes.
"Had we, in short, proved its efficiency as judge and defender,
instead of having found it treacherous, cruel, and anxiously to
be shunned, there would be some encouragement to hope other
benefits at its hands."

  Yet, he remarks, it is just this monstrously extravagant hope
that society is continually indulging; and indulging in the face
of daily evidence that it is illusory. He points to the anomaly
which we have all noticed as so regularly presented by
newspapers. Take up one, says Spencer, and you will probably
find a leading editorial "exposing the corruption, negligence or
mismanagement of some State department. Cast your eye down the
next column, and it is not unlikely that you will read proposals
for an extension of State supervision.[14]

----[14]
  All the newspaper-comments that I have read concerning the
  recent marine disasters that befell the Ward Line have,
  without exception, led up to just such proposals!
----[14]

...Thus while every day chronicles a failure, there every day
reappears the belief that it needs but an Act of Parliament and
a staff of officers to effect any end desired.[15]

----[15]
  Our recent experience with prohibition might be thought to
  have suggested this belief as fatuous, but apparently they
  have not done so.
----[15]

Nowhere is the perennial faith of mankind better seen."

  It is unnecessary to say that the reasons which Spencer gives
for the anti-social behaviour of the State are abundantly valid,
but we may now see how powerfully they are reinforced by the
findings of the historical method; a method which had not been
applied when Spencer wrote. These findings being what they are,
it is manifest that the conduct which Spencer complains of is
strictly historical. When the town-dwelling merchants of the
eighteenth century displaced the landholding nobility in control
of the State's mechanism, they did not change the State's
character; they merely adapted its mechanism to their own
special interests, and strengthened it immeasurably.[16]

----[16]
  This point is well discussed by the Spanish philosopher Ortega
  y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, ch. XIII (English
  Translation), in which he does not scruple to say that the
  State's rapid depletion of social power is "the greatest
  danger that today threatens civilization." He also gives a
  good idea of what may be expected when a third,
  economically-composite, class in turn takes over the mechanism
  of the State, as the merchant class took it over from the
  nobility. Surely no better forecast could be made of what is
  taking place in this country at the moment, than this: "The
  mass-man does in fact believe that he is the State, and he
  will tend more and more to set its machinery working, on
  whatever pretext, to crush beneath it any creative minority
  which disturbs it -- disturbs it in any order of things; in
  politics, in ideas, in industry."
----[16]

The merchant-State remained an anti-social institution, a pure
class-State, like the State of the nobility; its intention and
function remained unchanged, save for the adaptations necessary
to suit the new order of interests that it was thenceforth to
serve. Therefore in its flagrant disservice of social purposes,
for which Spencer arraigns it, the State was acting strictly in
character.

  Spencer does not discuss what he calls "the perennial faith of
mankind" in State action, but contents himself with elaborating
the sententious observations of Guizot, that "a belief in the
sovereign power of political machinery" is nothing less than "a
gross delusion." This faith is chiefly an effect of the immense
prestige which the State has diligently built up for itself in
the century or more since the doctrine of jure divino rulership
gave way. We need not consider the various instruments that the
State employs in building up its prestige; most of them are well
known, and their uses well understood. There is one, however,
which is in a sense peculiar to the republican State.
Republicanism permits the individual to persuade himself that
the State is his creation, that State action is his action, that
when it expresses itself it expresses him, and when it is
glorified he is glorified. The republican State encourages this
persuasion with all its power, aware that it is the most
efficient instrument for enhancing its own prestige. Lincoln's
phrase, "of the people, by the people, for the people" was
probably the most effective single stroke of propaganda ever
made in behalf of republican State prestige.

  Thus the individual's sense of his own importance inclines him
strongly to resent the suggestion that the State is by nature
anti-social. He looks on its failures and misfeasances with
somewhat the eye of a parent, giving it the benefit of a special
code of ethics. Moreover, he has always the expectation that the
State will learn by its mistakes, and do better. Granting that
its technique with social purposes is blundering, wasteful and
vicious -- even admitting, with the public official whom Spencer
cites, that wherever the State is, there is villainy -- he sees
no reason why, with an increase of experience and
responsibility, the State should not improve.

  Something like this appears to be the basic assumption of
collectivism. Let but the State confiscate all social power, and
its interests will become identical with those of society.
Granting that the State is of anti-social origin, and that it
has borne a uniformly anti-social character throughout its
history, let it but extinguish social power completely, and its
character will change; it will merge with society, and thereby
become society's efficient and disinterested organ. The historic
State, in short, will disappear, and government only remain. It
is an attractive idea; the hope of its being somehow translated
into practice is what, only so few years ago, made "the Russian
experiment" so irresistibly fascinating to generous spirits who
felt themselves hopelessly State-ridden. A closer examination of
the State's activities, however, will show that this idea,
attractive though it be, goes to pieces against the iron law of
fundamental economics, that man tends always to satisfy his
needs and desires with the least possible exertion. Let us see
how this is so.

                               IV

  There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's
needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and
exchange of wealth; this is the economic means.[17]

----[17]
  Oppenheimer, Der Staat, ch. I. Services are also, of course, a
  subject of economic exchange.
----[17]

The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced
by others; this is the political means. The primitive exercise
of the political means was, as we have seen, by conquest,
confiscation, expropriation, and the introduction of a
slave-economy. The conqueror parcelled out the conquered
territory among beneficiaries, who thenceforth satisfied their
needs and desires by exploiting the labour of the enslaved
inhabitants.[18]

----[18]
  In America, where the native huntsmen were not exploitable,
  the beneficiaries -- the Virginia Company, Massachusetts
  Company, Dutch West India Company, the Calverts, etc. --
  followed the traditional method of importing exploitable human
  material, under bond, from England and Europe, and also
  established the chattel-slave economy by importations from
  Africa. The best exposition of this phase of our history is in
  Beard's Rise of American Civilization, vol. I, pp. 103-109. At
  a later period, enormous masses of exploitable material
  imported themselves by immigration; Valentine's Manual for
  1859 says that in the period 1847-1858, 2,486,463 immigrants
  passed through the port of New York. This competition tended
  to depress the slave-economy in the industrial sections of the
  country, and to supplant it with a wage-economy. It is
  noteworthy that public sentiment in those regions did not
  regard the slave-economy as objectionable until it could no
  longer be profitably maintained.
----[18]

The feudal State, and the merchant-State, wherever found, merely
took over and developed successively the heritage of character,
intention and apparatus of exploitation which the primitive
State transmitted to them; they are in essence merely higher
integrations of the primitive State.

  The State, then, whether primitive, feudal or merchant, is the
organization of the political means. Now, since man tends always
to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible
exertion, he will employ the political means whenever he can --
exclusively, if possible; otherwise, in association with the
economic means. He will, at the present time, that is, have
recourse to the State's modern apparatus of exploitation; the
apparatus of tariffs, concessions, rent-monopoly, and the like.
It is a matter of the commonest observation that this is his
first instinct. So long, therefore, as the organization of the
political means is available -- so long as the
highly-centralized bureaucratic State stands as primarily a
distributor of economic advantage, an arbiter of exploitation,
so long will that instinct effectively declare itself. A
proletarian State would merely, like the merchant-State, shift
the incidence of exploitation, and there is no historic ground
for the presumption that a collectivist State would be in any
essential respect unlike its predecessors;[19]

----[19]
  Supposing, for example, that Mr. Norman Thomas and a solid
  collectivist Congress, with a solid collectivist Supreme
  Court, should presently fall heir to our enormously powerful
  apparatus of exploitation, it needs no great stretch of
  imagination to forecast the upshot.
----[19]

as we are beginning to see, "the Russian experiment" has
amounted to the erection of a highly-centralized bureaucratic
State upon the ruins of another, leaving the entire apparatus of
exploitation intact and ready for use. Hence, in view of the law
of fundamental economics just cited, the expectation that
collectivism will appreciably alter the essential character of
the State appears illusory.

  Thus the findings arrived at by the historical method amply
support the immense body of practical considerations brought
forward by Spencer against the State's inroads upon social
power. When Spencer concludes that "in State-organizations,
corruption is unavoidable," the historical method abundantly
shows cause why, in the nature of things, this should be
expected -- vilescit origine tali. When Freud comments on the
shocking disparity between State-ethics and private ethics --
and his observations on this point are most profound and
searching -- the historical method at once supplies the best of
reasons why that disparity should be looked for.[20]

----[20]
  In April, 1933, the American State issued half a billion
  dollars' worth of bonds of small denominations, to attract
  investment by poor persons. It promised to pay these,
  principal and interest, in gold of the then-existing value.
  Within three months the State repudiated that promise. Such an
  action by an individual would, as Freud says, dishonour him
  forever, and mark him as no better than a knave. Done by an
  association of individuals, it would put them in the category
  of a professional-criminal class.
----[20]

When Ortega y Gasset says that "Statism is the higher form taken
by violence and direct action, when these are set up as
standards," the historical method enables us to perceive at once
that his definition is precisely that which one would make a
priori.

  The historical method, moreover, establishes the important
fact that, as in the case of tabetic or parasitic diseases, the
depletion of social power by the State can not be checked after
a certain point of progress is passed. History does not show an
instance where, once beyond this point, this depletion has not
ended in a complete and permanent collapse. In some cases,
disintegration is slow and painful. Death set its mark on Rome
at the end of the second century, but she dragged out a pitiable
existence for some time after the Antonines. Athens, on the
other hand, collapsed quickly. Some authorities think Europe is
dangerously near that point, if not already past it; but
contemporary conjecture is probably without much value. That
point may have been reached in America, and it may not; again,
certainty is unattainable -- plausible arguments may be made
either way. Of two things, however, we may be certain; the first
is, that the rate of America's approach to that point is being
prodigiously accelerated; and the second is, that there is no
evidence of any disposition to retard it, or any intelligent
apprehension of the danger which that acceleration betokens.


=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

                                3

  IN CONSIDERING the State's development in America, it is
important to keep in mind the fact that America's experience of
the State was longer during the colonial period than during the
period of American independence; the period 1607-1776 was longer
than the period 1776-1935. Moreover, the colonists came here
full-grown, and had already a considerable experience of the
State of England and Europe before they arrived; and for
purposes of comparison, this would extend the former period by a
few years, say at least fifteen. It would probably be safe to
put it that the American colonists had twenty-five years' longer
experience of the State than citizens of the United States have
had.

  Their experience, too, was not only longer, but more varied.
The British State, the French, Dutch, Swedish and Spanish
States, were all established here. The separatist English
dissenters who landed at Plymouth had lived under the Dutch
State as well as the British State. When James I made England
too uncomfortable for them to live in, they went to Holland; and
many of the institutions which they subsequently set up in New
England, and which were later incorporated into the general body
of what we call "American Institutions," were actually Dutch,
though commonly -- almost invariably -- we credit them to
England. They were for the most part Roman-Continental in their
origin, but they were transmitted here from Holland, not from
England.[1]

----[1]
  Among these institutions are: our system of free public
  education; local self-government as originally established in
  the township system; our method of conveying land; almost all
  of our system of equity; much of our criminal code; and our
  method of administering estates.
----[1]

No such institutions existed in England at that time, and hence
the Plymouth colonists could not have seen them there; they
could have seen them only in Holland, where they did exist.

  Our colonial period coincided with the period of revolution
and readjustment in England, referred to in the preceding
chapter, when the British merchant-State was displacing the
feudal State, consolidating its own position, and shifting the
incidence of economic exploitation. These revolutionary measures
gave rise to an extensive review of the general theory on which
the feudal State had been operating. The earlier Stuarts
governed on the theory of monarchy by divine right. The State's
economic beneficiaries were answerable only to the monarch, who
was theoretically answerable only to God; he had no
responsibilities to society at large, save such as he chose to
incur, and these only for the duration of his pleasure. In 1607,
the year of the Virginia colony's landing at Jamestown, John
Cowell, regius professor of civil law at the University of
Cambridge, laid down the doctrine that the monarch "is above the
law by his absolute power, and though for the better and equal
course in making laws he do admit the Three Estates unto
Council, yet this in divers learned men's opinions is not of
constraint, but of his own benignity, or by reason of the
promise made upon oath at the time of his coronation."

  This doctrine, which was elaborated to the utmost in the
extraordinary work called Patriarcha, by Sir Robert Filmer, was
all well enough so long as the line of society's stratification
was clear, straight and easily drawn. The feudal State's
economic beneficiaries were virtually a close corporation, a
compact body consisting of a Church hierarchy and a titled group
of hereditary, large-holding landed proprietors. In respect of
interests, this body was extremely homogeneous, and their
interests, few in number, were simple in character and easily
defined. With the monarch, the hierarchy, and a small,
closely-limited nobility above the line of stratification, and
an undifferentiated populace below it, this theory of
sovereignty was passable; it answered the purposes of the feudal
State as well as any.

  But the practical outcome of this theory did not, and could
not, suit the purposes of the rapidly-growing class of merchants
and financiers. They wished to introduce a new economic system.
Under feudalism, production had been, as a general thing, for
use, with the incidence of exploitation falling largely on a
peasantry. The State had by no means always kept its hands off
trade, but it had never countenanced the idea that its chief
reason for existence was, as we say, "to help business." The
merchants and financiers, however, had precisely this idea in
mind. They saw the attractive possibilities of production for
profit, with the incidence of exploitation gradually shifting to
an industrial proletariat. They saw also, however, that to
realize all these possibilities, they must get the State's
mechanism to working as smoothly and powerfully on the side of
"business" as it had been working on the side of the monarchy,
the Church, and the large-holding landed proprietors. This meant
capturing control of this mechanism, and so altering and
adapting it as to give themselves the same free access to the
political means as was enjoyed by the displaced beneficiaries.
The course by which they accomplished this is marked by the
Civil War, the dethronement and execution of Charles I, the
Puritan protectorate, and the revolution of 1688.

  This is the actual inwardness of what is known as the Puritan
movement in England. It had a quasi-religious motivation --
speaking strictly, an ecclesiological motivation -- but the
paramount practical end towards which it tended was a
repartition of access to the political means. It is a
significant fact, though seldom noticed, that the only tenet
with which Puritanism managed to evangelize equally the
non-Christian and Christian world of English-bred civilization
is its tenet of work, its doctrine that work is, by God's
express will and command, a duty; indeed almost, if not quite,
the first and most important of man's secular duties. This
erection of labour into a Christian virtue per se, this
investment of work with a special religious sanction, was an
invention of Puritanism; it was something never heard of in
England before the rise of the Puritan State. The only doctrine
antedating it presented labour as the means to a purely secular
end; as Cranmer's divines put it, "that I may learn and labour
truly to get mine own living." There is no hint that God would
take it amiss if one preferred to do little work and put up with
a poor living, for the sake of doing something else with one's
time. Perhaps the best witness to the essential character of the
Puritan movement in England and America is the thoroughness with
which its doctrine of work has pervaded both literatures, all
the way from Cromwell's letters to Carlyle's panegyric and
Longfellow's verse.

  But the merchant-State of the Puritans was like any other; it
followed the standard pattern. It originated in conquest and
confiscation, like the feudal State which it displaced; the only
difference being that its conquest was by civil war instead of
foreign war. Its object was the economic exploitation of one
class by another; for the exploitation of feudal serfs by a
nobility, it proposed only to substitute the exploitation of a
proletariat by enterprisers. Like its predecessor, the
merchant-State was purely an organization of the political
means, a machine for the distribution of economic advantage, but
with its mechanism adapted to the requirements of a more
numerous and more highly differentiated order of beneficiaries;
a class, moreover, whose numbers were not limited by heredity or
by the sheer arbitrary pleasure of a monarch.

  The process of establishing the merchant-State, however,
necessarily brought about changes in the general theory of
sovereignty. The bald doctrine of Cowell and Filmer was no
longer practicable; yet any new theory had to find room for some
sort of divine sanction, for the habit of men's minds does not
change suddenly, and Puritanism's alliance between religious and
secular interests was extremely close. One may not quite put it
that the merchant-enterprisers made use of religious fanaticism
to pull their chestnuts out of the fire; the religionists had
sound and good chestnuts of their own to look after. They had
plenty of rabid nonsense to answer for, plenty of sour
hypocrisy, plenty of vicious fanaticism; whenever we think of
seventeenth-century British Puritanism, we think of Hugh Peters,
of Praise God Barebones, of Cromwell's iconoclasts "smashing the
mighty big angels in glass." But behind all this untowardness
there was in the religionists a body of sound conscience,
soundly and justly outraged; and no doubt, though mixed with an
intolerable deal of unscrupulous greed, there was on the part of
the merchant-enterprisers a sincere persuasion that what was
good for business was good for society. Taking Hampden's
conscience as representative, one would say that it operated
under the limitations set by nature upon the typical sturdy
Buckinghamshire squire; the mercantile conscience was likewise
ill-informed, and likewise set its course with a hard, dogged,
provincial stubbornness. Still, the alliance of the two bodies
of conscience was not without some measure of respectability. No
doubt, for example, Hampden regarded the State-controlled
episcopate to some extent objectively, as unscriptural in
theory, and a tool of Antichrist in practice; and no doubt, too,
the mercantile conscience, with the disturbing vision of William
Laud in view, might have found State-managed episcopacy
objectionable on other grounds than those of special interest.

  The merchant-State's political rationale had to respond to the
pressure of a growing individualism. The spirit of individualism
appeared in the latter half of the sixteenth century; probably
-- as well as such obscure origins can be determined -- as a
by-product of the Continental revival of learning, or, it may
be, specifically as a by-product of the Reformation in Germany.
It was long, however, in gaining force enough to make itself
count in shaping political theory. The feudal State could take
no account of this spirit; its stark regime of status was
operable only where there was no great multiplicity of diverse
economic interests to be accommodated, and where the sum of
social power remained practically stable. Under the British
feudal State, one large-holding landed proprietor's interest was
much like another's, and one bishop's or clergyman's interest
was about the same in kind as another's. The interests of the
monarchy and court were not greatly diversified, and the sum of
social power varied but little from time to time. Hence an
economic class-solidarity was easily maintained; access upward
from one class to the other was easily blocked, so easily that
very few positive State-interventions were necessary to keep
people, as we say, in their place; or as Cranmer's divines put
it, to keep them doing their duty in that station of life unto
which it had pleased God to call them. Thus the State could
accomplish its primary purpose, and still afford to remain
relatively weak. It could normally, that is, enable a
thorough-going economic exploitation with relatively little
apparatus of legislation or personnel.[2]

----[2]
  Throughout Europe, indeed, up to the close of the eighteenth
  century, the State was quite weak, even considering the
  relatively moderate development of social power, and the
  moderate amount of economic accumulation available to its
  predatory purposes. Social power in modern France could pay
  the flat annual levy of Louis XIV's taxes without feeling it,
  and would like nothing better than to commute the republican
  State's levy on those terms.
----[2]

  The merchant-State, on the other hand, with its ensuing regime
of contract, had to meet the problem set by a rapid development
of social power, and a multiplicity of economic interests. Both
these tended to foster and stimulate the spirit of
individualism. The management of social power made the
merchant-enterpriser feel that he was quite as much somebody as
anybody, and that the general order of interest which he
represented -- and in particular his own special fraction of
that interest -- was to be regarded as most respectable, which
hitherto it had not been. In short, he had a full sense of
himself as an individual, which on these grounds he could of
course justify beyond peradventure. The aristocratic
disparagement of his pursuits, and the consequent stigma of
inferiority which had been so long fixed upon the "base
mechanical," exacerbated this sense, and rendered it at its best
assertive, and at its worst, disposed to exaggerate the
characteristic defects of his class as well as its excellences,
and lump them off together in a new category of social virtues
-- its hardness, ruthlessness, ignorance and vulgarity at par
with its commercial integrity, its shrewdness, diligence and
thrift. Thus the fully-developed composite type of
merchant-enterpriser-financier might be said to run all the
psychological gradations between the brothers Cheeryble at one
end of the scale, and Mr. Gradgrind, Sir Gorgius Midas and Mr.
Bottles at the other.

  This individualism fostered the formulation of certain
doctrines which in one shape or another found their way into the
official political philosophy of the merchant-State. Foremost
among these were the two which the Declaration of Independence
lays down as fundamental, the doctrine of natural rights and the
doctrine of popular sovereignty. In a generation which had
exchanged the authority of a pope for the authority of a book --
or rather, the authority of unlimited private interpretation of
a book -- there was no difficulty about finding ample Scriptural
sanction for both these doctrines. The interpretation of the
Bible, like the judicial interpretation of a constitution, is
merely a process by which, as a contemporary of Bishop Butler
said, anything may be made to mean anything; and in the absence
of a coercive authority, papal, conciliar or judicial, any given
interpretation finds only such acceptance as may, for whatever
reason, be accorded it. Thus the episode of Eden, the parable of
the talents, the Apostolic injunction against being "slothful in
business," were a warrant for the Puritan doctrine of work; they
brought the sanction of economic interest into complete
agreement, uniting the religionist and the merchant-enterpriser
in the bond of a common intention. Thus, again, the view of man
as made in the image of God, made only a little lower than the
angels, the subject of so august a transaction as the Atonement,
quite corroborated the political doctrine of his endowment by
his Creator with certain rights unalienable by Church or State.
While the merchant-enterpriser might hold with Mr. Jefferson
that the truth of this political doctrine is self-evident, its
Scriptural support was yet of great value as carrying an
implication of human nature's dignity which braced his more or
less diffident and self-conscious individualism; and the
doctrine that so dignified him might easily be conceived of as
dignifying his pursuits. Indeed, the Bible's indorsement of the
doctrine of labour and the doctrine of natural rights was really
his charter for rehabilitating "trade" against the disparagement
that the regime of status had put upon it, and for investing it
with the most brilliant lustre of respectability.

  In the same way, the doctrine of popular sovereignty could be
mounted on impregnable Scriptural ground. Civil society was an
association of true believers functioning for common secular
purposes; and its right of self-government with respect to these
purposes was God-given. If on the religious side all believers
were priests, then on the secular side they were all sovereigns;
the notion of an intervening jure divino monarch was as
repugnant to Scripture as that of an intervening jure divino
pope -- witness the Israelite commonwealth upon which monarchy
was visited as explicitly a punishment for sin. Civil
legislation was supposed to interpret and particularize the laws
of God as revealed in the Bible, and its administrators were
responsible to the congregation in both its religious and
secular capacities. Where the revealed law was silent,
legislation was to be guided by its general spirit, as best this
might be determined. These principles obviously left open a
considerable area of choice; but hypothetically the range of
civil liberty and the range of religious liberty had a common
boundary.

  This religious sanction of popular sovereignty was agreeable
to the merchant-enterpriser; it fell in well with his
individualism, enhancing considerably his sense of personal
dignity and consequence. He could regard himself as by
birthright not only a free citizen of a heavenly commonwealth,
but also a free elector in an earthly commonwealth fashioned, as
nearly as might be, after the heavenly pattern. The range of
liberty permitted him in both qualities was satisfactory; he
could summon warrant of Scripture to cover his undertakings both
here and hereafter. As far as this present world's concerns
went, his doctrine of labour was Scriptural, his doctrine of
master-and-servant was Scriptural -- even bond-service, even
chattel-service was Scriptural; his doctrine of a wage-economy,
of money-lending -- again the parable of the talents -- both
were Scriptural. What especially recommended the doctrine of
popular sovereignty to him on its secular side, however, was the
immense leverage it gave him for ousting the regime of status to
make way for the regime of contract; in a word, for displacing
the feudal State and bringing in the merchant-State.

  But interesting as these two doctrines were, their actual
application was a matter of great difficulty. On the religious
side, the doctrine of natural rights had to take account of the
unorthodox. Theoretically it was easy to dispose of them. The
separatists, for example, such as those who manned the
Mayflower, had lost their natural rights in the fall of Adam,
and had never made use of the means appointed to reclaim them.
This was all very well, but the logical extension of this
principle into actual practice was a rather grave affair. There
were a good many dissenters, all told, and they were articulate
on the matter of natural rights, which made trouble; so that
when all was said and done, the doctrine came out considerably
compromised. Then, in respect of popular sovereignty, there were
the Presbyterians. Calvinism was monocratic to the core; in
fact, Presbyterianism existed side by side with episcopacy in
the Church of England in the sixteenth century, and was nudged
out only very gradually.[3]

----[3]
  During the reign of Elizabeth the Puritan contention, led by
  Cartwright, was for what amounted to a theory of jure divino
  Presbyterianism. The Establishment at large took the position
  of Archbishop Whitgift and Richard Hooker that the details of
  church polity were indifferent, and therefore properly subject
  to State regulation. The High Church doctrine of jure divino
  episcopacy was laid down later, by Whitgift's successor,
  Bancroft.Thus up to 1604 the Presbyterians were objectionable
  on secular grounds, and afterwards on both secular and
  ecclesiastical grounds.
----[3]

They were a numerous body, and in point of Scripture and history
they had a great deal to say for their position. Thus the
practical task of organizing a spiritual commonwealth had as
hard going with the logic of popular sovereignty as it had with
the logic of natural rights.

  The task of secular organization was even more troublesome. A
society organized in conformity to these two principles is
easily conceivable -- such an organization as Paine and the
Declaration contemplated, for example, arising out of social
agreement, and concerning itself only with the maintenance of
freedom and security for the individual -- but the practical
task of effecting such an organization is quite another matter.
On general grounds, doubtless, the Puritans would have found
this impracticable; if, indeed, the times are ever to be ripe
for anything of the kind, their times were certainly not. The
particular ground of difficulty, however, was that the
merchant-enterpriser did not want that form of social
organization; in fact, one can not be sure that the Puritan
religionists themselves wanted it. The root-trouble was, in
short, that there was no practicable way to avert a shattering
collision between the logic of natural rights and popular
sovereignty, and the economic law that man tends always to
satisfy his needs with the least possible exertion.

  This law governed the merchant-enterpriser in common with the
rest of mankind. He was not for an organization that should do
no more than maintain freedom and security; he was for one that
should redistribute access to the political means, and concern
itself with freedom and security only so far as would be
consistent with keeping this access open. That is to say, he was
thoroughly indisposed to the idea of government; he was quite as
strong for the idea of the State as the hierarchy and nobility
were. He was not for any essential transformation in the State's
character, but merely for a repartition of the economic
advantages that the State confers.

  Thus the merchant-polity amounted to an attempt, more or less
disingenuous, at reconciling matters which in their nature can
not be reconciled. The ideas of natural rights and popular
sovereignty were, as we have seen, highly acceptable and highly
animating to all the forces allied against the feudal idea; but
while these ideas might be easily reconcilable with a system of
simple government, such a system would not answer the purpose.
Only the State-system would do that. The problem therefore was,
how to keep these ideas well in the forefront of political
theory, and at the same time prevent their practical application
from undermining the organization of the political means. It was
a difficult problem. The best that could be done with it was by
making certain structural alterations in the State, which would
give it the appearance of expressing these ideas, without the
reality. The most important of these structural changes was that
of bringing in the so-called representative or parliamentary
system, which Puritanism introduced into the modern world, and
which has received a great deal of praise as an advance towards
democracy. This praise, however, is exaggerated. The change was
one of form only, and its bearing on democracy has been
inconsiderable.[4]

----[4]
  So were the kaleidoscopic changes that took place in France
  after the revolution of 1789. Throughout the Directorate, the
  Consulship, the Restoration, the two Empires, the three
  Republics and the Commune, the French State kept its essential
  character intact; it remained always the organization of the
  political means.
----[4]

                               II

  The migration of Englishmen to America merely transferred this
problem into another setting. The discussion of political theory
went on vigorously, but the philosophy of natural rights and
popular sovereignty came out in practice about where they had
come out in England. Here again a great deal has been made of
the democratic spirit and temper of the migrants, especially in
the case of the separatists who landed at Plymouth, but the
facts do not bear it out, except with regard to the
decentralizing congregationalist principle of church order. This
principle of lodging final authority in the smallest unit rather
than the largest -- in the local congregation rather than in a
synod or general council -- was democratic, and its
thorough-going application in a scheme of church order would
represent some actual advance towards democracy, and give some
recognition to the general philosophy of natural rights and
popular sovereignty. The Plymouth settlers did something with
this principle, actually applying it in the matter of church
order, and for this they deserve credit.[5]

----[5]
  In 1629 the Massachusetts Bay colony adopted the Plymouth
  colony's model of congregational autonomy, but finding its
  principle dangerously inconsistent with the principle of the
  State, almost immediately nullified their action; retaining,
  however, the name of Congregationalism. This mode of
  masquerade is easily recognizable as one of the modern State's
  most useful expedients for maintaining the appearance of
  things without the reality. The names of our two largest
  political parties will at once appear as a capital example.
  Within two years the Bay colony had set up a State church,
  nominally congregationalist, but actually a branch of the
  civil service, as in England.
----[5]

Applying it in the matter of civil order, however, was another
affair. It is true that the Plymouth colonists probably
contemplated something of the kind, and that for a time they
practised a sort of primitive communism. They drew up an
agreement on shipboard which may be taken at its face value as
evidence of their democratic disposition, though it was not in
any sense a "frame of government," like Penn's, or any kind of
constitutional document. Those who speak of it as our first
written constitution are considerably in advance of their text,
for it was merely an agreement to make a constitution or "frame
of government" when the settlers should have come to land and
looked the situation over. One sees that it could hardly have
been more than this -- indeed, that the proposed constitution
itself could be no more than provisional -- when it is
remembered that these migrants were not their own men. They did
not sail on their own, nor were they headed for any unpreempted
territory on which they might establish a squatter sovereignty
and set up any kind of civil order they saw fit. They were
headed for Virginia, to settle in the jurisdiction of a company
of English merchant-enterprisers, now growing shaky, and soon to
be superseded by the royal authority, and its territory
converted into a royal province. It was only by misreckonings
and the accidents of navigation that, most unfortunately for the
prospects of the colony, the settlers landed on the stern and
rockbound coast of Plymouth.

  These settlers were in most respects probably as good as the
best who ever found their way to America. They were bred of what
passed in England as "the lower orders," sober, hard-working and
capable, and their residence under Continental institutions in
Holland had given them a fund of politico-religious ideas and
habits of thought which set them considerably apart from the
rest of their countrymen. There is, however, no more than an
antiquarian interest in determining how far they were actually
possessed by those ideas. They may have contemplated a system of
complete religious and civil democracy, or they may not. They
may have found their communist practices agreeable to their
notion of a sound and just social order, or they may not. The
point is that while apparently they might be free enough to
found a church order as democratic as they chose, they were by
no means free to found a civil democracy, or anything remotely
resembling one, because they were in bondage to the will of an
English trading-company. Even their religious freedom was
permissive; the London company simply cared nothing about that.
The same considerations governed their communist practices;
whether or not these practices suited their ideas, they were
obliged to adopt them. Their agreement with the London
merchant-enterprisers bound them, in return for transportation
and outfit, to seven years' service, during which time they
should work on a system of common-land tillage, store their
produce in a common warehouse, and draw their maintenance from
these common stores. Thus whether or not they were communists in
principle, their actual practice of communism was by
prescription.

  The fundamental fact to be observed in any survey of the
American State's initial development is the one whose importance
was first remarked, I believe, by Mr. Beard; that the
trading-company -- the commercial corporation for colonization
-- was actually an autonomous State. "Like a State," says Mr.
Beard, "it had a constitution, a charter issued by the Crown...
like the State, it had a territorial basis, a grant of land
often greater in area than a score of European principalities...
it could make assessments, coin money, regulate trade, dispose
of corporate property, collect taxes, manage a treasury, and
provide for defense. Thus" -- and here is the important
observation, so important that I venture to italicize it --
"every essential element long afterward found in the government
of the American State appeared in the chartered corporation that
started English civilization in America." Generally speaking,
the system of civil order established in America was the
State-system of the "mother countries" operating over a
considerable body of water; the only thing that distinguished it
was that the exploited and dependent class was situated at an
unusual distance from the owning and exploiting class. The
headquarters of the autonomous State were one side of the
Atlantic, and its subjects on the other.

  This separation gave rise to administrative difficulties of
one kind and another; and to obviate the -- perhaps for other
reasons as well -- one English company, the Massachusetts Bay
Company, moved over bodily in 1630, bringing their charter and
most of their stockholders with them, thus setting up an actual
autonomous State in America. The thing to be observed about this
is that the merchant-State was set up complete in New England
long before it was set up in Old England. Most of the English
immigrants to Massachusetts came over between 1630 and 1640; and
in this period the English merchant-State was only at the
beginning of its hardest struggles for supremacy. James I died
in 1625, and his successor, Charles I, continued his absolutist
regime. From 1629, the year in which the Bay Company was
chartered, to 1640, when the Long Parliament was called, he
ruled without a parliament, effectively suppressing what few
vestiges of liberty had survived the Tudor and Jacobean
tyrannies; and during these eleven years the prospects of the
English merchant-State were at their lowest.[6]

----[6]
  Probably it was a forecast of this state of things, as much as
  the greater convenience of administration, that caused the Bay
  Company to move over to Massachusetts, bag and baggage, in the
  year following the issuance of their charter.
----[6]

It still had to face the distractions of the Civil War, the
retarding anomalies of the Commonwealth, the Restoration, and
the recurrence of tyrannical absolutism under James II, before
it succeeded in establishing itself firmly through the
revolution of 1688.

  On the other hand, the leaders of the Bay Colony were free
from the first to establish a State-policy of their own
devising, and to set up a State-structure which should express
that policy without compromise. There was no competing policy to
extinguish, no rival structure to refashion. Thus the
merchant-State came into being in a clear field a full
half-century before it attained supremacy in England.
Competition of any kind, or the possibility of competition, it
has never had. A point of greatest importance to remember is
that the merchant-State is the only form of State that ever
existed in America. Whether under the rule of a trading company
or a provincial governor or a republican representative
legislature, Americans have never known any other form of the
State. In this respect the Massachusetts Bay colony is
differentiated only as being the first autonomous State ever
established in America, and as furnishing the most compete and
convenient example for purposes of study. In principle it was
not differentiated. The State in New England, Virginia,
Maryland, the Jerseys, New York, Connecticut, everywhere, was
purely a class-State, with control of the political means
reposing in the hands of what we now style, in a general way,
the "business-man."

  In the eleven years of Charles's tyrannical absolutism,
English immigrants came over to join the Bay colony, at the rate
of about two thousand a year. No doubt at the outset some of the
colonists had the idea of becoming agricultural specialists, as
in Virginia, and of maintaining certain vestiges, or rather
imitations, of semi-feudal social practice, such as were
possible under that form of industry when operated by a
slave-economy or a tenant-economy. This, however, proved
impracticable; the climate and soil of New England were against
it. A tenant-economy was precarious, for rather than work for a
master, the immigrant agriculturalist naturally preferred to
push out into unpreempted land, and work for himself; in other
words, as Turgot, Marx, Hertzka, and many others have shown, he
could not be exploited until he had been expropriated from the
land. The long and hard winters took the profit out of
slave-labour in agriculture. The Bay colonists experimented with
it, however, even attempting to enslave the Indians, which they
found could not be done, for the reasons that I have already
noticed. In default of this, the colonists carried out the
primitive technique by resorting to extermination, their
ruthless ferocity being equalled only by that of the Virginia
colonists.[7]

----[7]
  Thomas Robinson Hazard, the Rhode Island Quaker, in his
  delightful Jonnycake Papers, says that the Great Swamp Fight
  of 1675 was "instigated against the rightful owners of the
  soil, solely by the cussed godly Puritans of Massachusetts,
  and their hell-hound allies, the Presbyterians of Connecticut;
  whom, though charity is my specialty, I can never think of
  without feeling as all good Rhode Islanders should,... and as
  old Miss Hazard did when in like vein she thanked God in the
  Conanicut prayer-meeting that she could hold malice forty
  years." The Rhode Island settlers dealt with the Indians for
  rights in land, and made friends with them.
----[7]

They held some slaves, and did a great deal of slave-trading;
but in the main, they became at the outset a race of small
freeholding farmers, shipbuilders, navigators, maritime
enterprisers in fish, whales, molasses, rum, and miscellaneous
cargoes; and presently, moneylenders. Their remarkable success
in these pursuits is well known; it is worth mention here in
order to account for many of the complications and collisions of
interest subsequently ensuing upon the merchant-State's
fundamental doctrine that the primary function of government is
not to maintain freedom and security, but to "help business."

                               III

  One examines the American merchant-State in vain for any
suggestion of the philosophy of natural rights and popular
sovereignty. The company-system and the provincial system made
no place for it, and the one autonomous State was
uncompromisingly against it. The Bay Company brought over their
charter to serve as the constitution of the new colony, and
under its provisions the form of the State was that of an
uncommonly small and close oligarchy. The right to vote was
vested only in shareholding members, or "freemen" of the
corporation, on the stark State principle laid down many years
later by John Jay, that "those who own the country should govern
the country." At the end of a year, the Bay colony comprised
perhaps about two thousand persons; and of these, certainly not
twenty, probably not more than a dozen, had anything whatever to
say about its government. This small group constituted itself as
a sort of directorate or council, appointing its own executive
body, which consisted of a governor, a lieutenant-governor, and
a half-dozen or more magistrates. These officials had no
responsibility to the community at large, but only to the
directorate. By the terms of the charter, the directorate was
self-perpetuating. It was permitted to fill vacancies and add to
its numbers as it saw fit; and in so doing it followed a policy
similar to that which was subsequently recommended by Alexander
Hamilton, of admitting only such well-to-do and influential
persons as could be trusted to sustain a solid front against
anything savouring of popular sovereignty.

  Historians have very properly made a great deal of the
influence of Calvinist theology in bracing the strongly
anti-democratic attitude of the Bay Company. The story is
readable and interesting -- often amusing -- yet the gist of it
is so simple that it can be perceived at once. The company's
principle of action was in this respect the one that in like
circumstances has for a dozen centuries invariably motivated the
State. The Marxian dictum that "religion is the opiate of the
people" is either an ignorant or a slovenly confusion of terms,
which can not be too strongly reprehended. Religion was never
that, nor will it ever be; but organized Christianity, which is
by no means the same thing as religion, has been the opiate of
the people ever since the beginning of the fourth century, and
never has this opiate been employed for political purposes more
skilfully than it was by the Massachusetts Bay oligarchy.

  In the year 311 the Roman emperor Constantine issued an edict
of toleration in favour of organized Christianity. He patronized
the new cult heavily, giving it rich presents, and even adopted
the labarum as his standard, which was a most distinguished
gesture, and cost nothing; the story of the heavenly sign
appearing before his crucial battle against Maxentius may quite
safely be put down beside that of the apparitions seen before
the battle of the Marne. He never joined the Church, however,
and the tradition that he was converted to Christianity is open
to great doubt. The point of all this is that circumstances had
by that time made Christianity a considerable figure; it had
survived contumely and persecution, and had become a social
influence which Constantine saw was destined to reach far enough
to make it worth courting. The Church could be made a most
effective tool of the State, and only a very moderate amount of
statesmanship was needed to discern the right way of bringing
this about. The understanding, undoubtedly tacit, was based on a
simple quid pro quo; in exchange for imperial recognition and
patronage, and endowments enough to keep up to the requirements
of a high official respectability, the Church should quit its
disagreeable habit of criticizing the course of politics; and in
particular, it should abstain from unfavourable comment on the
State's administration of the political means.

  These are the unvarying terms -- again I say, undoubtedly
tacit, as it is seldom necessary to stipulate against biting the
hand by which one is fed -- of every understanding that has been
struck since Constantine's day, between organized Christianity
and the State. They were the terms of the understanding struck
in the Germanies and in England at the Reformation. The petty
German principality had its State Church as it had its State
theatre; and in England, Henry VIII set up the Church in its
present status as an arm of the civil service, like the
Post-office. The fundamental understanding in all cases was that
the Church should not interfere with or disparage the
organization of the political means; and in practice it
naturally followed that the Church would go further, and quite
regularly abet this organization to the best of its ability.

  The merchant-State in America came to this understanding with
organized Christianity. In the Bay colony the Church became in
1638 an established subsidiary of the State,[8]

----[8]
  Mr. Parrington (Main Currents in American Thought, vol. I, p.
  24) cites the successive steps leading up to this, as follows:
  the law of 1631, restricting the franchise to Church members;
  of 1635, obliging all persons to attend Church services; and
  of 1636, which established a virtual State monopoly, by
  requiring consent of both Church and State authority before a
  new church could be set up. Roger Williams observed acutely
  that a State establishment of organized Christianity is "a
  politic invention of man to maintain the civil State."
----[8]

supported by taxation; it maintained a State creed, promulgated
in 1647. In some other colonies also, as for example, in
Virginia, the Church was a branch of the State service, and
where it was not actually established as such, the same
understanding was reached by other means, quite as satisfactory.
Indeed the merchant-State both in England and America soon
became lukewarm towards the idea of an Establishment, perceiving
that the same modus vivendi could be almost as easily arrived at
under voluntaryism, and that the latter had the advantage of
satisfying practically all modes of credal and ceremonial
preference, thus releasing the State from the troublesome and
profitless business of interference in disputes over matters of
doctrine and Church order.

  Voluntaryism pure and simple was set up in Rhode Island by
Roger Williams, John Clarke, and their associates who were
banished from the Bay colony almost exactly three hundred years
ago, in 1636. This group of exiles is commonly regarded as
having founded a society on the philosophy of natural rights and
popular sovereignty in respect of both Church order and civil
order, and as having launched an experiment in democracy. This,
however, is an exaggeration. The leaders of the group were
undoubtedly in sight of this philosophy, and as far as Church
order is concerned, their practice was conformable to it. On the
civil side, the most that can be said is that their practice was
conformable in so far as they knew how to make it so; and one
says this much only by a very considerable concession. The least
that can be said, on the other hand, is that their practice was
for a time greatly in advance of the practice prevailing in
other colonies -- so far in advance that Rhode Island was in
great disrepute with its neighbours in Massachusetts and
Connecticut, who diligently disseminated the tale of its evil
fame throughout the land, with the customary exaggerations and
embellishments. Nevertheless, through acceptance of the State
system of land-tenure, the political structure of Rhode Island
was a State-structure from the outset, contemplating as it did
the stratification of society into an owning and exploiting
class and a propertyless dependent class. Williams's theory of
the State was that of social compact arrived at among equals,
but equality did not exist in Rhode Island; the actual outcome
was a pure class-State.

  In the spring of 1638, Williams acquired about twenty square
miles of land by gift from two Indian sachems, in addition to
some he had bought from them two years before. In October he
formed a "proprietary" of purchasers who bought
twelve-thirteenths of the Indian grant. Bicknell, in his history
of Rhode Island, cites a letter written by Williams to the
deputy-governor of the Bay colony, which says frankly that the
plan of this proprietary contemplated the creation of two
classes of citizens, one consisting of landholding heads of
families, and the other, of "young men, single persons" who were
a landless tenantry, and as Bicknell says, "had no voice or vote
as to the officers of the community, or the laws which they were
called upon to obey." Thus the civil order in Rhode Island was
essentially a pure State order, as much so as the civil order of
the Bay colony, or any other in America; and in fact the
landed-property franchise lasted uncommonly long in Rhode
Island, existing there for some time after it had been given up
in most other quarters of America.[9]

----[9]
  Bicknell says that the formation of Williams's proprietary was
  a "landholding, land-jobbing, land-selling scheme, with no
  moral, social, civil, educational or religious end in view";
  and his distinction of the early land-allotments on the site
  where the city of Providence now stands, makes it pretty clear
  that "the first years of Providence are consumed in a greedy
  scramble for land." Bicknell is not precisely an unfriendly
  witness towards Williams, though his history is avowedly ex
  parte for the thesis that the true expounder of civil freedom
  in Rhode Island was not Williams, but Clarke. This contention
  is immaterial to the present purpose, however, for the State
  system of land-tenure prevailed in Clarke's settlements on
  Aquidneck as it did in Williams's settlements farther up the
  bay.
----[9]

  By way of summing up, it is enough to say that nowhere in the
American colonial civil order was there ever the trace of a
democracy. The political structure was always that of the
merchant-State; Americans have never known any other.
Furthermore, the philosophy of natural rights and popular
sovereignty was never once exhibited anywhere in American
political practice during the colonial period, from the first
settlement in 1607 down to the revolution of 1776.


=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

                                4

  AFTER conquest and confiscation have been effected, and the
State set up, its first concern is with the land. The State
assumes the right of eminent domain over its territorial basis,
whereby every landholder becomes in theory a tenant of the
State. In its capacity as ultimate landlord, the State
distributes the land among its beneficiaries on its own terms. A
point to be observed in passing is that by the State-system of
land-tenure each original transaction confers two distinct
monopolies, entirely different in their nature, inasmuch as one
concerns the right to labour-made property, and the other
concerns the right to purely law-made property. The one is a
monopoly of the use-value of land; and the other, a monopoly of
the economic rent of land. The first gives the right to keep
other persons from using the land in question, or trespassing on
it, and the right to exclusive possession of values accruing
from the application of labour to it; values, that is, which are
produced by exercise of the economic means upon the particular
property in question. Monopoly of economic rent, on the other
hand, gives the exclusive right to values accruing from the
desire of other persons to possess that property; values which
take their rise irrespective of any exercise of the economic
means on the part of the landholder.[1]

----[1]
  The economic rent of the Trinity Church estate in New York
  City, for instance, would be as high as it is now, even if the
  holders had never done a stroke of work on the property.
  Landowners who are holding a property "for a rise" usually
  leave it idle, or improve it only to the extent necessary to
  clear its taxes; the type of building commonly called a
  "taxpayer" is a familiar sight everywhere. Twenty-five years
  ago a member of the New York City Tax Commission told me that
  by careful estimate there was almost enough vacant land within
  the city limits to feed the population, assuming that all of
  it were arable and put under intensive cultivation!
----[1]

  Economic rent arises when for whatsoever reason, two or more
persons compete for the possession of a piece of land, and it
increases directly according to the number of persons competing.
The whole of Manhattan Island was bought originally by a handful
of Hollanders from a handful of Indians for twenty-four dollars
worth of trinkets. The subsequent "rise in land-values," as we
call it, was brought about by the steady influx of population
and the consequent high competition for portions of the island's
surface; and these ensuing values were monopolized by the
holders. They grew to an enormous size, and the holders profited
accordingly; the Astor, Wendel, and Trinity Church estates have
always served as classical examples for study of the
State-system of land-tenure.

  Bearing in mind that the State is the organization of the
political means -- that its primary intention is to enable the
economic exploitation of one class by another -- we see that it
has always acted on the principle already cited, that
expropriation must precede exploitation. There is no other way
to make the political means effective. The first postulate of
fundamental economics is that man is a land-animal, deriving his
subsistence wholly from the land.[2]

----[2]
  As a technical term in economics, land includes all natural
  resources, earth, air, water, sunshine, timber and minerals in
  situ, etc. Failure to understand this use of the term has
  seriously misled some writers, notably Count Tolstoy.
----[2]

His entire wealth is produced by the application of labour and
capital to land; no form of wealth known to man can be produced
in any other way. Hence, if his free access to land be shut off
by legal preemption, he can apply his capital only with the
landholder's consent, and on the landholder's terms; in other
words, it is at this point, and at this point only, that
exploitation becomes practicable.[3]

----[3]
  Hence there is actually no such thing as a "labour-problem,"
  for no encroachment on the rights of either labour or capital
  can possibly take place until all natural resources within
  reach have been preempted. What we call the "problem of the
  unemployed" is in no sense a problem, but a direct consequence
  of State-created monopoly.
----[3]

Therefore the first concern of the State must be invariably, as
we find it invariably is, with its policy of land-tenure.

  I state these elementary matters as briefly as I can; the
reader may easily find a full exposition of them elsewhere.[4]

----[4]
  For fairly obvious reasons they have no place in the
  conventional courses that are followed in our schools and
  colleges.
----[4]

I am here concerned only to show why the State system of
land-tenure came into being, and why its maintenance is
necessary to the State's existence. If this system were broken
up, obviously the reason for the State's existence would
disappear, and the State itself would disappear with it.[5]

----[5]
  The French school of physiocrats, led by Quesnay, du Pont de
  Nemours, Turgot, Gournay and le Trosne -- usually regarded as
  the founders of the science of political economy -- broached
  the idea of destroying this system by the confiscation of
  economic rent; and this idea was worked out in detail some
  years ago in America by Henry George. None of these writers,
  however, seemed to be aware of the effect that their plan
  would produce upon the State itself. Collectivism, on the
  other hand, proposes immeasurably to strengthen and entrench
  the State by confiscation of the use-value as well as the
  rental-value of land, doing away with private proprietorship
  in either.
----[5]

With this in mind, it is interesting to observe that although
all our public policies would seem to be in process of
exhaustive review, no publicist has anything to say about the
State system of land-tenure. This is no doubt the best evidence
of its importance.[6]

----[6]
  If one were not aware of the highly explosive character of
  this subject, it would be almost incredible that until three
  years ago, no one has ever presumed to write a history of
  land-speculation in America. In 1932, the firm of Harpers
  published an excellent work by Professor Sakolski, under the
  frivolous catch-penny title of The Great American Land Bubble.
  I do not believe that anyone can have a competent
  understanding of our history or of the character of our
  people, without hard study of this book. It does not pretend
  to be more than a preliminary approach to the subject, a sort
  of pathbreaker for the exhaustive treatise which someone,
  preferably Professor Sakolski himself, should be undertaking;
  but for what it is, nothing could be better. I am making
  liberal use of it throughout this section.
----[6]

  Under the feudal State there was no great amount of traffic in
land. When William, for example, set up the Norman State in
England after conquest and confiscation in 1066-76, his
associated banditti, among whom he parcelled out the confiscated
territory, did nothing to speak of in the way of developing
their holdings, and did not contemplate gain from the increment
of rental-values. In fact, economic rent hardly existed; their
fellow-beneficiaries were not in the market to any great extent,
and the dispossessed population did not represent any economic
demand. The feudal regime was a regime of status, under which
landed estates yielded hardly any rental-value, and only a
moderate use-value, but carried an enormous insignia-value. Land
was regarded more as a badge of nobility than an active asset;
its possession marked a man as belonging to the exploiting
class, and the size of his holdings seems to have counted for
more than the number of his exploitable dependents.[7]

----[7]
  Regard for this insignia-value or token-value of land has
  shown an interesting persistence. The rise of the
  merchant-State, supplanting the regime of status by the regime
  of contract, opened the way for men of all sorts and
  conditions to climb into the exploiting class; and the new
  recruits have usually shown a hankering for the old
  distinguishing sign of their having done so, even though the
  rise in rental-values has made the gratification of this
  desire progressively costly.
----[7]

The encroachments of the merchant-State, however, brought about
a change in these circumstances. The importance of rental-values
was recognized, and speculative trading in land became general.

  Hence, in a study of the merchant-State as it appeared
full-blown in America, it is a point of utmost importance to
remember that from the time of the first colonial settlement to
the present day, America has been regarded as a practically
limitless field for speculation in rental-values.[8]

----[8]
  If our geographical development had been determined in a
  natural way, by the demands of speculation, our western
  frontier would not yet be anywhere near the Mississippi River.
  Rhode Island is the most thickly-populated member of the
  Union, yet one may drive from one end of it to the other on
  one of its "through" highways, and see hardly a sign of human
  occupancy. All discussions of "over-population" from Malthus
  down, are based on the premise of legal occupancy, and are
  therefore utterly incompetent and worthless. Oppenheimer's
  calculation, made in 1912, to which I have already referred,
  shows that if legal occupation were abolished, every family of
  five persons could possess nearly twenty acres of land, and
  still leave about two-thirds of the planet unoccupied. Henry
  George's examination of Malthus's theory of population is well
  known, or at least, easily available. It is perhaps worth
  mention in passing that exaggerated rental-values are
  responsible for the perennial troubles of the American
  single-crop farmer. Curiously, one finds this fact set forth
  in the report of a farm-survey, published by the Department of
  Agriculture about fifty years ago.
----[8]

One may say at a safe venture that every colonial enterpriser
and proprietor after Raleigh's time understood economic rent and
the conditions necessary to enhance it. The Swedish, Dutch and
British trading-companies understood this; Endicott and
Winthrop, of the autonomous merchant-State on the Bay,
understood it; so did Penn and the Calverts; so did the
Carolinian proprietors, to whom Charles II granted a lordly belt
of territory south of Virginia, reaching from the Atlantic to
the Pacific; and as we have seen, Roger Williams and Clarke
understood it perfectly. Indeed, land-speculation may be put
down as the first major industry established in colonial
America. Professor Sakolski calls attention to the fact that it
was flourishing in the South before the commercial importance of
either negroes or tobacco was recognized. These two staples came
fully into their own about 1670 -- tobacco perhaps a little
earlier, but not much -- and before that, England and Europe had
been well covered by a lively propaganda of Southern
landholders, advertising for settlers.[9]

----[9]
  Mr. Chinard, professor in the Faculty of Literature at Johns
  Hopkins, has lately published a translation of a little book,
  hardly more than a pamphlet, written in 1686 by the Huguenot
  refugee Durand, giving a description of Virginia for the
  information of his fellow-exiles. It strikes a modern reader
  as being very favourable to Virginia, and one is amused to
  read that the landholders who had entertained Durand with an
  eye to business, thought he had not laid it on half thick
  enough, and were much disgusted. The book is delightfully
  interesting, and well worth owning.
----[9]

  Mr. Sakolski makes it clear that very few original
enterprisers in American rental-values ever got much profit out
of their ventures. This is worth remarking here as enforcing the
point that what gives rise to economic rent is the presence of a
population engaged in a settled exercise of the economic means,
or as we commonly put it, "working for a living" -- or again, in
technical terms, applying labour and capital to natural
resources for the production of wealth. It was no doubt a very
fine dignified thing for Carteret, Berkeley, and their associate
nobility to be the owners of a province as large as the
Carolinas, but if no population were settled there, producing
wealth by exercise of the economic means, obviously not a foot
of it would bear a pennyworth of rental-value, and the
proprietors' chance of exercising the political means would
therefore be precisely nil. Proprietors who made the most
profitable exercise of the political means have been those -- or
rather, speaking strictly, the heirs of those -- like the
Brevoorts, Wendels, Whitneys, Astors, and Goelets, who owned
land in an actual or prospective urban centre, and held it as an
investment rather than for speculation.

  The lure of the political means in America, however, gave rise
to a state of mind which may profitably be examined. Under the
feudal State, living by the political means was enabled only by
the accident of birth, or in some special cases by the accident
of personal favour. Persons outside these categories of accident
had no chance whatever to live otherwise than by the economic
means. No matter how much they may have wished to exercise the
political means, or how greatly they may have envied the
privileged few who could exercise it, they were unable to do so;
the feudal regime was strictly one of status. Under the
merchant-State, on the contrary, the political means was open to
anyone, irrespective of birth or position, who had the sagacity
and determination necessary to get at it. In this respect,
America appeared as a field of unlimited opportunity. The effect
of this was to produce a race of people whose master-concern was
to avail themselves of the opportunity. They had but the one
spring of action, which was the determination to abandon the
economic means as soon as they could, and at any sacrifice of
conscience or character, and live by the political means. From
the beginning, this determination has been universal, amounting
to monomania.[10]

----[10]
  It was the ground of Chevalier's observation that Americans
  had "the morale of an army on the march," and of his equally
  notable observations on the supreme rule of expediency in
  America.
----[10]

We need not concern ourselves here with the effect upon the
general balance of advantage produced by supplanting the feudal
State by the merchant-State; we may observe only that certain
virtues and integrities were bred by the regime of status, to
which the regime of contract appears to be inimical, even
destructive. Vestiges of them persist among peoples who have had
a long experience of the regime of status, but in America, which
has had no such experience, they do not appear. What the
compensations for their absence may be, or whether they may be
regarded as adequate, I repeat, need not concern us; we remark
only the simple fact that they have not struck root in the
constitution of the American character at large, and apparently
can not do so.

                               II

  It was said at the time, I believe, that the actual causes of
the colonial revolution of 1776 would never be known. The causes
assigned by our schoolbooks may be dismissed as trivial; the
various partisan and propagandist views of that struggle and its
origins may be put down as incompetent. Great evidential value
may be attached to the long line of adverse commercial
legislation laid down by the British State from 1651 onward,
especially to that portion of it which was enacted after the
merchant-State established itself firmly in England in
consequence of the events of 1688. This legislation included the
Navigation Acts, the Trade Acts, acts regulating the colonial
currency, the act of 1752 regulating the process of levy and
distress, and the procedures leading up to the establishment of
the Board of Trade in 1696.[11]

----[11]
  For a most admirable discussion of these measures and their
  consequences, cf. Beard, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 191-220
----[11]

These directly affected the industrial and commercial interests
in the colonies, though just how seriously is perhaps an open
question -- enough at any rate, beyond doubt, to provoke deep
resentment.

  Over and above these, however, if the reader will put himself
back into the ruling passion of the time, he will at once
appreciate the import of two matters which have for some reason
escaped the attention of historians. The first of these is the
attempt of the British State to limit the exercise of the
political means in respect of rental-values.[12]

----[12]
  In principle, this had been done before; for example, some of
  the early royal land-grants reserved mineral-rights and
  timber-rights to the Crown. The Dutch State reserved the
  rights to furs and pelts. Actually, however, these
  restrictions did not amount to much, and were not felt as a
  general grievance, for these resources had been but little
  explored.
----[12]

In 1763 it forbade the colonists to take up lands lying westward
of the source of any river flowing through the Atlantic
seaboard. The dead-line thus established ran so as to cut off
from preemption about half of Pennsylvania and half of Virginia
and everything to the west thereof. This was serious. With the
mania for speculation running as high as it did, with the
consciousness of opportunity, real or fancied, having become so
acute and so general, this ruling affected everybody. One can
get some idea of its effect by imagining the state of mind of
our people at large if stock-gambling had suddenly been outlawed
at the beginning of the last great boom in Wall Street a few
years ago.

  For by this time the colonists had begun to be faintly aware
of the illimitable resources of the country lying westward; they
had learned just enough about them to fire their imagination and
their avarice to a white heat. The seaboard had been pretty well
taken up, the freeholding farmer had been pushed back farther
and farther, population was coming in steadily, the maritime
towns were growing. Under these conditions, "western lands" had
become a centre of attraction. Rental-values depended on
population, the population was bound to expand, and the one
general direction in which it could expand was westward, where
lay an immense and incalculably rich domain waiting for
preemption. What could be more natural than that the colonists
should itch to get their hands on this territory, and exploit it
for themselves alone, and on their own terms, without risk of
arbitrary interference by the British State? -- and this of
necessity meant political independence. It takes no great stress
of imagination to see that anyone in those circumstances would
have felt that way, and that colonial resentment against the
arbitrary limitation which the edict of 1763 put upon the
political means must therefore have been great.

  The actual state of land-speculation during the colonial
period will give a fair idea of the probabilities in the case.
Most of it was done on the company-system; a number of
adventurers would unite, secure a grant of land, survey it, and
then sell it off as speedily as they could. Their aim was a
quick turnover; they did not, as a rule, contemplate holding the
land, much less settling it -- in short, their ventures were a
pure gamble in rental-values.[13]

----[13]
  There were a few exceptions, but not many; notably in the case
  of the Wadsworth properties in Western New York, which were
  held as an investment and leased out on a rental-basis. In
  one, at lease, of General Washington's operations, it appears
  that he also had this method in view. In 1773 he published an
  advertisement in a Baltimore newspaper, stating that he had
  secured a grant of about twenty thousand acres on the Ohio and
  Kanawha rivers, which he proposed to open to settlers on a
  rental-basis.
----[13]

Among these pre-revolutionary enterprises was the Ohio company,
formed in 1748 with a grant of half a million acres; the Loyal
Company, which like the Ohio Company, was composed of
Virginians; the Transylvania, the Vandalia, Scioto, Indiana,
Wabash, Illinois, Susquehanna, and others whose holdings were
smaller.[14]

----[14]
  Sakolski, op. cit., ch. I.
----[14]

It is interesting to observe the names of persons concerned in
these undertakings; one can not escape the significance of this
connexion in view of their attitude towards the revolution, and
their subsequent career as statesmen and patriots. For example,
aside from his individual ventures, General Washington was a
member of the Ohio Company, and a prime mover in organizing the
Mississippi Company. He also conceived the scheme of the Potomac
Company, which was designed to raise the rental-value of western
holdings by affording an outlet for their produce by canal and
portage to the Potomac River, and thence to the seaboard. This
enterprise determined the establishment of the national capital
in its present most ineligible situation, for the proposed
terminus of the canal was at that point. Washington picked up
some lots in the city that bears his name, but in common with
other early speculators, he did not make much money out of them;
they were appraised at about $20,000 when he died.

  Patrick Henry was an inveterate and voracious engrosser of
land lying beyond the dead-line set by the British State; later
he was heavily involved in the affairs of one of the notorious
Yazoo companies, operating in Georgia. He seems to have been
most unscrupulous. His company's holdings in Georgia, amounting
to more than ten million acres, were to be paid for in Georgia
scrip, which was much depreciated. Henry bought up all these
certificates that he could get his hands on, at ten cents on the
dollar, and made a great profit on them by their rise in value
when Hamilton put through his measure for having the central
government assume the debts they represented. Undoubtedly it was
this trait of unrestrained avarice which earned him the dislike
of Mr. Jefferson, who said, rather contemptuously, that he was
"insatiable in money."[15]

----[15]
  It is an odd fact that among the most eminent names of the
  period, almost the only ones unconnected with land-grabbing or
  land-jobbing, are those of the two great antagonists, Thomas
  Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Mr. Jefferson had a
  gentleman's distaste for profiting by any form of the
  political means; he never even went so far as to patent one of
  his many useful inventions. Hamilton seems to have cared
  nothing for money. His measures made many rich, but he never
  sought anything from them for himself. In general, he appears
  to have had few scruples, yet amidst the riot of greed and
  rascality which he did most to promote, he walked worthily.
  Even his professional fees as a lawyer were absurdly small,
  and he remained quite poor all his life.
----[15]

  Benjamin Franklin's thrifty mind turned cordially to the
project of the Vandalia Company, and he acted successfully as
promoter for it in England in 1766. Timothy Pickering, who was
Secretary of State under Washington and John Adams, went on
record in 1796 that "all I am now worth was gained by
speculations in land." Silas Deane, emissary of the Continental
Congress in France, was interested in the Illinois and Wabash
Companies, as was Robert Morris, who managed the revolution's
finances; as was also James Wilson, who became a justice of the
Supreme Court and a mighty man in post-revolutionary
land-grabbing. Wolcott of Connecticut, and Stiles, president of
Yale College, held stock in the Susquehanna Company; so did
Peletiah Webster, Ethan Allen, and Jonathan Trumbull, the
"Brother Jonathan," whose name was long a sobriquet for the
typical American, and is still sometimes so used. James Duane,
the first mayor of New York City, carried on some quite
considerable speculative undertakings; and however indisposed
one may feel towards entertaining the fact, so did the "Father
of the Revolution" himself -- Samuel Adams.

  A mere common-sense view of the situation would indicate that
the British State's interference with a free exercise of the
political means was at least as great an incitement to
revolution as its interference, through the Navigation Acts, and
the Trade Acts, with a free exercise of the economic means. In
the nature of things it would be a greater incitement, both
because it affected a more numerous class of persons, and
because speculation in land-values represented much easier
money. Allied with this is the second matter which seems to me
deserving of notice, and which has never been properly reckoned
with, as far as I know, in studies of the period.

  It would seem the most natural thing in the world for the
colonists to perceive that independence would not only give
freer access to this one mode of the political means, but that
it would also open access to other modes which the colonial
status made unavailable. The merchant-State existed in the royal
provinces complete in structure, but not in function; it did not
give access to all the modes of economic exploitation. The
advantages of a State which should be wholly autonomous in this
respect must have been clear to the colonists, and must have
moved them strongly towards the project of establishing one.

  Again it is purely a common-sense view of the circumstances
that leads to this conclusion. The merchant-State in England had
emerged triumphant from conflict, and the colonists had plenty
of chance to see what it could do in the way of distributing the
various means of economic exploitation, and its method of doing
it. For instance, certain English concerns were in the carrying
trade between England and America, for which other English
concerns built ships. Americans could compete in both these
lines of business. If they did so, the carrying-charges would be
regulated by the terms of this competition; if not, they would
be regulated by monopoly, or, in our historic phrase, they could
be set as high as the traffic would bear. English carriers and
shipbuilders made common cause, approached the State and asked
it to intervene, which it did by forbidding the colonists to
ship goods on any but English-built and English-operated ships.
Since freight-charges are a factor in prices, the effect of this
intervention was to enable British shipowners to pocket the
difference between monopoly-rates and competitive rates; to
enable them, that is, to exploit the consumer by employing the
political means.[16]

----[16]
  Raw colonial exports were processed in England, and reexported
  to the colonies at prices enhanced in this way, thus making
  the political means effective on the colonists both coming and
  going.
----[16]

Similar interventions were made at the instance of cutlers,
nailmakers, hatters, steelmakers, etc.

  These interventions took the form of simple prohibition.
Another mode of intervention appeared in the customs-duties laid
by the British State on foreign sugar and molasses.[17]

----[17]
  Beard, op. cit., vol. I., p. 195, cites the observation
  current in England at the time, that seventy-three members of
  the Parliament that imposed this tariff were interested in
  West Indian sugar-plantations.
----[17]

We all now know pretty well, probably, that the primary reason
for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic
consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery.[18]

----[18]
  It must be observed, however, that free trade is impractical
  so long as land is kept out of free competition with industry
  in the labour-market. Discussions of the rival policies of
  free trade and protection invariably leave this limitation out
  of account, and are therefore nugatory. Holland and England,
  commonly spoken of as free-trade countries, were never really
  such; they had only so much freedom of trade as was consistent
  with their special economic requirements. American
  free-traders of the last century, such as Sumner and Godkin,
  were not really free-traders; they were never able -- or
  willing -- to entertain the crucial question why, if free
  trade is a good thing, the conditions of labour were no better
  in free-trade England than, for instance, in protectionist
  Germany, but were in fact worse. The answer is, of course,
  that England had no unpreempted land to absorb displaced
  labour, or to stand in continuous competition with industry
  for labour.
----[18]

All the reasons regularly assigned are debatable; this one is
not, hence propagandists and lobbyists never mention it. The
colonists were well aware of this reason, and the best evidence
that they were aware of it is that long before the Union was
established, the merchant-enterprisers and industrialists were
ready and waiting to set upon the new-formed administration with
an organized demand for a tariff.

  It is clear that while in the nature of things the British
State's interventions upon the economic means would stir up
great resentment among the interests directly concerned, they
would have another effect fully as significant, if not more so,
in causing those interests to look favourably on the idea of
political independence. They could hardly have helped seeing the
positive as well as the negative advantages that would accrue
from setting up a State of their own, which they might bend to
their own purposes. It takes no great amount of imagination to
reconstruct the vision that appeared before them of a
merchant-State clothed with the full powers of intervention and
discrimination, a State which should first and last "help
business," and which should be administered by persons of actual
interest like to their own. It is hardly presumable that the
colonists generally were not intelligent enough to see this
vision, or that they were not resolute enough to risk the chance
of realizing it when the time could be made ripe; as it was, the
time was ripened almost before it was ready.[19]

----[19]
  The immense amount of labour involved in getting the
  revolution going, and keeping it going, is not as yet exactly
  a commonplace of American history, but it has begun to be
  pretty well understood, and the various myths about it have
  been exploded by the researches of disinterested historians.
----[19]

We can discern a distinct line of common purpose uniting the
interests of the actual or potential speculator in rental-values
-- uniting the Hancocks, Gores, Otises, with the Henrys, Lees
Wolcotts, Trumbulls -- and leading directly towards the goal of
political independence.

  The main conclusion, however, towards which these observations
tend, is that one general frame of mind existed among the
colonists with reference to the nature and primary function of
the State. This frame of mind was not peculiar to them; they
shared it with the beneficiaries of the merchant-State in
England, and with those of the feudal State as far back as the
State's history can be traced. Voltaire, surveying the debris of
the feudal State, said that in essence the State is "a device
for taking money out of one set of pockets and putting it into
another." The beneficiaries of the feudal State had precisely
this view, and they bequeathed it unchanged and unmodified to
the actual and potential beneficiaries of the merchant-State.
The colonists regarded the State primarily as an instrument
whereby one might help oneself and hurt others; that is to say,
first and foremost they regarded it as the organization of the
political means. No other view of the State was ever held in
colonial America. Romance and poetry were brought to bear on the
subject in the customary way; glamorous myths about it were
propagated with the customary intent; but when all came to all,
nowhere in colonial America were actual practical relations with
the State ever determined by any other view than this.[20]

----[20]
  The influence of this view upon the rise of nationalism and
  the maintenance of the national spirit in the modern world,
  now that the merchant-State has so generally superseded the
  feudal State, may be perceived at once. I do not think it has
  ever been thoroughly discussed, or that the sentiment of
  patriotism has ever been thoroughly examined for traces of
  this view, though one might suppose that such a work would be
  extremely useful.
----[20]

                               III

  The charter of the American revolution was the Declaration of
Independence, which took its stand on the double theses of
"unalienable" natural rights and popular sovereignty. We have
seen that these doctrines were theoretically, or as politicians
say, "in principle," congenial to the spirit of the English
merchant-enterpriser, and we may see that in the nature of
things they would be even more agreeable to the spirit of all
classes in American society. A thin and scattered population
with a whole wide world before it, with a vast territory full of
rich resources which anyone might take a hand at preempting and
exploiting, would be strongly on the side of natural rights, as
the colonists were from the beginning; and political
independence would confirm it in that position. These
circumstances would stiffen the American merchant-enterpriser,
agrarian, forestaller and industrialist alike in a jealous,
uncompromising and assertive economic individualism.

  So also with the sister doctrine of popular sovereignty. The
colonists had been through a long and vexatious experience of
State interventions which limited their use of both the
political and economic means. They had also been given plenty of
opportunity to see how the interventions had been managed, and
how the interested English economic groups which did the
managing had profited at their expense. Hence there was no place
in their minds for any political theory that disallowed the
right of individual self-expression in politics. As their
situation tended to make them natural-born economic
individualists, so it also tended to make them natural-born
republicans.

  Thus the preamble of the Declaration hit the mark of a cordial
unanimity. Its two leading doctrines could easily be interpreted
as justifying an unlimited economic pseudo-individualism on the
part of the State's beneficiaries, and a judiciously managed
exercise of political self-expression by the electorate. Whether
or not this were a more free-and-easy interpretation than a
strict construction of the doctrines will bear, no doubt it was
in effect the interpretation quite commonly put upon them.
American history abounds in instances where great principles
have, in their common application, been narrowed down to the
service of very paltry ends. The preamble, nevertheless, did
reflect a general state of mind. However incompetent the
understanding of its doctrines may have been, and however
interested the motives which prompted that understanding, the
general spirit of the people was in their favour.

  There was complete unanimity also regarding the nature of the
new and independent political institution which the Declaration
contemplated as within "the right of the people" to set up.
There was a great and memorable dissension about its form, but
none about its nature. It should be in essence the mere
continuator of the merchant-State already existing. There was no
idea of setting up government, the purely social institution
which should have no other object than, as the Declaration put
it, to secure the natural rights of the individual; or as Paine
put it, which should contemplate nothing beyond the maintenance
of freedom and security -- the institution which should make no
positive interventions of any kind upon the individual, but
should confine itself exclusively to such negative interventions
as the maintenance of freedom might indicate. The idea was to
perpetuate an institution of another character entirely, the
State, the organization of the political means; and this was
accordingly done.

  There is no disparagement implied in this observation; for,
all questions of motive aside, nothing else was to be expected.
No one knew any other kind of political organization. The causes
of American complaint were conceived of as due only to
interested and culpable mal-administration, not to the
essentially anti-social nature of the institution administered.
Dissatisfaction was directed against administrators, not against
the institution itself. Violent dislike of the form of the
institution -- the monarchical form -- was engendered, but no
distrust or suspicion of its nature. The character of the State
had never been subjected to scrutiny; the cooperation of the
Zeitgeist was needed for that, and it was not yet to be had.[21]

----[21]
  Even now its cooperation seems not to have got very far in
  English and American professional circles. The latest English
  exponent of the State, Professor Laski, draws the same set of
  elaborate distinctions between the State and officialdom that
  one would look for if he had been writing a hundred and fifty
  years ago. He appears to regard the State as essentially a
  social institution, though his observations on this point are
  by no means clear. Since his conclusions tend towards
  collectivism, however, the inference seems admissible.
----[21]

One may see here a parallel with the revolutionary movements
against the Church in the sixteenth century -- and indeed with
revolutionary movements in general. They are incited by abuses
and misfeasances, more or less specific and always secondary,
and are carried on with no idea beyond getting them rectified or
avenged, usually by the sacrifice of conspicuous scapegoats. The
philosophy of the institution that gives play to these
misfeasances is never examined, and hence they recur promptly
under another form or other auspices,[22]

----[22]
  As, for example, when one political party is turned out of
  office, and another put in.
----[22]

or else their place is taken by others which are in character
precisely like them. Thus the notorious failure of reforming and
revolutionary movements in the long-run may as a rule be found
due to their incorrigible superficiality.

  One mind, indeed, came within reaching distance of the
fundamentals of the matter, not by employing the historical
method, but by a homespun kind of reasoning, aided by a sound
and sensitive instinct. The common view of Mr. Jefferson as a
doctrinaire believer in the stark principle of "states' rights"
is most incompetent and misleading. He believed in states'
rights, assuredly, but he went much farther; states' rights were
only an incident in his general system of political
organization. He believed that the ultimate political unit, the
repository and source of political authority and initiative,
should be the smallest unit; not the federal unit, state unit or
county unit, but the township, or, as he called it, the "ward."
The township, and the township only, should determine the
delegation of power upwards to the county, the state, and the
federal units. His system of extreme decentralization is
interesting and perhaps worth a moment's examination, because if
the idea of the State is ever displaced by the idea of
government, it seems probable that the practical expression of
this idea would come out very nearly in that form.[23]

----[23]
  In fact, the only modification of it one can foresee is that
  the smallest unit should reserve the taxing-power strictly to
  itself. The larger units should have no power whatever of
  direct or indirect taxation, but should present their
  requirements to the townships, to be met by quota. This would
  tend to reduce the organizations of the larger units to
  skeleton form, and would operate strongly against their
  assuming any functions but those assigned them, which under a
  strictly governmental regime would be very few -- for the
  federal unit, indeed, extremely few. It is interesting to
  imagine the suppression of every bureaucratic activity in
  Washington today that has to do with the maintenance and
  administration of the political means, and see how little
  would be left. If the State were superseded by government,
  probably every federal activity could be housed in the Senate
  Office Building -- quite possibly with room to spare.
----[23]

There is probably no need to say that the consideration of such
a displacement involves a long look ahead, and over a field of
view that is cluttered with the debris of a most discouraging
number, not of nations alone, but of whole civilizations.
Nevertheless it is interesting to remind ourselves that more
than a hundred and fifty years ago, one American succeeded in
getting below the surface of things, and that he probably to
some degree anticipated the judgment of an immeasurably distant
future.

  In February, 1816, Mr. Jefferson wrote a letter to Joseph C.
Cabell, in which he expounded the philosophy behind his system
of political organization. What is it, he asks, that has
"destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government
which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and
concentrating all powers into one body, no matter whether of the
autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a
Venetian senate." The secret of freedom will be found in the
individual "making himself the depository of the powers
respecting himself, so far as he is competent to them, and
delegating only what is beyond his competence, by a synthetical
process, to higher and higher orders of functionaries, so as to
trust fewer and fewer powers in proportion as the trustees
become more and more oligarchical." This idea rests on accurate
observation, for we are all aware that not only the wisdom of
the ordinary man, but also his interest and sentiment, have a
very short radius of operation; they can not be stretched over
an area of much more than township-size; and it is the acme of
absurdity to suppose that any man or any body of men can
arbitrarily exercise their wisdom, interest and sentiment over a
state-wide or nation-wide area with any kind of success.
Therefore the principle must hold that the larger the area of
exercise, the fewer and more clearly defined should be the
functions exercised. Moreover, "by placing under everyone what
his own eye may superintend," there is erected the surest
safeguard against usurpation of freedom. "Where every man is a
sharer in the direction of his ward-republic, or of some of the
higher ones, and feels that he is a participator in the
government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the
year, but every day;... he will let the heart be torn out of his
body sooner than his power wrested from him by a Caesar or a
Bonaparte."

  No such idea of popular sovereignty, however, appeared in the
political organization that was set up in 1789 -- far from it.
In devising their structure, the American architects followed
certain specifications laid down by Harington, Locke and Adam
Smith, which might be regarded as a sort of official digest of
politics under the merchant-State; indeed, if one wished to be
perhaps a little inurbane in describing them -- though not
actually unjust -- one might say that they are the
merchant-State's defence mechanism.[24]

----[24]
  Harington published the Oceana in 1656. Locke's political
  treatises were published in 1690. Smith's Inquiry into the
  Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776.
----[24]

Harington laid down the all-important principle that the basis
of politics is economic -- that power follows property. Since he
was arguing against the feudal concept, he laid stress
specifically upon landed property. He was of course too early to
perceive the bearings of the State-system of land-tenure upon
industrial exploitation, and neither he nor Locke perceived any
natural distinction to be drawn between law-made property and
labour-made property; nor yet did Smith perceive this clearly,
though he seems to have had occasional indistinct glimpses of
it. According to Harington's theory of economic determinism, the
realization of popular sovereignty is a simple matter. Since
political power proceeds from land-ownership, a simple diffusion
of land-ownership is all that is needed to insure a satisfactory
distribution of power.[25]

----[25]
  This theory, with its corollary that democracy is primarily an
  economic rather than a political status, is extremely modern.
  The Physiocrats in France, and Henry George in America,
  modified Harington's practical proposals by showing that the
  same results could be obtained by the more convenient method
  of a local confiscation of economic rent.
----[25]

If everybody owns, then everybody rules. "If the people hold
three parts in four of the territory," Harington says, "it is
plain that there can neither be any single person nor nobility
able to dispute the government with them. In this case
therefore, except force be interposed, they govern themselves."

  Locke, writing a half-century later, when the revolution of
1688 was over, concerned himself more particularly with the
State's positive confiscatory interventions upon other modes of
property-ownership. These had long been frequent and vexatious,
and under the Stuarts they had amounted to unconscionable
highwaymanry. Locke's idea therefore was to copper-rivet such a
doctrine of the sacredness of property as would forever put a
stop to this sort of thing. Hence he laid it down that the first
business of the State is to maintain the absolute inviolability
of general property-rights; the State itself might not violate
them, because in so doing it would act against its own primary
function. Thus, in Locke's view, the rights of property took
precedence even over those of life and liberty; and if ever it
came to the pinch, the State must make its choice
accordingly.[26]

----[26]
  Locke held that in time of war it was competent for the State
  to conscript the lives and liberties of its subjects, but not
  their property. It is interesting to remark the persistence of
  this view in the practice of the merchant-State at the present
  time. In the last great collision of competing interests among
  merchant-States, twenty years ago, the State everywhere
  intervened at wholesale upon the rights of life and liberty,
  but was very circumspect towards the rights of property. Since
  the principle of absolutism was introduced into our
  constitution by the income-tax amendment, several attempts
  have been made to reduce the rights of property, in time of
  war, to an approximately equal footing with those of life and
  liberty; but so far, without success.
----[26]

  Thus while the American architects assented "in principle" to
the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty, and
found it in a general way highly congenial as a sort of voucher
for their self-esteem, their practical interpretation of it left
it pretty well hamstrung. They were not especially concerned
with consistency; their practical interest in this philosophy
stopped short at the point which we have already noted, of its
presumptive justification of a ruthless economic
pseudo-individualism, and an exercise of political
self-expression by the general electorate which should be so
managed as to be, in all essential respects, futile. In this
they took precise pattern by the English Whig exponents and
practitioners of this philosophy. Locke himself, whom we have
seen putting the natural rights of property so high above those
of life and liberty, was equally discriminating in his view of
popular sovereignty. He was no believer in what he called "a
numerous democracy," and did not contemplate a political
organization that should countenance anything of the kind.[27]

----[27]
  It is worth going through the literature of the late
  seventeenth and early eighteenth century to see how the words
  "democracy" and "democrat" appear exclusively as terms of
  contumely and reprehension. They served this purpose for a
  long time both in England and America, much as the terms
  "bolshevism" and "bolshevist" serve us now. They were
  subsequently taken over to become what Bentham called
  "imposter-terms," in behalf of the existing economic and
  political order, as synonymous with a purely nominal
  republicanism. They are now used regularly in this way to
  describe the political system of the United States, even by
  persons who should know better -- even, curiously, by persons
  like Bertrand Russell and Mr. Laski, who have little sympathy
  with the existing order. One sometimes wonders how our
  revolutionary forefathers would take it if they could hear
  some flatulent political thimblerigger charge them with having
  founded "the great and glorious democracy of the West."
----[27]

The sort of organization he had in mind is reflected in the
extraordinary constitution he devised for the royal province of
Carolina, which established a basic order of politically
inarticulate serfdom. Such an organization as this represented
about the best, in a practical way, that the British
merchant-State was ever able to do for the doctrine of popular
sovereignty.

  It was also about the best that the American counterpart of
the British merchant-State could do. The sum of the matter is
that while the philosophy of natural rights and popular
sovereignty afforded a set of principles upon which all
interests could unite, and practically all did unite, with the
aim of securing political independence, it did not afford a
satisfactory set of principles on which to found the new
American State. When political independence was secured, the
stark doctrine of the Declaration went into abeyance, with only
a distorted simulacrum of its principles surviving. The rights
of life and liberty were recognized by a mere constitutional
formality left open to eviscerating interpretations, or, where
these were for any reason deemed superfluous, to simple
executive disregard; and all consideration of the rights
attending "the pursuit of happiness" was narrowed down to a
plenary acceptance of Locke's doctrine of the preeminent rights
of property, with law-made property on an equal footing with
labour-made property. As for popular sovereignty, the new State
had to be republican in form, for no other would suit the
general temper of the people; and hence its peculiar task was to
preserve the appearance of actual republicanism without the
reality. To do this, it took over the apparatus which we have
seen the English merchant-State adopting when confronted with a
like task -- the apparatus of a representative or parliamentary
system. Moreover, it improved upon the British model of this
apparatus by adding three auxiliary devices which time has
proved most effective. These were, first, the device of the
fixed term, which regulates the administration of our system by
astronomical rather than political considerations -- by the
motion of the earth around the sun rather than by political
exigency; second, the device of judicial review and
interpretation, which, as we have already observed, is a process
whereby anything may be made to mean anything; third, the device
of requiring legislators to reside in the district they
represent, which puts the highest conceivable premium upon
pliancy and venality, and is therefore the best mechanism for
rapidly building up an immense body of patronage. It may be
perceived at once that all these devices tend of themselves to
work smoothly and harmoniously towards a great centralization of
State power, and that their working in this direction may be
indefinitely accelerated with the utmost economy of effort.

  As well as one can put a date to such an event, the surrender
at Yorktown marks the sudden and complete disappearance of the
Declaration's doctrine from the political consciousness of
America. Mr. Jefferson resided in Paris as minister to France
from 1784 to 1789. As the time for his return to America drew
near, he wrote Colonel Humphreys that he hoped soon "to possess
myself anew, by conversation with my countrymen, of their spirit
and ideas. I know only the Americans of the year 1784. They tell
me this is to be much a stranger to those of 1789." So indeed he
found it. On arriving in New York and resuming his place in the
social life of the country, he was greatly depressed by the
discovery that the principles of the Declaration had gone wholly
by the board. No one spoke of natural rights and popular
sovereignty; it would seem actually that no one had ever heard
of them. On the contrary, everyone was talking about the
pressing need of a strong central coercive authority, able to
check the incursions which "the democratic spirit" was likely to
incite upon "the men of principle and property."[28]

----[28]
  This curious collocation of attributes belongs to General
  Henry Knox, Washington's secretary of war, and a busy
  speculator in land-values. He used it in a letter to
  Washington, on the occasion of Shays's Rebellion in 1786, in
  which he made an agonized plea for a strong federal army. In
  the literature of the period, it is interesting to observe how
  regularly a moral superiority is associated with the
  possession of property.
----[28]

Mr. Jefferson wrote despondently of the contrast of all this
with the sort of thing he had been hearing in the France which
he had just left "in the first year of her revolution, in the
fervour of natural rights and zeal for reformation." In the
process of possessing himself anew of the spirit and ideas of
his countrymen, he said, "I can not describe the wonder and
mortification with which the table conversations filled me."
Clearly, though the Declaration might have been the charter for
American independence, it was in no sense the charter of the new
American State.


=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

                                5

  IT IS a commonplace that the persistence of an institution is
due solely to the state of mind that prevails towards it, the
set of terms in which men habitually think about it. So long,
and only so long, as those terms are favourable, the institution
lives and maintains its power; and when for any reason men
generally cease thinking in those terms, it weakens and becomes
inert. At one time, a certain set of terms regarding man's place
in nature gave organized Christianity the power largely to
control men's consciences and direct their conduct; and this
power has dwindled to the point of disappearance, for no other
reason than that men generally stopped thinking in those terms.
The persistence of our unstable and iniquitous economic system
is not due to the power of accumulated capital, the force of
propaganda, or to any force or combination of forces commonly
alleged its cause. It is due solely to a certain set of terms in
which men think of the opportunity to work; they regard this
opportunity as something to be given. Nowhere is there any other
idea about it than that the opportunity to apply labour and
capital to natural resources for the production of wealth is not
in any sense a right, but a concession.[1]

----[1]
  Consider, for example, the present situation. Our natural
  resources, while much depleted, are still great; our
  population is very thin, running something like twenty or
  twenty-five to the square mile; and some millions of this
  population are at the moment "unemployed," and likely to
  remain so because no one will or can "give them work." The
  point is not that men generally submit to this state of
  things, or that they accept it as inevitable, but that they
  see nothing irregular or anomalous about it because of their
  fixed idea that work is something to be given.
----[1]

This is all that keeps our system alive. When men cease to think
in these terms, the system will disappear, and not before.

  It seems pretty clear that changes in the terms of thought
affecting an institution are but little advanced by direct
means. They are brought about in obscure and circuitous ways,
and assisted by trains of circumstance which before the fact
would appear quite unrelated, and their explosive or solvent
action is therefore quite unpredictable. A direct drive at
effecting these changes comes as a rule to nothing, or more
often than not turns out to be retarding. They are so largely
the work of those unimpassioned and imperturbable agencies for
which Prince de Bismarck had such vast respect -- he called them
the imponderabilia -- that any effort which disregards them, or
thrusts them violently aside, will in the long run find them
stepping in to abort its fruit.

  That is what we are attempting to do in this rapid survey of
the historical progress of certain ideas, is to trace the
genesis of an attitude of mind, a set of terms in which now
practically everyone thinks of the State; and then to consider
the conclusions towards which this psychical phenomenon
unmistakably points. Instead of recognizing the State as "the
common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men,"
the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as
a final and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main,
beneficent. The mass-man, ignorant of its history, regards its
character and intentions as social rather than anti-social; and
in that faith he is willing to put at its disposal an indefinite
credit of knavery, mendacity and chicane, upon which its
administrators may draw at will. Instead of looking upon the
State's progressive absorption of social power with the
repugnance and resentment that he would naturally feel towards
the activities of a professional-criminal organization, he tends
rather to encourage and glorify it, in the belief that he is
somehow identified with the State, and that therefore, in
consenting to its indefinite aggrandizement, he consents to
something in which he has a share -- he is, pro tanto,
aggrandizing himself. Professor Ortega y Gasset analyzes this
state of mind extremely well. The mass-man, he says, confronting
the phenomenon of the State, "sees it, admires it, knows that
there it is.... Furthermore, the mass-man sees in the State an
anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he
believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in
the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or
problem, presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that
the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution
directly with its immense and unassailable resources.... When
the mass suffers any ill-fortune, or simply feels some strong
appetite, its great temptation is that permanent sure
possibility of obtaining everything, without effort, struggle,
doubt, or risk, merely by touching a button and setting the
mighty machine in motion."

  It is the genesis of this attitude, this state of mind, and
the conclusions which inexorably follow from its predominance,
that we are attempting to get at through our present survey.
These conclusions may perhaps be briefly forecast here, in order
that the reader who is for any reason indisposed to entertain
them may take warning of them at this point, and close the book.

  The unquestioning, determined, even truculent maintenance of
the attitude which Professor Ortega y Gasset so admirably
describes, is obviously the life and strength of the State; and
obviously too, it is now so inveterate and so wide-spread -- one
may freely call it universal -- that no effort could overcome
its inveteracy or modify it, and least of all hope to enlighten
it. This attitude can only be sapped and mined by uncountable
generations of experience, in a course marked by recurrent
calamity of a most appalling character. When once the
predominance of this attitude in any given civilization has
become inveterate, as so plainly it has become in the
civilization of America, all that can be done is to leave it to
work its own way out to its appointed end. The philosophic
historian may content himself with pointing out and clearly
elucidating its consequences, as Professor Ortega y Gasset has
done, aware that after this there is no more that one can do.
"The result of this tendency," he says, "will be fatal.
Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again
by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify.[2]

----[2]
  The present paralysis of production, for example, is due
  solely to State intervention, and uncertainty concerning
  further intervention.
----[2]

Society will have to live for the State, man for the
governmental machine. And as after all it is only a machine,
whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports
around it,[3]

----[3]
  It seems to be very imperfectly understood that the cost of
  State intervention must be paid out of production, this being
  the only source from which any payment for anything can be
  derived. Intervention retards production; then the resulting
  stringency and inconvenience enable further intervention,
  which in turn still further retards production; and this
  process goes on until, as in Rome, in the third century,
  production ceases entirely, and the source of payment dries
  up.
----[3]

the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be
left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of
machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism.
Such was the lamentable fate of ancient civilization."

                               II

  The revolution of 1776-1781 converted thirteen provinces,
practically as they stood, into thirteen autonomous political
units, completely independent, and they so continued until 1789,
formally held together as a sort of league, by the Articles of
Confederation. For our purposes, the point to be remarked about
this eight-year period, 1781-1789, is that administration of the
political means was not centralized in the federation, but in
the several units of which the federation was composed. The
federal assembly, or congress, was hardly more than a
deliberative body of delegates appointed by the autonomous
units. It had no taxing-power, and no coercive power. It could
not command funds for any enterprise common to the federation,
even for war; all it could do was to apportion the sum needed,
in the hope that each unit would meet its quota. There was no
coercive federal authority over these matters, or over any
matters; the sovereignty of each of the thirteen federated units
was complete.

  Thus the central body of this loose association of
sovereignties had nothing to say about the distribution of the
political means. This authority was vested in the several
component units. Each unit had absolute jurisdiction over its
territorial basis, and could partition it as it saw fit, and
could maintain any system of land-tenure that it chose to
establish.[4]

----[4]
  As a matter of fact, all thirteen units merely continued the
  system that had existed throughout the colonial period -- the
  system which gave the beneficiary a monopoly of rental-values
  as well as a monopoly of use-values. No other system was ever
  known in America, except in the short-lived state of Deseret,
  under the Mormon polity.
----[4]

Each unit set up its own trade-regulations. Each unit levied its
own tariffs, one against another, in behalf of its chosen
beneficiaries. Each manufactured its own currency, and might
manipulate it as it liked, for the benefit of such individuals
or economic groups as were able to get effective access to the
local legislature. Each managed its own system of bounties,
concessions, subsidies, franchises, and exercised it with a view
to whatever private interest its legislature might be influenced
to promote. In short, the whole mechanism of the political means
was non-national. The federation was not in any sense a State;
the State was not one, but thirteen.

  Within each unit, therefore, as soon as the war was over,
there began at once a general scramble for access to the
political means. It must never be forgotten that in each unit
society was fluid; this access was available to anyone gifted
with the peculiar sagacity and resolution necessary to get at
it. Hence one economic interest after another brought pressure
to bear on the local legislatures, until the economic hand of
every unit was against every other, and the hand of every other
was against itself. The principle of "protection," which, as we
have seen was already well understood, was carried to lengths
precisely comparable with those to which it is carried in
international commerce today, and for the same primary purpose
-- the exploitation, or in plain terms the robbery, of the
domestic consumer. Mr. Beard remarks that the legislature of New
York, for example, pressed the principle which governs
tariff-making to the point of levying duties on firewood brought
in from Connecticut and on cabbages from New Jersey -- a fairly
close parallel with the octroi that one still encounters at the
gates of French towns.

  The primary monopoly, fundamental to all others -- the
monopoly of economic rent -- was sought with redoubled
eagerness.[5]

----[5]
  For a brilliant summary of post-revolutionary
  land-speculation, cf. Sakolski, op. cit., ch. II.
----[5]

The territorial basis of each unit now included the vast
holdings confiscated from British owners, and the bar erected by
the British State's proclamation of 1763 against the
appropriation of Western lands was now removed. Professor
Sakolski observes drily that "the early land-lust which the
colonists inherited from their European forebears was not
diminished by the democratic spirit of the revolutionary
fathers." Indeed not! Land-grants were sought as assiduously
from local legislatures as they had been in earlier days from
the Stuart dynasty and from colonial governors, and the mania of
land-jobbing ran apace with the mania of land-grabbing.[6]

----[6]
  Mr. Sakolski very justly remarks that the mania for
  land-jobbing was stimulated by the action of the new units in
  offering lands by way of settlement of their public debts,
  which led to extensive gambling in the various issues of
  "land-warrants." The list of eminent names involved in this
  enterprise includes Wilson C. Nicholas, who later became
  governor of Virginia; "Light Horse Harry" Lee, father of the
  great Confederate commander; General John Preston, of
  Smithfield; and George Taylor, brother-in-law of Chief Justice
  Marshall. Lee, Preston and Nicholas were prosecuted at the
  instance of some Connecticut speculators, for a transaction
  alleged as fraudulent; Lee was arrested in Boston, on the eve
  of embarking for the West Indies. They had deeded a tract,
  said to be 300,000 acres, at ten cents an acre, but on being
  surveyed, the tract did not come to half that size. Frauds of
  this order were extremely common.
----[6]

Among the men most actively interested in these pursuits were
those whom we have already seen identified with them in
pre-revolutionary days, such as the two Morrises, Knox,
Pickering, James Wilson and Patrick Henry; and with their names
appear those of Duer, Bingham, McKean, Willing, Greenleaf,
Nicholson, Aaron Burr, Low, Macomb, Wadsworth, Remsen,
Constable, Pierrepont, and others which now are less well
remembered.

  There is probably no need to follow out the rather repulsive
trail of effort after other modes of the political means. What
we have said about the foregoing two modes -- tariffs and
rental-value monopoly -- is doubtless enough to illustrate
satisfactorily the spirit and attitude of mind towards the State
during the eight years immediately following the revolution. The
whole story of insensate scuffle for State-created economic
advantage is not especially animating, nor is it essential to
our purposes. Such as it is, it may be read in detail elsewhere.
All that interests us is to observe that during the eight years
of federation, the principles of government set forth by Paine
and by the Declaration continued in utter abeyance. Not only did
the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty[7]

----[7]
  The new political units continued the colonial practice of
  restricting the suffrage to taxpayers and owners of property,
  and none but men of considerable wealth were eligible to
  public office. Thus the exercise of sovereignty was a matter
  of economic right, not natural right.
----[7]

remain as completely out of consideration as when Mr. Jefferson
first lamented its disappearance, but the idea of government as
a social institution based on this philosophy was likewise
unconsidered. No one thought of a political organization as
instituted "to secure these rights" by processes of purely
negative intervention -- instituted, that is, with no other end
in view than the maintenance of "freedom and security." The
history of the eight-year period of federation shows no trace
whatever of any idea of political organization other than the
State-idea. No one regarded this organization otherwise than as
the organization of the political means, an all-powerful engine
which should stand permanently ready and available for the
irresistible promotion of this-or-that set of economic
interests, and the irremediable disservice of others; according
as whichever set, by whatever course of strategy, might succeed
in obtaining command of its machinery.

                               III

  It may be repeated that while State power was well centralized
under the federation, it was not centralized in the federation,
but in the federated unit. For various reasons, some of them
plausible, many leading citizens, especially in the more
northerly units, found this distribution of power
unsatisfactory; and a considerable compact group of economic
interests which stood to profit by a redistribution naturally
made the most of these reasons. It is quite certain that
dissatisfaction with the existing arrangement was not general,
for when the redistribution took place in 1789, it was effected
with great difficulty and only through a coup d'Etat, organized
by methods which if employed in any other field than that of
politics, would be put down at once as not only daring, but
unscrupulous and dishonorable.

  The situation, in a word, was that American economic interests
had fallen into two grand divisions, the special interests in
each having made common cause with a view to capturing control
of the political means.One division comprised the speculating,
industrial-commercial and creditor interests, with their natural
allies of the bar and bench, the pulpit and the press. The other
comprised chiefly the farmers and artisans and the debtor class
generally. From the first, these two grand divisions were
colliding briskly here and there in the several units, the most
serious collision occurring over the terms of the Massachusetts
constitution of 1780.[8]

----[8]
  This was the uprising known as Shays's Rebellion, which took
  place in 1786. The creditor division in Massachusetts had
  gained control of the political means, and had fortified its
  control by establishing a constitution which was made to bear
  so hardly on the agrarian and debtor division that an armed
  insurrection broke out six years later, led by Daniel Shays,
  for the purpose of annulling its onerous provisions, and
  transferring control of the political means to the latter
  group. This incident affords a striking view in miniature of
  the State's nature and teleology. The rebellion had a great
  effect in consolidating the creditor division and giving
  plausibility to its contention for the establishment of a
  strong coercive national State.Mr. Jefferson spoke
  contemptuously of this contention, as "the interested clamours
  and sophistry of speculating, shaving and banking
  institutions"; and of the rebellion itself he observed to Mrs.
  John Adams, whose husband had most to do with drafting the
  Massachusetts constitution, "I like a little rebellion now and
  then.... The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable
  that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be
  exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised
  at all." Writing to another correspondent at the same time, he
  said earnestly, "God forbid we should ever be twenty years
  without such a rebellion." Obiter dicta of this nature,
  scattered here and there in Mr. Jefferson's writings, have the
  interest of showing how near his instinct led him towards a
  clear understanding of the State's character.
----[8]

The State in each of the thirteen units was a class-State, as
every State known to history has been; and the work of
manoeuvring it in its function of enabling the economic
exploitation of one class by another went steadily on.

  General conditions under the Articles of Confederation were
pretty good. The people had made a creditable recovery from the
dislocations and disturbances due to the revolution, and there
was a very decent prospect that Mr. Jefferson's idea of a
political organization which should be national in foreign
affairs and non-national in domestic affairs might be found
continuously practicable. Some tinkering with the Articles
seemed necessary -- in fact, it was expected -- but nothing that
would transform or seriously impair the general scheme. The
chief trouble was with the federation's weakness in view of the
chance of war, and in respect of debts due to foreign creditors.
The Articles, however, carried provision for their own
amendment, and for anything one can see, such amendment as the
general scheme made necessary was quite feasible. In fact, when
suggestions of revision arose, as they did almost immediately,
nothing else appears to have been contemplated.

  But the general scheme itself was as a whole objectionable to
the interests grouped in the first grand division. The grounds
of their dissatisfaction are obvious enough. When one bears in
mind the vast prospect of the continent, one need use but little
imagination to perceive that the national scheme was by far the
more congenial to those interests, because it enabled an
ever-closer centralization of control over the political means.
For instance, leaving aside the advantage of having but one
central tariff-making body to chaffer with, instead of twelve,
any industrialist could see the great primary advantage of being
able to extend his exploiting operations over a nation-wide
free-trade area walled-in by a general tariff; the closer the
centralization, the larger the exploitable area. Any speculator
in rental-values would be quick to see the advantage of bringing
this form of opportunity under unified control.[9]

----[9]
  Professor Sakolski observes that after the Articles of
  Confederation were supplanted by the constitution, schemes of
  land-speculation "multiplied with renewed and intensified
  energy." Naturally so, for as he says, the new scheme of a
  national State got strong support from this class of
  adventurers because they foresaw that rental-values "must be
  greatly increased by an efficient federal government."
----[9]

Any speculator in depreciated public securities would be
strongly for a system that could offer him the use of the
political means to bring back their face-value.[10]

----[10]
  More than half the delegates to the constitutional convention
  of 1787 were either investors or speculators in the public
  funds. Probably sixty per cent of the values represented by
  these securities were fictitious, and were so regarded even by
  their holders.
----[10]

Any shipowner or foreign trader would be quick to see that his
bread was buttered on the side of a national State which, if
properly approached, might lend him the use of the political
means by way of a subsidy, or would be able to back up some
profitable but dubious freebooting enterprise with "diplomatic
representations" or with reprisals.

  The farmers and the debtor class in general, on the other
hand, were not interested in those considerations, but were
strongly for letting things stay, for the most part, as they
stood. Preponderance in the local legislatures gave them
satisfactory control of the political means, which they could
and did use to the prejudice of the creditor class, and they did
not care to be disturbed in their preponderance. They were
agreeable to such modification of the Articles as should work
out short of this, but not to setting up a national[11]

----[11]
  It may be observed that at this time the word "national" was a
  term of obloquy, carrying somewhat the same implications that
  the word "fascist" carries in some quarters today. Nothing is
  more interesting than the history of political terms in their
  relation to the shifting balance of economic advantage --
  except, perhaps, the history of the partisan movements which
  they designate, viewed in the same relation.
----[11]

replica of the British merchant-State, which they perceived was
precisely what the classes grouped in the opposing grand
division wished to do. These classes aimed at bringing in the
British system of economics, politics and judicial control, on a
nation-wide scale; and the interests grouped in the second
division saw that what this would really come to was a shifting
of the incidence of economic exploitation upon themselves. They
had an impressive object-lesson in the immediate shift that took
place in Massachusetts after the adoption of John Adams's local
constitution of 1780. They naturally did not care to see this
sort of thing put into operation on a nation-wide scale, and
they therefore looked with extreme disfavour upon any bait put
forth for amending the Articles out of existence. When Hamilton,
in 1780, objected to the Articles in the form in which they were
proposed for adoption, and proposed the calling of a
constitutional convention instead, they turned the cold
shoulder; as they did again to Washington's letter to the local
governors three years later, in which he adverted to the need of
a strong coercive central authority.

  Finally, however, a constitutional convention was assembled,
on the distinct understanding that it should do no more than
revise the Articles in such a way, as Hamilton cleverly phrased
it, as to make them "adequate to the exigencies of the nation,"
and on the further understanding that all the thirteen units
should assent to the amendments before they went into effect; in
short, that the method of amendment provided by the Articles
themselves should be followed. Neither understanding was
fulfilled. The convention was made up wholly of men representing
the economic interests of the first division. The great majority
of them, possibly as many as four-fifths, were public creditors;
one-third were land-speculators; some were money-lenders;
one-fifth were industrialists, traders, shippers; and many of
them were lawyers. They planned and executed a coup d'Etat,
simply tossing the Articles of Confederation into the
waste-basket, and drafting a constitution de novo, with the
audacious provision that it should go into effect when ratified
by nine units instead of by all thirteen. Moreover, with like
audacity, they provided that the document should not be
submitted either to the Congress or to the local legislatures,
but that it should go direct to a popular vote![12]

----[12]
  The obvious reason for this, as the event showed, was that the
  interests grouped in the first division had the advantage of
  being relatively compact and easily mobilized. Those in the
  second division, being chiefly agrarian, were loose and
  sprawling, communications among them were slow, and
  mobilization difficult.
----[12]

  The unscrupulous methods employed in securing ratification
need not be dwelt on here.[13]

----[13]
  They have been noticed by several recent authorities, and are
  exhibited fully in Mr. Beard's monumental Economic
  Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.
----[13]

We are not indeed concerned with the moral quality of the
proceedings by which the constitution was brought into being,
but only with showing their instrumentality in encouraging a
definite general idea of the State and its functions, and a
consequent general attitude towards the State. We therefore go
on to observe that in order to secure ratification by even the
nine necessary units, the document had to conform to certain
very exacting and difficult requirements. The political
structure which is contemplated had to be republican in form,
yet capable of resisting what Gerry unctuously called "the
excess of democracy," and what Randolph termed its "turbulence
and follies." The task of the delegates was precisely analogous
to that of the earlier architects who had designed the structure
of the British merchant-State, with its system of economics,
politics and judicial control; they had to contrive something
that could pass muster as showing a good semblance of popular
sovereignty, without the reality. Madison defined their task
explicitly in saying that the convention's purpose was "to
secure the public good and private rights against the danger of
such a faction [i.e., a democratic faction], and at the same
time preserve the spirit and form of popular government."

  Under the circumstances, this was a tremendously large order;
and the constitution emerged, as it was bound to do, as a
compromise-document, or as Mr. Beard puts it very precisely, "a
mosaic of second choices," which really satisfied neither of the
two opposing sets of interests. It was not strong and definite
enough in either direction to please anybody. In particular, the
interests composing the first division, led by Alexander
Hamilton, saw that it was not sufficient of itself to fix them
in anything like a permanent impregnable position to exploit
continuously the groups composing the second division. To do
this -- to establish the degree of centralization requisite to
their purposes -- certain lines of administrative management
must be laid down, which, once established, would be permanent.
The further task therefore, in Madison's phrase, was to
"administration" the constitution into such absolutist modes as
would secure economic supremacy, by a free use of the political
means, to the groups which made up the first division.

  This was accordingly done. For the first ten years of its
existence the constitution remained in the hands of its makers
for administration in the directions most favourable to their
interests. For an accurate understanding of the newly-erected
system's economic tendencies, too much stress can not be laid on
the fact that for these ten critical years "the machinery of
economic and political power was mainly directed by the men who
had conceived and established it."[14]

----[14]
  Beard, op. cit., p. 337.
----[14]

Washington, who had been chairman of the convention, was elected
President. Nearly half the Senate was made up of men who had
been delegates, and the House of Representatives was largely
made up of men who had to do with the drafting or ratifying of
the constitution. Hamilton, Randolph and Knox, who were active
in promoting the document, filled three of the four positions in
the Cabinet; and all the federal judgeships, without a single
exception, were filled by men who had a hand in the business of
drafting or of ratification, or both.

  Of all the legislative measures enacted to implement the new
constitution, the one best calculated to ensure a rapid and
steady progress in the centralization of political power was the
Judiciary Act of 1789.[15]

----[15]
  The principal measures bearing directly on the distribution of
  the political means were those drafted by Hamilton for funding
  and assumption, for a protective tariff, and for a national
  bank. These gave practically exclusive use of the political
  means to the classes grouped in the first grand division, the
  only modes left available to others being patents and
  copyrights. Mr. Beard discusses these measures with his
  invariable lucidity and thoroughness, op. cit., ch. VIII. Some
  observations on them which are perhaps worth reading are
  contained in my Jefferson, ch. V.
----[15]

This measure created a federal supreme court of six members
(subsequently enlarged to nine) and a federal district court in
each state, with its own complete personnel, and a complete
apparatus for enforcing its decrees. The Act established federal
oversight of state legislation by the familiar device of
"interpretation," whereby the Supreme Court might nullify state
legislative or judicial action which for any reason it saw fit
to regard as unconstitutional. One feature of the Act which for
our purposes is most noteworthy is that it made the tenure of
all these federal judgeships appointive, not elective, and for
life; thus marking almost the farthest conceivable departure
from the doctrine of popular sovereignty.

  The first chief justice was John Jay, "the learned and gentle
Jay," as Beveridge calls him in his excellent biography of
Marshall. A man of superb integrity, he was far above doing
anything whatever in behalf of the accepted principle that est
boni judicis ampliare jurisdictionem. Ellsworth, who followed
him, also did nothing. The succession, however, after Jay had
declined a reappointment, then fell to John Marshall, who, in
addition to the control established by the Judiciary Act over
the state legislative and judicial authority, arbitrarily
extended judicial control over both the legislative and
executive branches of the federal authority;[16]

----[16]
  The authority of the Supreme Court was disregarded by Jackson,
  and overruled by Lincoln, thus converting the mode of the
  State temporarily from an oligarchy to an autocracy. It is
  interesting to observe that just such a contingency was
  foreseen by the framers of the constitution, in particular by
  Hamilton. They were apparently well aware of the ease with
  which, in any period of crisis, a quasi-republican mode of the
  State slips off into executive tyranny. Oddly enough, Mr.
  Jefferson at one time considered nullifying the Alien and
  Sedition Acts by executive action, but did not do so. Lincoln
  overruled the opinion of Chief Justice Taney that suspension
  of the habeas corpus was unconstitutional, and in consequence
  the mode of the State was, until 1865, a monocratic military
  despotism. In fact, from the date of his proclamation of
  blockade, Lincoln ruled unconstitutionally throughout his
  term. The doctrine of "reserved powers" was knaved up ex post
  facto as a justification of his acts, but as far as the intent
  of the constitution is concerned, it was obviously a pure
  invention. In fact, a very good case could be made out for the
  assertion that Lincoln's acts resulted in a permanent radical
  change in the entire system of constitutional "interpretation"
  -- that since his time "interpretations" have not been
  interpretations of the constitution, but merely of public
  policy; or, as our most acute and profound critic put it, "th'
  Supreme Court follows th' iliction rayturns." A strict
  constitutionalist might indeed say that the constitution died
  in 1861, and one would have to scratch one's head pretty
  diligently to refute him.
----[16]

thus effecting as complete and convenient a centralization of
power as the various interest concerned in framing the
constitution could reasonably have contemplated.[17]

----[17]
  Marshall was appointed by John Adams at the end of his
  Presidential term, when the interests grouped in the first
  division were becoming very anxious about the opposition
  developing against them among the exploited interests. A
  letter written by Oliver Wolcott to Fisher Ames gives a good
  idea of where the doctrine of popular sovereignty stood; his
  reference to military measures is particularly striking. He
  says, "The steady men in Congress will attempt to extend the
  judicial department, and I hope that their measures will be
  very decided. It is impossible in this country to render an
  army an engine of government; and there is no way to combat
  the state opposition but by an efficient and extended
  organization of judges, magistrates, and other civil
  officers." Marshall's appointment followed, and also the
  creation of twenty-three new federal judgeships. Marshall's
  cardinal decisions were made in the cases of Marbury, of
  Fletcher, of McCulloch, of Dartmouth College, and of Cohens.
  It is perhaps not generally understood that as a result of
  Marshall's efforts, the Supreme Court became not only the
  highest law-interpreting body, but the highest law-making body
  as well; the precedents established by its decisions have the
  force of constitutional law. Since 1800, therefore, the actual
  mode of the State in America is normally that of a small and
  irresponsible oligarchy! Mr. Jefferson, regarding Marshall
  quite justly as "a crafty chief judge who sophisticates the
  law to his mind by the turn of his own reasoning," made in
  1821 the very remarkable prophecy that "our government is now
  taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass
  to destruction, to wit: by consolidation first, and then
  corruption, its necessary consequence. The engine of
  consolidation will be the federal judiciary; the other two
  branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments." Another
  prophetic comment on the effect of centralization was his
  remark that "when we must wait for Washington to tell us when
  to sow and when to reap, we shall soon want bread." A survey
  of our present political circumstances makes comment on these
  prophecies superfluous.
----[17]

  We may now see from this necessarily brief survey, which
anyone may amplify and particularize at his pleasure, what the
circumstances were which rooted a certain definite idea of the
State still deeper in the general consciousness. That idea was
precisely the same in the constitutional period as that which we
have seen prevailing in the two periods already examined -- the
colonial period, and the eight-year period following the
revolution. Nowhere in the history of the constitutional period
do we find the faintest suggestion of the Declaration's doctrine
of natural rights; and we find its doctrine of popular
sovereignty not only continuing in abeyance, but
constitutionally estopped from ever reappearing. Nowhere do we
find a trace of the Declaration's theory of government; on the
contrary, we find it expressly repudiated. The new political
mechanism was a faithful replica of the old disestablished
British model, but so far improved and strengthened as to be
incomparably more close-working and efficient, and hence
presenting incomparably more attractive possibilities of capture
and control. By consequence, therefore, we find more firmly
implanted than ever the same general idea of the State that we
have observed as prevailing hitherto -- the idea of an
organization of the political means, an irresponsible and
all-powerful agency standing always ready to be put into use for
the service of one set of economic interests as against another.

                               IV

  Out of this idea proceeded what we know as the "party system"
of political management, which has been in effect ever since.
Our purposes do not require that we examine its history in close
detail for evidence that it has been from the beginning a purely
bipartisan system, since this is now a matter of fairly common
acceptance. In his second term Mr. Jefferson discovered the
tendency towards bipartisanship,[18]

----[18]
  He had observed it in the British State some years before, and
  spoke of it with vivacity. "The nest of office being too small
  for all of them to cuddle into at once, the contest is eternal
  which shall crowd the other out. For this purpose they are
  divided into two parties, the Ins and the Outs." Why he could
  not see that the same thing was bound to take place in the
  American State as an effect of causes identical with those
  which brought it about in the British State, is a puzzle to
  students. Apparently, however, he did not see it,
  notwithstanding the sound instinct that made him suspect
  parties, and always kept him free from party alliances. As he
  wrote Hopkinson in 1789, "I never submitted the whole system
  of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in
  religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else
  where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addition
  is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could
  not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at
  all."
----[18]

and was both dismayed and puzzled by it. I have elsewhere[19]

----[19]
  Jefferson, p. 274. The agrarian-artisan-debtor economic group
  that elected Mr. Jefferson took title as the Republican party
  (subsequently re-named Democratic) and the opposing group
  called itself by the old pre-constitutional title of
  Federalist.
----[19]

remarked his curious inability to understand how the cohesive
power of public plunder works straight towards political
bipartisanship. In 1823, finding some who called themselves
Republicans favouring the Federalist policy of centralization,
he spoke of them in a rather bewildered way as
"pseudo-Republicans, but real Federalists." But most naturally
any Republican who saw a chance of profiting by the political
means would retain the name, and at the same time resist any
tendency within the party to impair the general system which
held out such a prospect.[20]

----[20]
  An example, noteworthy only because uncommonly conspicuous, is
  seen in the behaviour of the Democratic senators in the matter
  of the tariff on sugar, in Cleveland's second administration.
  Ever since that incident, one of the Washington newspapers has
  used the name "Senator Sorghum" in its humorous paragraphs, to
  designate the typical venal jobholder.
----[20]

In this way bipartisanship arises. Party designations become
purely nominal, and the stated issues between parties become
progressively trivial; and both are more and more openly kept up
with no other object than to cover from scrutiny the essential
identity of purpose in both parties.

  Thus the party system at once became in effect an elaborate
system of fetiches, which, in order to be made as impressive as
possible, were chiefly moulded up around the constitution, and
were put on show as "constitutional principles." The history of
the whole post-constitutional period, from 1789 to the present
day, is an instructive and cynical exhibit of the fate of these
fetiches when they encounter the one and only actual principle
of party action -- the principle of keeping open the channels of
access to the political means. When the fetich of "strict
construction," for example, has collided with this principle, it
has invariably gone by the board, the party that maintained it
simply changing sides. The anti-Federalist party took office in
1800 as the party of strict construction; yet, once in office,
it played ducks and drakes with the constitution, in behalf of
the special interests that it represented.[21]

----[21]
  Mr. Jefferson was the first to acknowledge that his purchase
  of the Louisiana territory was unconstitutional; but it added
  millions of acres to the sum of agrarian resource, and added
  an immense amount of prospective voting-strength to agrarian
  control of the political means, as against control by the
  financial and commercial interests represented by the
  Federalist party. Mr. Jefferson justified himself solely on
  the ground of public policy, an interesting anticipation of
  Lincoln's self-justification in 1861, for confronting Congress
  and the country with a like fait accompli -- this time,
  however, executed in behalf of financial and commercial
  interests as against the agrarian interests.
----[21]

The Federalists were nominally for loose construction, yet they
fought bitterly every one of the opposing party's
loose-constructionist measures -- the embargo, the protective
tariff and the national bank. They were the constitutional
nationalists of the deepest dye, as we have seen; yet in their
centre and stronghold, New England, they held the threat of
secession over the country throughout the period of what they
harshly called "Mr. Madison's war," the War of 1812, which was
in fact a purely imperialist adventure after annexation of
Floridian and Canadian territory, in behalf of stiffening
agrarian control of the political means; but when the planting
interests of the South made the same threat in 1861, they became
fervid nationalists again.

  Such exhibitions of pure fetichism, always cynical in their
transparent candour, make up the history of the party system.
Their reductio ad absurdum is now seen as perhaps complete --
one can not see how it could go further -- in the attitude of
the Democratic party towards its historical principles of state
sovereignty and strict construction. A fair match for this,
however, is found in a speech made the other day to a group of
exporting and importing interests by the mayor of New York --
always known as a Republican in politics -- advocating the hoary
Democratic doctrine of a low tariff!

  Throughout our post-constitutional period there is not on
record, as far as I know, a single instance of party adherence
to a fixed principle, qua principle, or to a political theory,
qua theory. Indeed, the very cartoons on the subject show how
widely it has come to be accepted that party-platforms, with
their cant of "issues," are so much sheer quackery, and that
campaign-promises are merely another name for thimblerigging.
The workaday practice of politics has been invariably
opportunist, or in other words, invariably conformable to the
primary function of the State; and it is largely for this reason
that the State's service exerts its most powerful attraction
upon an extremely low and sharp-set type of individual.[22]

----[22]
  Henry George made some very keep comment upon the almost
  incredible degradation that he saw taking place progressively
  in the personnel of the State's service. It is perhaps most
  conspicuous in the Presidency and the Senate, though it goes
  on pari passu elsewhere and throughout. As for the federal
  House of Representatives and the state legislative bodies,
  they must be seen to be believed.
----[22]

  The maintenance of this system of fetiches, however, gives
great enhancement to the prevailing general view of the State.
In that view, the State is made to appear as somehow deeply and
disinterestedly concerned with great principles of action; and
hence, in addition to its prestige as a pseudo-social
institution, it takes on the prestige of a kind of moral
authority, thus disposing of the last vestige of the doctrine of
natural rights by overspreading it heavily with the quicklime of
legalism; whatever is State-sanctioned is right. This double
prestige is assiduously inflated by many agencies; by a
State-dazzled pulpit, by a meretricious press, by a continuous
kaleidoscopic display of State pomp, panoply and circumstance,
and by all the innumerable devices of electioneering. These last
invariably take their stand on the foundation of some imposing
principle, as witness the agonized cry now going up here and
there in the land, for a "return to the constitution." All this
is simply "the interested clamours and sophistry," which means
no more and no less than it meant when the constitution was not
yet five years old, and Fisher Ames was observing contemptuously
that of all the legislative measures and proposals which were on
the carpet at the time, he scarce knew one that had not raised
this same cry, "not excepting a motion for adjournment."

  In fact, such popular terms of electioneering appeal are
uniformly and notoriously what Jeremy Bentham called
impostor-terms, and their use invariably marks one thing and one
only; it marks a state of apprehension, either fearful or
expectant, as the case may be, concerning access to the
political means. As we are seeing at the moment, once let this
access come under threat of straitening or stoppage, the menaced
interests immediately trot out the spavined, glandered hobby of
"state rights" or "a return to the constitution," and put it
through its galvanic movements. Let the incidence of
exploitation show the first sign of shifting, and we hear at
once from one source of "interested clamours and sophistry" that
"democracy" is in danger, and that the unparalleled excellences
of our civilization have come about solely through a policy of
"rugged individualism," carried out under terms of "free
competition"; while from another source we hear that the
enormities of laissez-faire have ground the faces of the poor,
and obstructed entrance into the More Abundant Life.[23]

----[23]
  Of all the impostor-terms in our political glossary, these are
  perhaps the most flagrantly impudent, and their employment
  perhaps the most flagitious. We have already seen that nothing
  remotely resembling democracy has ever existed here; nor yet
  has anything resembling free competition, for the existence of
  free competition is obviously incompatible with any exercise
  of the political means, even the feeblest. For the same
  reason, no policy of rugged individualism has ever existed;
  the most that rugged individualism has done to distinguish
  itself has been by way of running to the State for some form
  of economic advantage. If the reader has any curiousity about
  this, let him look up the number of American business
  enterprises that have made a success unaided by the political
  means, or the number of fortunes accumulated without such aid.
  Laissez-faire has become a term of pure opprobrium; those who
  use it either do not know what it means, or else wilfully
  pervert it. As for the unparalleled excellences of our
  civilization, it is perhaps enough to say that the statistics
  of our insurance-companies now show that four-fifths of our
  people who have reached the age of sixty-fiive are supported
  by their relatives or by some other form of charity.
----[23]

  The general upshot of all this is that we see politicians of
all schools and stripes behaving with the obscene depravity of
degenerate children; like the loose-footed gangs that infest the
railway-yards and purlieus of gas-houses, each group tries to
circumvent another with respect to the fruit accruing to acts of
public mischief. In other words, we see them behaving in a
strictly historical manner. Professor Laski's elaborate moral
distinction between the State and officialdom is devoid of
foundation. The State is not, as he would have it, a social
institution administered in an anti-social way. It is an
anti-social institution administered in the only way an
anti-social institution can be administered, and by the kind of
person who, in the nature of things, is best adapted to such
service.


=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

                                6

  SUCH has been the course of our experience from the beginning,
and such are the terms in which its stark uniformity has led us
to think of the State. This uniformity also goes far to account
for the development of a peculiar moral enervation with regard
to the State, exactly parallel to that which prevailed with
regard to the Church in the Middle Ages.[1]

----[1]
  Not long ago Professor Laski commented on the prevalence of
  this enervation among our young people, especially among our
  student-population. It has several contributing causes, but it
  is mainly to be accounted for, I think, by the unvarying
  uniformity of our experience. The State's pretensions have
  been so invariably extravagant, the disparity between them and
  its conduct so invariably manifest, that one could hardly
  expect anything else. Probably the protest against our
  imperialism in the Pacific and the Caribbean, after the
  Spanish War, marked the last major effort of an impotent and
  moribund decency. Mr. Laski's comparison with student-bodies
  in England and Europe lose some of their force when it is
  remembered that the devices of a fixed term and an
  irresponsible executive render the American State particularly
  insensitive to protest and inaccessible to effective censure.
  As Mr. Jefferson said, the one resource of impeachment is "not
  even a scarecrow."
----[1]

The Church controlled the distribution of certain privileges and
immunities, and if one approached it properly, one might get the
benefit of them. It stood as something to be run to in any kind
of emergency, temporal or spiritual; for the satisfaction of
ambition and cupidity, as well as for the more tenuous
assurances it held out against various forms of fear, doubt and
sorrow. As long as this was so, the anomalies were more or less
contentedly acquiesced in; and thus a chronic moral enervation,
too negative to be called broadly cynical, was developed towards
the vast overbuilding of its material structure.[2]

----[2]
  As an example of this overbuilding, at the beginning of the
  sixteenth century one-fifth of the land of France was owned by
  the Church; it was held mainly by monastic establishments.
----[2]

  A like enervation pervades our society with respect to the
State, and for like reasons. It effects especially those who
take the State's pretensions at face value and regard it as a
social institution whose policies of continuous intervention are
wholesome and necessary; and it also affects the great majority
who have no clear idea of the State, but merely accept it as
something that exists, and never think about it except when some
intervention bears unfavourably upon their interests. There is
little need to dwell upon the amount of aid thus given to the
State's progress in self-aggrandizement, or to show in detail or
by illustration the courses by which this spiritlessness
promotes the State's steady policy of intervention, exaction and
overbuilding.[3]

----[3]
  It may be observed, however, that mere use-and-wont interferes
  with our seeing how egregiously the original structure of the
  American State, with its system of superimposed jurisdictions
  and reduplicated functions, was overbuilt. At the present
  time, a citizen lives under half-a-dozen or more separate
  overlapping jurisdictions, federal, state, county, township,
  municipal, borough, school-district, ward, federal district.
  Nearly all of these have power to tax him directly or
  indirectly, or both, and as we all know, the only limit to the
  exercise of this power is what can be safely got by it; and
  thus we arrive at the principle rather naively formulated by
  the late senator from Utah, and sometimes spoken of ironically
  as "Smoot's law of government" -- the principle, as he put it,
  that the cost of government tends to increase from year to
  year, no matter which party is in power. It would be
  interesting to know the exact distribution of the burden of
  jobholders and mendicant political retainers -- for it must
  not be forgotten that the subsidized "unemployed" are now a
  permanent body of patronage -- among income-receiving
  citizens. Counting indirect taxes and voluntary contributions
  as well as direct taxes, it would probably be not far off the
  mark to say that every two citizens are carrying a third
  between them.
----[3]

  Every intervention by the State enables another, and this in
turn another, and so on indefinitely; and the State stands ever
ready and eager to make them, often on its own motion, often
again wangling plausibility for them through the specious
suggestion of interested persons. Sometimes the matter at issue
is in its nature simple, socially necessary, and devoid of any
character that would bring it into the purview of politics.[4]

----[4]
  For example, the basic processes of exchange are necessary,
  non-political, and as simple as any in the world. The humblest
  Yankee rustic who swaps eggs for bacon in the country store,
  or a day's labour for potatoes in a neighbour's field,
  understands them thoroughly, and manages them competently.
  Their formula is: goods or services in return for goods or
  services. There is not, never has been, and never will be, a
  single transaction anywhere in the realm of "business" -- no
  matter what its magnitude or apparent complexity -- that is
  not directly reducible to this formula. For convenience in
  facilitating exchange, however, money was introduced; and
  money is a complication, and so are the other evidences of
  debt, such as cheques, drafts, notes, bills, bonds,
  stock-certificates, which were introduced for the same
  reasons. These complications were found to be exploitable, and
  the consequent number and range of State interventions to
  "regulate" and "supervise" their exploitation appear to be
  without end.
----[4]

For convenience, however, complications are erected on it; then
presently someone sees that these complications are exploitable,
and proceeds to exploit them; then another, and another, until
the rivalries and collisions of interest thus generated issue in
a more or less general disorder. When this takes place, the
logical thing, obviously, is to recede, and let the disorder be
settled in the slower and more troublesome way, through the
operation of natural laws. But in such circumstances recession
is never for a moment thought of; the suggestion would be put
down as sheer lunacy. Instead, the interests unfavourably
affected -- little aware, perhaps, how much worse the cure is
than the disease, or at any rate little caring -- immediately
call on the State to cut in arbitrarily between cause and
effect, and clear up the disorder out of hand.[5]

----[5]
  It is one of the most extraordinary things in the world, that
  the interests which abhor and dread collectivism are the ones
  which have the most eagerly urged on the State to take each
  one of the successive single steps that lead directly to
  collectivism. Who urged it on to form the Federal Trade
  Commission; to expand the Department of Commerce; to form the
  Interstate Commerce Commission and the Federal Farm Board; to
  pass the Anti-trust Acts; to build highways, dig out
  waterways, provide airway services, subsidize shipping? If
  these steps do not tend straight to collectivism, which way do
  they tend? Furthermore, when the interests which encouraged
  the State to take them are horrified by the apparition of
  communism and the Red menace, just what are their
  protestations worth?
----[5]

The State then intervenes by imposing another set of
complications upon the first; these in turn are found
exploitable, another demand arises, another set of
complications, still more intricate, is erected upon the first
two;[6]

----[6]
  The text of the Senate's proposed banking law, published on
  the first of July, 1935, almost exactly filled four pages of
  the Wall Street Journal! Really now -- now really -- can any
  conceivable absurdity surpass that?
----[6]

and the same sequence is gone through again and again until the
recurrent disorder becomes acute enough to open the way for a
sharking political adventurer to come forward and, always
alleging "necessity, the tyrant's plea," to organize a coup
d'Etat.[7]

----[7]
  As here in 1932, in Italy, Germany and Russia latterly, in
  France after the collapse of the Directory, in Rome after the
  death of Pertinax, and so on.
----[7]

  But more often the basic matter at issue represents an
original intervention of the State, an original allotment of the
political means. Each of these allotments, as we have seen, is a
charter of highwaymanry, a license to appropriate the
labour-products of others without compensation. Therefore it is
in the nature of things that when such a license is issued, the
State must follow it up with an indefinite series of
interventions to systematize and "regulate" its use. The State's
endless progressive encroachments that are recorded in the
history of the tariff, their impudent and disgusting
particularity, and the prodigious amount of apparatus necessary
to give them effect, furnish a conspicuous case in point.
Another is furnished by the history of our railway-regulation.
It is nowadays of the fashion, even among those who ought to
know better, to hold "rugged individualism" and laissez-faire
responsible for the riot of stock-watering, rebates,
rate-cutting, fraudulent bankruptcies, and the like, which
prevailed in our railway-practice after the Civil War, but they
had no more to do with it than they have with the precession of
the equinoxes. The fact is that our railways, with few
exceptions, did not grow up in response to any actual economic
demand. They were speculative enterprises enabled by State
intervention, by allotment of the political means in the form of
land-grants and subsidies; and of all the evils alleged against
our railway-practice, there is not one but what is directly
traceable to this primary intervention.[8]

----[8]
  Ignorance has no assignable limits; yet when one hears our
  railway-companies cited as specimens of rugged individualism,
  one is put to it to say whether the speaker's sanity should be
  questioned, or his integrity. Our transcontinental companies,
  in particular, are hardly to be called railway-companies,
  since transportation was purely incidental to their true
  business, which was that of land-jobbing and subsidy-hunting.
  I remember seeing the statement a few years ago -- I do not
  vouch for it, but it can not be far off the fact -- that at
  the time of writing, the current cash value of the political
  means allotted to the Northern Pacific Company would enable it
  to build four transcontinental lines, and in addition, to
  build a fleet of ships and maintain it in around-the-world
  service. If this sort of thing represents rugged
  individualism, let future lexicographers make the most of it.
----[8]

  So it is with shipping. There was no valid economic demand for
adventure in the carrying trade; in fact, every sound economic
consideration was dead against it. It was entered upon through
State intervention, instigated by shipbuilders and their allied
interests; and the mess engendered by their manipulation of the
political means is now the ground of demand for further and
further coercive intervention. So it is with what, by an
unconscionable stretch of language, goes by the name of
farming.[9]

----[9]
  A farmer, properly speaking, is a freeholder who directs his
  operations, first, towards making his family, as far as
  possible, an independent unit, economically self-contained.
  What he produces over and above this requirement he converts
  into a cash crop. There is a second type of agriculturist, who
  is not a farmer but a manufacturer, as much so as one who
  makes woolen or cotton textiles or leather shoes. He raises
  one crop only -- milk, corn, wheat, cotton, or whatever it may
  be -- which is wholly a cash crop; and if the market for his
  particular commodity goes down below cost of production, he is
  in the same bad luck as the motor-car maker or shoemaker or
  pantsmaker who turns out more of his special kind of goods
  than the market will bear. His family is not independent; he
  buys everything his household uses; his children can not live
  on cotton or milk or corn, any more than the
  shoe-manufacturer's children can live on shoes. There is still
  to be distinguished a third type, who carries on agriculture
  as a sort of taxpaying subsidiary to speculation in
  agricultural land-values. It is the last two classes who
  chiefly clamour for intervention, and they are often, indeed,
  in a bad way; but it is not farming that puts them there.
----[9]

There are very few troubles so far heard of as normally
besetting this form of enterprise but what are directly
traceable to the State's primary intervention in establishing a
system of land-tenure which gives a monopoly-right over
rental-values as well as over use-values; and as long as that
system is in force, one coercive intervention after another is
bound to take place in support of it.[10]

----[10]
  The very limit of particularity in this course of coercive
  intervention seems to have been reached, according to
  press-reports, in the state of Wisconsin. On 31 May, the
  report is, Governor La Follette signed a bill requiring all
  public eating-places to serve two-thirds of an ounce of
  Wisconsin-made cheese and two-thirds of an ounce of
  Wisconsin-made butter with every meal costing more than
  twenty-four cents. To match this for particularity one would
  pretty much have to go back to some of the British Trade Acts
  of the eighteenth century, and it would be hard to find an
  exact match, even there. If this passes muster under the "due
  process of law" clause -- whether the eating-house pays for
  these supplies or passes their cost along to the consumer --
  one can see nothing to prevent the legislature of New York,
  say, from requiring that each citizen buy annually two hats
  made by Knox, and two suits made by Finchley.
----[10]

                               II

  Thus we see how ignorance and delusion concerning the nature
of the State combine with extreme moral debility and myopic
self-interest -- what Ernest Renan so well calls la bassesse de
l'homme interesse -- to enable the steadily accelerated
conversion of social power into State power that has gone on
from the beginning of our political independence. It is a
curious anomaly. State power has an unbroken record of inability
to do anything efficiently, economically, disinterestedly or
honestly; yet when the slightest dissatisfaction arises over any
exercise of social power, the aid of the agent least qualified
to give aid is immediately called for. Does social power
mismanage banking-practice in this-or-that special instance --
then let the State, which never has shown itself able to keep
its own finances from sinking promptly into the slough of
misfeasance, wastefulness and corruption, intervene to
"supervise" or "regulate" the whole body of banking-practice, or
even take it over entire. Does social power, in this-or-that
case, bungle the business of railway-management -- then let the
State, which has bungled every business it has ever undertaken,
intervene and put its hand to the business of "regulating"
railway-operation. Does social power now and then send out an
unseaworthy ship to disaster -- then let the State, which
inspected and passed the Morro Castle, be given a freer swing at
controlling the routine of the shipping trade. Does social power
here and there exercise a grinding monopoly over the generation
and distribution of electric current -- then let the State,
which allots and maintains monopoly, come in and intervene with
a general scheme of price-fixing which works more unforeseen
hardships than it heals, or else let it go into direct
competition; or, as the collectivists urge, let it take over the
monopoly bodily. "Ever since society has existed," says Herbert
Spencer, "disappointment has been preaching, `Put not your trust
in legislation'; and yet the trust in legislation seems hardly
diminished."

  But it may be asked where we are to go for relief from the
misuses of social power, if not to the State. What other
recourse have we? Admitting that under our existing mode of
political organization we have none, it must still be pointed
out that this question rests on the old inveterate
misapprehension of the State's nature, presuming that the State
is a social institution, whereas it is an anti-social
institution; that is to say, the question rests on an
absurdity.[11]

----[11]
  Admitting that the lamb in the fable had no other recourse
  than the wolf, one may nonetheless see that its appeal to the
  wolf was a waste of breath.
----[11]

It is certainly true that the business of government, in
maintaining "freedom and security," and "to secure these
rights," is to make a recourse to justice costless, easy and
informal; but the State, on the contrary, is primarily concerned
with injustice, and its primary function is to maintain a regime
of injustice; hence, as we see daily, its disposition is to put
justice as far out of reach, and to make the effort after
justice as costly and difficult as it can. One may put it in a
word that while government is by its nature concerned with the
administration of justice, the State is by its nature concerned
with the administration of law -- law, which the State itself
manufactures for the service of its own primary ends. Therefore
an appeal to the State, based on the ground of justice, is
futile in any circumstances,[12]

----[12]
  This is now so well understood that no one goes to a court for
  justice; he goes for gain or revenge. It is interesting to
  observe that some philosophers of law now say that law has no
  relation to justice, and is not meant to have any such
  relation. In their view, law represents only a progressive
  registration of the ways in which experience leads us to
  believe that society can best get along. One might hesitate a
  long time about accepting their notion of what law is, but one
  must appreciate their candid affirmation of what is not.
----[12]

for whatever action the State might take in response to it would
be conditioned by the State's own paramount interest, and would
hence be bound to result, as we see such action invariably
resulting, in as great injustice as that which it pretends to be
correct, or as a rule, greater. The question thus presumes, in
short, that the State may on occasion be persuaded to act out of
character; and this is levity.

  But passing on from this special view of the question, and
regarding it in a more general way, we see that what it actually
amounts to is a plea for arbitrary interference with the order
of nature, an arbitrary cutting-in to avert the penalty which
nature lays on any and every form of error, whether wilful or
ignorant, voluntary or involuntary; and no attempt at this has
ever yet failed to cost more than it came to. Any contravention
of natural law, any tampering with the natural order of things,
must have its consequences, and the only recourse for escaping
them is such as entails worse consequences. Nature recks nothing
of intentions, good or bad; the one thing she will not tolerate
is disorder, and she is very particular about getting her full
pay for any attempt to create disorder. She gets it sometimes by
very indirect methods, often by very roundabout and unforeseen
ways, but she always gets it. "Things and actions are what they
are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be;
why, then, should we desire to be deceived?" It would seem that
our civilization is greatly given to this infantile addiction --
greatly given to persuading itself that it can find some means
which nature will tolerate, whereby we may eat our cake and have
it; and it strongly resents the stubborn fact that there is no
such means.[13]

----[13]
  This resentment is very remarkable. In spite of our failure
  with one conspicuously ambitious experiment in State
  intervention, I dare say there would still be great resentment
  against Professor Sumner's ill-famed remark that when people
  talked tearfully about "the poor drunkard lying in the
  gutter," it seemed never to occur to them that the gutter
  might be quite the right place for him to lie; or against the
  bishop of Peterborough's declaration that he would rather see
  England free than sober. Yet both these remarks merely
  recognize the great truth which experience forces on our
  notice every day, that attempts to interfere with the natural
  order of things are bound, in one way or another, to turn out
  for the worse.
----[13]

  It will be clear to anyone who takes the trouble to think the
matter through, that under a regime of natural order, that is to
say under government, which makes no positive interventions
whatever on the individual, but only negative interventions in
behalf of simple justice -- not law, but justice -- misuses of
social power would be effectively corrected; whereas we know by
interminable experience that the State's positive interventions
do not correct them. Under a regime of actual individualism,
actually free competition, actual laissez-faire -- a regime
which, as we have seen, can not possibly coexist with the State
-- a serious or continuous misuse of social power would be
virtually impracticable.[14]

----[14]
  The horrors of England's industrial life in the last century
  furnish a standing brief for addicts of positive intervention.
  Child-labour and woman-labour in the mills and mines; Coketown
  and Mr. Bounderby; starvation wages; killing hours; vile and
  hazardous conditions of labour; coffin ships officered by
  ruffians -- all these are glibly charged off by reformers and
  publicists to a regime of rugged individualism, unrestrained
  competition, and laissez-faire. This is an absurdity on its
  face, for no such regime ever existed in England. They were
  due to the State's primary intervention whereby the population
  of England was expropriated from the land; due to the State's
  removal of the land from competition with industry for labour.
  Nor did the factory system and the "industrial revolution"
  have the least thing to do with creating those hordes of
  miserable beings. When the factory system came in, those
  hordes were already there, expropriated, and they went into
  the mills for whatever Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Plugson of
  Undershot would give them, because they had no choice but to
  beg, steal or starve. Their misery and degradation did not lie
  at the door of individualism; they lay nowhere but at the door
  of the State. Adam Smith's economics are not the economics of
  individualism; they are the economics of landowners and
  mill-owners. Our zealots of positive intervention would do
  well to read the history of the Enclosures Acts and the work
  of the Hammonds, and see what they can make of them.
----[14]

  I shall not take up space with amplifying these statements
because, in the first place, this has already been done by
Spencer, in his essays entitled The Man versus the State; and in
the second place, because I wish above all things to avoid the
appearance of suggesting that a regime such as these statements
contemplate is practicable, or that I am ever so covertly
encouraging anyone to dwell on the thought of such a regime.
Perhaps, some aeons hence, if the planet remains so long
habitable, the benefits accruing to conquest and confiscation
may be adjudged over-costly; the State may in consequence be
superseded by government, the political means suppressed, and
the fetiches which give nationalism and patriotism their present
execrable character may be broken down. But the remoteness and
uncertainty of this prospect makes any thought of it fatuous,
and any concern with it futile. Some rough measure of its
remoteness may perhaps be gained by estimating the growing
strength of the forces at work against it. Ignorance and error,
which the State's prestige steadily deepens, are against it; la
bassesse de l'homme interesse, steadily pushing its purposes to
greater lengths of turpitude, is against it; moral enervation,
steadily proceeding to the point of complete insensitiveness, is
against it. What combination of influences more powerful than
this can one imagine, and what can one imagine possible to be
done in the face of such a combination?

  To the sum of these, which may be called spiritual influences,
may be added the overweening physical strength of the State,
which is ready to be called into action at once against any
affront to the State's prestige. Few realize how enormously and
how rapidly in recent years the State has everywhere built up
its apparatus of armies and police forces. The State has
thoroughly learned the lesson laid down by Septimius Severus, on
his death-bed. "Stick together," he said to his successors, "pay
the soldiers, and don't worry about anything else." It is now
known to every intelligent person that there can be no such
thing as a revolution as long as this advice is followed; in
fact, there has been no revolution in the modern world since
1848 -- every so-called revolution has been merely a coup
d'Etat.[15]

----[15]
  When Sir Robert Peel proposed to organize the police force of
  London, Englishmen said openly that half a dozen throats cut
  in Whitechapel every year would be a cheap price to pay for
  keeping such an instrument of tyranny out of the State's
  hands. We are all beginning to realize now that there is a
  great deal to be said for that view of the matter.
----[15]

All talk of the possibility of a revolution in America is in
part perhaps ignorant, but mostly dishonest; it is merely the
"interested clamours and sophistry" of persons who have some
sort of ax to grind. Even Lenin acknowledged that a revolution
is impossible anywhere until the military and police forces
become disaffected; and the last place to look for that,
probably, is here. We have all seen demonstrations of a disarmed
populace, and local riots carried on with primitive weapons, and
we have also seen how they ended, as in Homestead, Chicago, and
the mining districts of West Virginia, for instance. Coxey's
Army marched on Washington -- and it kept off the grass.

  Taking the sum of the State's physical strength, with the
force of powerful spiritual influences behind it, one asks
again, what can be done against the State's progress in
self-aggrandizement? Simply nothing. So far from encouraging any
hopeful contemplation of the unattainable, the student of
civilized man will offer no conclusion but that nothing can be
done. He can regard the course of our civilization only as he
would regard the course of a man in a row-boat on the lower
reaches of the Niagara -- as an instance of Nature's
unconquerable intolerance of disorder, and in the end, an
example of the penalty which she puts upon any attempt at
interference with order. Our civilization may at the outset have
taken its chances with the current of Statism either ignorantly
or deliberately; it makes no difference. Nature cares nothing
whatever about motive or intention; she cares only for order,
and looks to see only that her repugnance to disorder shall be
vindicated, and that her concern with the regular orderly
sequences of things and actions shall be upheld in the outcome.
Emerson, in one of his great moments of inspiration, personified
cause and effect as "the chancellors of God"; and invariable
experience testifies that the attempt to nullify or divert or in
any wise break in upon their sequences must have its own reward.

  "Such," says Professor Ortega y Gasset, "was the lamentable
fate of ancient civilization." A dozen empires have already
finished the course that ours began three centuries ago. The
lion and the lizard keep the vestiges that attest their passage
upon earth, vestiges of cities which in their day were as proud
and powerful as ours -- Tadmor, Persepolis, Luxor, Baalbek --
some of them indeed forgotten for thousands of years and brought
to memory again only by the excavator, like those of the Mayas,
and those buried in the sands of the Gobi. The sites which now
bear Narbonne and Marseilles have borne the habitat of four
successive civilizations, each of them, as St. James says, even
as a vapour which appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth
away. The course of all these civilizations was the same.
Conquest, confiscation, the erection of the State; then the
sequences which we have traced in the course of our own
civilization; then the shock of some irruption which the social
structure was too far weakened to resist, and from which it was
left too disorganized to recover; and then the end.

  Our pride resents the thought that the great highways of New
England will one day lie deep under layers of encroaching
vegetation, as the more substantial Roman roads of Old England
have lain for generations; and that only a group of heavily
overgrown hillocks will be left to attract the archaeologist's
eye to the hidden debris of our collapsed skyscrapers. Yet it is
to just this, we know, that our civilization will come; and we
know it because we know that there never has been, never is, and
never will be, any disorder in nature -- because we know that
things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of
them will be what they will be.

  But there is no need to dwell lugubriously upon the probable
circumstances of a future so far distant. What we and our more
nearly immediate descendants shall see is a steady progress in
collectivism running off into a military despotism of a severe
type. Closer centralization; a steadily growing bureaucracy;
State power and faith in State power increasing, social power
and faith in social power diminishing; the State absorbing a
continually larger proportion of the national income; production
languishing, the State in consequence taking over one "essential
industry" after another, managing them with ever-increasing
corruption, inefficiency and prodigality, and finally resorting
to a system of forced labour. Then at some point in this
progress, a collision of State interests, at least as general as
that which occurred in 1914, will result in an industrial and
financial dislocation too severe for the asthenic social
structure to bear; and from this the State will be left to "the
rusty death of machinery," and the casual anonymous forces of
dissolution will be supreme.

                               III

  But it may quite properly be asked, if we in common with the
rest of the Western world are so far gone in Statism as to make
this outcome inevitable, what is the use of a book which merely
shows that it is inevitable? By its own hypothesis the book is
useless. Upon the very evidence it offers, no one's political
opinions are likely to be changed by it, no one's practical
attitude towards the State will be modified by it; and if they
were, according to the book's own premises, what good could they
do?

  Assuredly I do not expect this book to change anyone's
political opinions, for it is not meant to do that. One or two,
perhaps, here and there, may be moved to look a little into the
subject-matter on their own account, and thus perhaps their
opinions would undergo some slight loosening -- or some
constriction -- but this is the very most that would happen. In
general, too, I would be the first to acknowledge that no
results of the kind which we agree to call practical could
accrue to the credit of a book of this order, were it a hundred
times as cogent as this one -- no results, that is, that would
in the least retard the State's progress in self-aggrandizement
and thus modify the consequences of the State's course. There
are two reasons, however, one general and one special, why the
publication of such a book is admissible.

  The general reason is that when in any department of thought a
person has, or thinks he has, a view of the plain intelligible
order of things, it is proper that he should record that view
publicly, with no thought whatever of the practical
consequences, or lack of consequences, likely to ensue upon his
so doing. He might indeed be thought bound to do this as a
matter of abstract duty; not to crusade or propagandize for his
view or seek to impose it upon anyone -- far from that! -- not
to concern himself at all with either its acceptance or its
disallowance; but merely to record it. This, I say, might be
thought his duty to the natural truth of things, but it is at
all events his right; it is admissible.

  The special reason has to do with the fact that in every
civilization, however generally prosaic, however addicted to the
short-time point of view on human affairs, there are always
certain alien spirits who, while outwardly conforming to the
requirements of the civilization around them, still keep a
disinterested regard for the plain intelligible law of things,
irrespective of any practical end. They have an intellectual
curiosity, sometimes touched with emotion, concerning the august
order of nature; they are impressed by the contemplation of it,
and like to know as much about it as they can, even in
circumstances where its operation is ever so manifestly
unfavourable to their best hopes and wishes. For these, a work
like this, however in the current sense impractical, is not
quite useless; and those of them it reaches will be aware that
for such as themselves, and such only, it was written.


                             THE END


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