COPYRIGHT 1936, 1954 BY

ROSE WILDER LANE

Printed and bound in the United States of America by

The CAXTON PRINTERS, Ltd.

Caldwell, Idaho

77808

Digital Edition by the Ludwig von Mises Institute 2013

eISBN: 978-1-61016-597-6

IN 1919 I was a communist. My Bolshevik friends of those days are scattered now; some are bourgeois, some are dead, some are in China and Russia, and I did not know the last American chiefs of the Third International, who now officially embrace Democracy. They would repudiate me even as a renegade comrade, for I was never a member of The Party. But it was merely an accident that I was not.

I was in Transcaucasian Russia at the time, drinking tea with cherry preserves in it and trying to hold a lump of sugar between my teeth while I did so. It’s difficult. My plump Russian hostess and her placid, golden-bearded husband beamed at me, and a number of round-cheeked children stared in wonder at the American. Their house was a century old, and charming. Icons hung on thick walls whiter than snow; featherbeds rounded upward in the bed-niche of the large brick stove, which was also white-washed.

The picture of the economic revolution as the final step to freedom was false as soon as I asked myself that question. For, in actual fact, The State, The Government, cannot exist. They are abstract concepts, useful enough in their place, as the theory of minus numbers is useful in mathematics. In actual living experience, however, it is impossible to subtract anything from nothing; when a purse is empty, it is empty, it cannot contain a minus ten dollars. On this same plane of actuality, no State, no Government, exists.

In Russia, then, our hope was realized; the economic revolution had occurred. The Communist Party had captured power with the cry, “All power to the councils!”

I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom. Like all Americans, I took for granted the individual liberty to which I had been born. It seemed as necessary and as inevitable as the air I breathed; it seemed the natural element in which human beings lived.

The thought that I might lose it had never remotely occurred to me. And I could not conceive that multitudes of human beings would ever willingly live without it.

When I asked myself, “Am I truly free?” I began slowly to understand the nature of man and man’s situation on this planet. I understood at last that every human being is free; that I am endowed by the Creator with inalienable liberty as I am endowed with life; that my freedom is inseparable from my life, since freedom is the individual’s self-controlling nature. My freedom is my control of my own life-energy, for the uses of which I, alone, am therefore responsible.

For each of us, the answer to that question is a personal one. But the final answer cannot be personal, for individual freedom of choice and of action cannot long exist except among multitudes of individuals who choose it and who are willing to to pay for it.

Multitudes of human beings will not do this unless their freedom is worth more than it costs, not only in value to their own souls but also in terms of the general welfare and the future of their country, which means the welfare and the future of their children.

Look at this phenomenon: The United States of America.

For two hundred and fifty years, Europe colonizes this continent. Then Spain holds the Gulf and the Floridas. Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Russia is in the north. France controls the Great Lakes and the waterways of the Mississippi valley, the fur trade and the Missouri mines. Along the Atlantic coast, between wilderness and sea, are scattered little English colonies.

For years now, I have been looking at America. I had spent more than thirty years in my own country, before; I had traveled over it everywhere and had lived in many of its States, but I had never seen it. Americans should look at America. Look at this vast, infinitely various, completely unstandardized, complex, subtle, passionate, strong, weak, beautiful, inorganic and intensely vital land.

How could we be so bemused by books and by the desire of our own minds to make a pattern, as to apply to these United States the ideology of Europe?