How Do We Know

20

OUR WORK? TIME WILL TELL

Not armies, not nations, have advanced the race; but here and there in the course of ages, an individual has stood up and cast his shadow over the world.

—E. H. CHAPIN

This American clergyman (1814-80) was blest with hindsight and foresight. He knew of those sages over the centuries who stood foursquare for their righteous convictions, set examples for the advancing of the human race—cast their shadows over the world!

Some nations may have used their armies solely for defensive purposes, but most armies throughout world history have had only aggressive purposes. I feel personally involved in this matter, for my family has had quite a war record. My great-great-great-grand-father and my great-great-grandfather fought in the Revolutionary War, my grandfather in the Civil War, I in World War I, and my two sons in World War II. As I have written earlier, it has taken me all of these years to see the light.1 I now see the nonsense of war; I see that the better alternative is free trade among nations. Dwight Eisenhower, with a far greater experience, had a view which I share: “When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing!”

A nation—apart from the families of men, women and children who comprise it—is a mere label for a piece of real estate. If the citizens are intelligent, industrious, honest and kind they make up a great nation regardless of the geography. This is just as true of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as of the United States of America. Apart from the people we have here only labels which mislead the thoughtless. Here are three among the many agreements with E. H. Chapin:

Territory is but the body of a nation. The people who inhabit its hills and valleys are its souls, its spirit, its life.

—James A. Garfield

National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness and vice.

—Samuel Smiles

The true grandeur of nations is in those qualities which constitute the true greatness of the individual.

—Charles Sumner

With reference to Samuel Smiles’ observation, there is no need to elaborate on why national decay is born of individual idleness, selfishness and vice. The rise and fall of the Roman Empire is but one of many examples throughout all history. Paraphrasing the English poet, Lord Byron (1788-1824): “’Tis vice that digs her own voluptuous tomb.”

Now for the opposite—the most remarkable demonstration of how “national progress is the sum of individual industry, energy and uprightness in all history.” It took place in Florence when it was a nation and not a city as now. The Duke of Florence, known as Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-92) was wealthy, a great scholar and had as much political power as any dictator who ever lived.

Lorenzo limited his great political power to keeping the peace. Florentians acted creatively as they pleased; an essentially free society prevailed which accounted for one of the greatest outbursts of creativity up to that time and laid the ground for the birth of the Italian Renaissance.

When Lorenzo passed on to his reward, his son, Piero, became the Duke whom the unlimited power corrupted. The Florentians drove that family—the Medici—out of their nation, never to return.2 The rise for a good reason and a fall for an equally good reason!

Wrote Elisha Friedman: “When a national ideal dies, a nation perishes.” Lorenzo’s ideal died when his son, Piero, took over. The nation perished! I am reminded of a thought by Shakespeare: “Man, proud man! dressed in a little brief authority, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep.”

The English poet, Samuel Butler, expressed the same idea a generation later in this enlightening jingle:

Authority intoxicates,

And makes mere sots of magistrates;

The fumes of it invade the brain,

And make men giddy, proud, and vain.

Lord Acton (1834-1902), added his wisdom: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Here is the way my dictionary defines the kind of government that “makes the angels weep,” that “intoxicates,” that “corrupts absolutely”: “To exercise authority over, direct; control; rule; manage.” Authoritarianism on the rampage!

In our America—once the home of the free—authoritarianism, for the past few decades, has raged unchecked, increasing each year by horrendous leaps toward a politico-economic hell. The American theologian, Tryon Edwards (1809-94), cited the cause of such a deplorable mess, of a kind that has infected the citizens of all nations throughout history: “Hell is truth seen too late—duty neglected in its season.” And this wise man added: “Much of the glory and sublimity of truth is connected with its mystery. To understand everything we must be as God.”

Duty’s season is always past, present and future. Duty-vacations are taboo! The late Robert A. Millikan, a FEE Trustee, one of the world’s greatest scientists and Nobel Prize winner in physics, wrote: “Duty has nothing to do with what somebody else conceives to be for the common good.” Duty has to do with what you and I conceive to be for our own good. What’s for the common good is a mystery to every citizen. Our one and only duty? Intellectual, moral and spiritual growth!

May our work—yours and ours—result in a return to freedom for the U.S.A. and, hopefully, for the world. Let us be freemen whom the truth makes free!

• 1See Science Is a Sacred Cow by Anthony Standen (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1950), pp. 63-64.
• 2“No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words ‘no’ and ‘not’ employed in restraint of governmental power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.” (“Liberty and Ethical Values,” Edmund A. Opitz)