The Mainspring of Human Progress

Chapter 7

THE STATIC CENTER

THERE is no denying the fact that human beings progress and prosper in proportion to the degree to which individual initiative is permitted, or at least not prevented. But Old World government has always been based on the fallacious idea of an authority controlling a planned economy for the so-called common good. Actually, it is nothing more than the arbitrary use of physical force by persons upon persons; and regardless of the high motives and good intentions, the effect is the same – it always slows down progress and hinders the production and distribution of the necessities of life.

This explains the historical fact – at first surprising – that a sincere, conscientious, hard-working ruler always does the most harm to his own subjects. The lazy, dissolute ruler neglects his job. Caligula, for instance, merely wasted goods in riotous extravagance and tortured just a few hundred of his subjects for his personal enjoyment. The majority of the people always get along comparatively well under a ruler like Caligula.

It was the sober, ascetic, industrious Augustus Caesar, toiling for the welfare of his Empire and its people, who began the destruction of Rome and laid the foundation for the misery and human degradation which Europeans suffered for centuries thereafter. He launched a planned economy which was to serve as the basis for the Roman world peace. The Roman legions gave it to all the people of the then-known world – as fast as they could be conquered. From Africa and Asia to England that peace extended, and it was designed to last forever.

The hairsplitting economic regulations were perfected by Diocletian, whose stern directives were so efficiently administered that farmers could no longer farm; and many of the small businessmen, faced with starvation, committed suicide in preference to being executed for black marketing.

There was no work for the workingman, so the beneficent government stepped in and, by taxing the rich, managed for a while to provide the populace with bread and circus tickets.

But that was no solution. The improvement was shortlived. Money can’t buy goods unless the goods are produced.

The mounting taxes put more and more people out of business. An increasing number of workers were forced onto tax-supported relief until there was not enough productive energy at work to pay the tax bills. The great Roman Empire – with its plans for a thousand years of peace and security – collapsed into the Dark Ages.

That was the work of the best of emperors.

British Empire

At the other extreme, let us turn to England, which, for many centuries, was blessed with some of the worst rulers ever to wear a crown. If Richard the Lion-Hearted had stayed at home and tended to his job, or if King John had been half as good a ruler as his grandfather, there never would have been a Magna Charta for freedom.

The only able Tudor was Queen Elizabeth, whose father, Henry VIII, had left England so uncontrolled that it took all her energy and wit just to hold on to her throne. There was no time left for her to rule, and never was a realm so loosely governed. She built up the British Navy by doing nothing for it. She told her sea captains to act on their own responsibility and at their own expense. She wouldn’t even pay for the powder and lead they used in defending England against the Spanish Armada. Her plan was to do no planning. With great firmness of character and consistency of purpose, she always decided to decide nothing. By this highly intelligent means, she let her subjects found the British Empire.

The good Queen Bess was succeeded by the Stuarts – a charming, self-indulgent breed of “divine right” kings, the poodle dogs of their species, with not a moral under their curly wigs. They governed so negligently that the butchers and bakers and candlestick makers chucked them off the throne and made ex-brewer Cromwell the ruler of England.

Even after such a lesson, the Stuarts later came back to power so lazily that Charles II gave his parliament the order: “I pray, contrive any good short bills which may improve the industry of the nation.”4

That was all. And while the King uttered such idle words, his police were so few that it was no longer necessary to bribe them. Thousands of smugglers took over, and boomed British foreign trade from every port and cove. They were so numerous that a wit described “Merrie England” as a piece of land entirely surrounded by smugglers!

Woolen Shrouds

At that time, Continental weavers depended on England for raw wool, which they wove into cloth far superior to the product of English looms. To protect the domestic manufacturers, Parliament prohibited any further export of English wool. Of course, this measure would have ruined the English woolgrowers; but as always in all history, realistic tradesmen rescued commerce.

And when the prospering English woolgrowers expanded production so rapidly that the black marketeers could no longer handle all the export trade, Charles offered only one little remedy for “overproduction.” He decreed that in England no corpse could be buried that was not wrapped in a woolen shroud of domestic manufacture.

The measure was strictly enforced; the wool was buried, but ghouls dug up the corpses and stole the shrouds, which, through bootlegging, finally covered the naked legs of London’s workingmen.

Germany and France

The Continental rulers with their powerful police forces were more efficient, especially in the Germanies where everything was so thoroughly regulated that production and commerce almost ceased to exist. And here is Buckle’s comment, with particular reference to France:

“In every quarter, and at every moment, the hand of government was felt. Duties on importation, and duties on exportation; bounties to raise up a losing trade, and taxes to pull down a remunerative one; this branch of industry forbidden, and that branch of industry encouraged; one article of commerce must not be grown, because it was grown in the colonies, another article might be grown and bought, but not sold again, while a third article might be bought and sold, but not leave the country. Then, too, we find laws to regulate wages; laws to regulate prices; laws to regulate profits; laws to regulate the interest of money; custom-house arrangements of the most vexatious kind, aided by a complicated scheme, which was well called the sliding scale, – a scheme of such perverse ingenuity, that the duties constantly varied on the same article, and no man could calculate beforehand what he would have to pay…. The tolls were so onerous, as to double and often quadruple the cost of production.… A large part of all this was by way of protection: that is to say, the money was avowedly raised, and the inconvenience suffered, not for the use of the government, but for the benefit of the people; in other words, the industrious classes were robbed, in order that industry might thrive.

“… the first inevitable consequence was, that, in every part of Europe, there arose numerous and powerful gangs of armed smugglers, who lived by disobeying the laws which their ignorant rulers had imposed. These men, desperate from fear of punishment … spread, wherever they came, drunkenness, theft, and dissoluteness; and familiarized their associates with those coarse and swinish debaucheries, which were the natural habits of so vagrant and lawless a life.”5

Indeed, nothing but smuggling kept the French from starving to death under the care of their state, benevolently planned for their welfare.

During the reign of Louis XIV, the French weavers went through a whole season without moving a shuttle. While the people were waiting for clothes, the weavers were waiting for the government to tell them what kind of cloth they would be allowed to weave, what color it should be, and how many threads would be permitted for each inch of warp and woof.

The regulations on the textile industry alone covered over 3,000 pages, and they were different for each district. The manufacturers of Saint-Maixent, for example, had to negotiate for four years before the government allowed them to use black warp, and they never did get permission to use black woof.

Human energy simply does not work the way the despots and dictators would like to have it work. It works only under its natural control. Any attempt to make it work through the use of police force has always failed and has held back civilization.

Weak Alibi

It is contended by some that the people of the Old World are more interested in the higher things of life, that they have never had any desire for what is scornfully called the “material civilization” of the Western world.

Perhaps. And perhaps slaves carrying loads on their backs were not permitted to invent a four-wheeled wagon. It’s hard to say. But surely, human beings – all human beings – have always wanted food. Yet for 6,000 years, they have been hungry and dying of hunger. Under such conditions, there is not much chance for widespread improvement along cultural and moral lines. (This will be dealt with more fully in a later chapter.)

Egyptians erected their stately pyramids – and sold their daughters to brothels because they could not feed them. Athenians built their proud Parthenon and went to their democratic elections – while desolate wails came from pottery jars along their streets, where babies were dying. A mother’s friends would put her baby into a jar to die slowly, in the forlorn hope that it might be rescued by someone who could afford to feed a child.

Perpetual Famines

In Asia and Africa famines have never ceased. In Europe, the working people have never yet obtained enough milk, butter, fruit. Over the greater part of this earth, women as well as men continue to give 16 hours of literally killing labor for the day’s meager food. In peaceful Shanghai’s most prosperous days, every morning at dawn the policemen gathered up from the streets the bodies of the men, women, and children who had died of hunger during the night. It was a routine job!

So much for progress during the past 6,000 years. But why consider such a short period?

As far back as 250,000 years ago, people lived in caves in France and Spain. People still live in caves in France and Spain. The cliffs of Chinchilla are still inhabited. At Coria, the pottery workers live as they have always lived – along the banks of the Guadalquivir, in holes without floors or windows. In Italy, in Greece, in Yugoslavia, in Russia, many people still live underground.

Ancestral Habitat

Mrs. Lane writes:

“When American Red Cross workers went into the Balkans after the first World War, they found families living in a clay bank at Montenegro’s largest city. They were horrified. So was I. I wrote a piece about those homeless victims of war that should have wrung dollars from the stoniest American pocketbook. Only, before I finished it, I went back with an interpreter to give some first aid to those miserable refugees. My sympathetic questions bewildered them. They were living as they always had lived, in their ancestral homes.”3-a

If men and women do not want to live like that – if they do not want to be always in destitution, always on the verge of starvation – they must come to realize that they, and they alone, can control their human energies.

The state is called the government, but it cannot actually govern the individual acts of any person because of the nature of human energy. Men in public office are only men, and no man can control another’s thoughts, speech, or creative actions. No possible use of physical force can compel anyone to think, speak, or act. It can only limit, hinder, and prevent.

In the last analysis, and stripped of all the furbelows, government is nothing more than a legal monopoly of the use of physical force – by persons upon persons. And the monopoly is permitted by common consent. No government can exist without the consent and economic support of the people.

This important fact is quite obvious when you consider the frontier sheriff who was elected to protect the good men against the “bad man.” It is somewhat less obvious in the case of the Old World tyrants and dictators, but the fact remains that their power rests on the consent and support of the people. The best evidence of this is that the pages of history are full of rebellions against earthly rulers.

Revolts versus Revolutions

All men who have ever obeyed a living authority have in time revolted against it. Look at the history of Assyria, Persia, Egypt, Rome, Spain, France, England; look at any record of any people living anywhere at any time in the Old World’s history. Sooner or later, they revolted.

But with minor exceptions, such revolts have been directed against a particular authority, without disturbing the pagan belief that some authority should control their lives and be responsible for their welfare.

When such people do not get enough to eat, they merely conclude that the existing authority does not control them properly; that everything would be all right if they were governed by a new authority, or a stronger and wiser authority – one which would really make good on the age-old and alluring promise of “something for nothing.”

So they rebel against their king and set up another king. At a later date, they rebel against him and set up still another. Then as time goes on, they rebel against monarchy itself and set up some other kind of authority.

Every imaginable kind of living authority has been tried, also every possible combination – the priest and the king, the king who is the priest, the king who is a god, the king and a senate, the king and the senate and a majority, the senate and a tyrant, the tyrant and the aristocrats. Think of any combination that comes to mind. Somewhere it has been tried. Somewhere on this earth, most of them are being tried right today.

Down through the ages, century after century, time and time again, men have killed their rulers and have slaughtered one another in untold millions, in the effort to find an authority that would improve their conditions. Such rebellions sometimes bring temporary benefits. They interrupt the mechanism of attempted control and permit human energy to work a little – for a little while.

In a Circle

But the Old World revolutions are not real revolutions. They are revolutions only in the sense of a wheel rotating around a motionless center. Under the pagan view, the standard pattern has always been to overthrow one form of authority merely to replace it with another form of authority – from priest to king, from king to oligarchy, from oligarchy to despot, from despot to majority, from majority to bureaucracy, from bureaucracy to dictator, from dictator to king, from king to … and so on, and so on. There have been 6,000 years of it; and for 6,000 years, people have gone hungry. The simple reason is that human energy cannot be made to work efficiently except in an atmosphere of individual freedom and voluntary co-operation, based on enlightened self-interest and moral responsibility.

For Human Freedom

There has never been but one real revolution. It is the revolution against pagan fatalism – the revolution for human freedom.