The thought elusive that had burned
      With smoking smudge, remote and dull,
      Within each thick and troubled skull
Burst forth at last in vocal flame.
Each gave a start, and then a shout
Of wonderment; and each held out,
The one his flint, the one his game,
And thus a mighty force was sired.
Man’s life would never be the same,
Each gave the thing he least required,
And gained the thing he most desired!

The Process of Exchange

Well . . . in some such fashion the principle of trade was discovered, and a first long step was taken toward civilization. For that (or some experience like it) was the beginning of specialization, which was the convenience under which individuals no longer had to supply with their own hands all they needed, but each could specialize in what he did best, easiest, and with most pleasure. This gave to those who wanted it freedom for leisure; and with leisure, even a little of it, came time to wonder, to think, to dream, to question, to doubt, to create—in short, to begin to be civilized.

That was trade—exchange; and it is still at the heart of business. It has almost infinite ramifications—finances, credit, production, distribution, salesmanship, advertising, competition, legal observances and restrictions,—but it comes down finally to an exchange between two ‘people.

The two cave men of my little poetic fable stood face to face. In modern commerce the original producer and ultimate consumer almost never see each other. A score, maybe a hundred, intermediaries may stand between them. But the principle and the results are the same.

Namely, Mr. A has produced something far in excess of his need for that particular thing. He receives tokens for the time and skill he has expended in producing the thing. These tokens are called money. Another man, Mr. B, has done the same thing with some other product. On the open market each exchanges his tokens—his money—for what he needs of the other’s product,—and so do millions of others,—with some grumbling, some cheating, some chiseling going on, no doubt; but with general satisfaction, benefit and convenience to all concerned.

Some years ago I saw this graphically illustrated. A television commercial was extolling the superior grade of cotton in a product being advertised. It showed two men in a raw cotton wareroom—a seller and a buyer. Many samples of cotton were spread out on tables—handfuls of lint that had been pulled from bales in a distant warehouse, each sample tagged by number to its far-away parent bale.

The seller demonstrated the quality of the various samples—long staple, freedom from dirt, etc. After some haggling back and forth as to price and number of bales available, the buyer said okay—and the deal was closed. And as the scene closed, I remarked to my wife, who happened to be with me, “Multiply what we have just seen by a thousand, and you have that mysterious thing called the cotton market.”

Back of each of those men was a small army—farmers, truckers, weighers, graders, ginners, compress men, railroaders, weavers, spinners, salesmen—and hundreds more. But the whole business was built around the point where two men strike a bargain for X bales of cotton.

That is trade; that is business; and that, in these modern times, is capitalism. Business is more than a store, or an office, or a bank, or a stock exchange. It is the whole, vast, infinitely complicated yet essentially simple matter of exchanging the excess goods and services provided by a million John Does, for the similar excess of other goods and services produced by a million Richard Roes—to the benefit of all.

Finally, it is summed up in a couplet from my little poetic analysis:

Each gave the thing he least required,
And gained the thing he most desired.

These men are capitalists. What about your capitalist? Is he a hero, or a culprit?

Shall we keep it that way—or shall we trade it for the imagined comforts and benefits of the welfare state?

      We men of Earth have searched to find
            A moral principle or guide—
      A basic Law for humankind,
            To light our steps, and to provide
                  Direction for our earthly course,
                  Derived from some celestial Source.

      And this has led, along the road
            That spans the dim, unfolding ages,
      To many a prayer and creed and code,
            And volumes of unnumbered pages,
                  As we have hopefully explored
                  The mystic purpose of the Lord.

      The Lord! Thus man has named the Power,
            The Savior, God, and Judge Supreme—
      Concepts of majesty that tower
            Above the substance of his dream—
                  A Lord to listen and to lead,
                  And satisfy his constant need.

      So men in new and ancient lands,
            Destined with sin and fear to cope,
      Have lifted heavenward their hands,
            To grasp the faded hem of hope,
                  Beseeching light, and strength to pray:
                  Help us, O Lord, to find the Way!

      For man has never been content,
            As centuries have come and gone,
      To think that nothing more was meant
            By his creation than the spawn
                  Of yet another form of life
                  To kindle Earth’s eternal strife.

      He hopes and prays for love and peace
            Among the nations; and he gropes
      For understanding and release
            From tribal hatreds; and he hopes
                  That men will follow, more and more,
                  The path of peace, away from war.

      And all the while his mind is torn
            With speculation, hope and doubt.
      Why am I here? Why was I born?
            What is my being all about?
                  Is man on earth by God’s decree?
                  What does existence mean to me?

      Thus questioning, he probes the night
            For evidence of God’s desire,
      Seeking amid the stellar light
            The secret and eternal fire
                  Which hopeful men have ever seen
                  Lighting the stars and worlds between.

      What is the lesson he can draw?
            What moral do the stars declare
      The while we study them in awe,
            With hopeful eye and heart at prayer?
                  For grace and strength and love we yearn—
                  What is there yet for us to learn?

      Our mighty Earth is but a speck
            Against the vastness of the sky;
      Our blazing sun is but a fleck
            Of flame that will explode and die—
                  And every planet, sun and moon
                  Will fade and vanish, late or soon!

      Thus speaks the counsel of despair,
            The pain that evermore assails
      The hopeful heart. But man will dare;
            His search for comfort never fails.
                  His questing eye is heavenward cast;
                  His courage, like his hope, will last.

      And somewhere in the aisles of space,
            Or in the temple of his heart,
      He hears the whispered word of grace
            Which love and hope—and fear—impart:
                  Be still, my son; your troubling cease;
                  Love God and man . . . . and be at peace!

Ralph Bradford, of Ocala, Florida, is well known as a writer, poet, speaker, and business organization consultant.

Reprints of this poem are available from The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y. 10533 at 20 copies for $1.00.

First, as to his status, he is a retired businessman, a widower, who employs a part-time housekeeper. For twelve years after his wife died he employed a live-in housekeeper; but he reports that after her retirement (and after interviewing twenty other women) he has been unable to secure another. In his search he found that many women who formerly did domestic work now dwell in government-subsidized apartments at low rentals, and subsist on Federal Social Security payments, bank interest, and other types of income. But he has also found, he adds, that such women seem pleased with their situations. While their incomes are low and their living standards are not high, they are generally happy, since “they do not have to work.” Their desire and will to work, he believes, have been destroyed.

His present part-time domestic employee, he reports, is paid the Federal minimum hourly wage, together with her meals and several other benefits; but in order to employ her legally he is required to execute and file thirteen different forms, and pay a total of $442.35 a year in Federal Social Security taxes, and state and Federal unemployment insurance taxes. This he must do in order to be allowed to furnish employment to a person who seriously needs it!

The employee has both a heart and an eye condition that would make it very difficult for her to secure other employment. So his use of her services fills a real social need; and he says she is very happy with her work. But . . . . he must do all that paper work, and dig up nearly $450 over and above her wages, for the privilege of giving her employment that is beneficial to her and to society at large, as well as to him.

When she was first hired, he was required to prepare and file a paper called Form UC01—“a report to determine status of domestic employment.” Then he had to file Form 327, to show that he is not a retailer, a wholesaler, or a manufacturer. Then every three months he is required to prepare and file Form 942 Federal Aid Security, pay 6.13 per cent of her wages in taxes and deduct that amount from her wages—a total tax of 12.26 per cent of her wages. At year’s end he must prepare and file with Internal Revenue Service Form W 2, showing her total wages and taxes—and a copy of this report must also be given to the employee.

Then every three months he must also prepare and file Form UC-D, namely, Employer’s Contribution Report for Unemployment Insurance, together with Form UC 3-T; and must pay 3 per cent of her wages in such taxes. Incidentally, another form, which shows the employee’s name, Social Security number and the amount of such taxes in her case, must be sent to a Michigan Avenue address in Chicago, whereas the other form (UC 3-T) must be sent to a different Chicago address.

Endless Filing and Duplicate Reporting

Maybe there is some matter of bureaucratic efficiency or convenience involved in such a requirement, but one wonders why these two reports couldn’t be combined and sent to the same address, thus saving printing costs, extra envelopes, and extra postage cost to the taxpayers. A small matter of maybe only fifty cents or less to each individual? Yes—but not small when you multiply it by many thousands, and possibly by several million.

But my employer friend is not yet finished with his paper work. At the end of each year he has to prepare and file Form 940, the Employer’s Annual Federal Unemployment re turn, showing the total wages paid to his part-time housekeeper. At the same time, he must pay 7 per cent in taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

He tells me that he could also face the possibility of completing and filing twelve more forms each year. This could happen if his four-days-a-week housekeeper, who pays a total of about $150 a year in Federal and Illinois income taxes, should ask him to withhold such Illinois taxes from her pay, so she would not have to make the single payment on April 15th. This would involve his completing Form IL 501 (Illinois Employers Income Tax) on the first and second months of each calendar quarter, paying such withheld taxes, and then completing and filing another form (IL 941) showing total wages for the quarter, on the third month of each quarter. These three forms and three remittances would be mailed quarterly to the Illinois Department of Revenue at Springfield. So far my employer-friend has been spared this particular load of paper work; but it would be required of him if his employee should decide she wants him to withhold these taxes from her pay. If this should happen, he estimates that a minimum of two and a half days of time each year would be required to complete, file, record, issue checks, and mail, in order to comply with the law.

Rules and Regulations

For many years defenders of the so-called liberal program of our government (high employment at good wages with attendant social benefits) have sung the praises of its al leged advantages. Seldom do they mention the wasteful, time-consuming, sometimes ridiculous rules and regulations that have become a part of that program.

To some extent this results from the long-established “liberal” notion of labor as an abused commodity—a mass of underprivileged, downtrodden wage slaves; and of employ ers as big-bellied cartoon types, or as huge and soulless aggregations of capital. Partly it inheres in any bureaucratic management of the minutiae of our lives.

Apologists for the system of so-called benefits for thousands of marginally-employed workers are either unaware of or indifferent to the problems faced by the employers of such labor, who are almost as numerous as the workers themselves. An example is the case of my friend, who, because he employs a part-time housekeeper, must prepare and mail 13 different forms, and possibly 12 more forms for a yearly total of 25; must enter in his personal financial records the figures upon which to base the issuance of nine checks for a total yearly payment of $442.35 in Federal Social Security taxes, plus both Federal and Illinois State unemployment insurance taxes on the cash wages of $4500.

On top of all this, he says that domestic employment in 1980 will come under the Illinois Workmen’s Compensation Act, and he will have to secure an appropriate insurance policy at an annual premium of about $75. This coverage, he notes, would be included at very low cost to him (only $4.75 per year) under the liability section of his regular Homeowner’s Insurance policy! Thus an employer is again to be penalized for furnishing some much-needed employment and income.

What is the alternative to such nonsense? One sensible way would be to allow the free- market economy to take its beneficial course. The problem is simple. A man needs a part- time housekeeper. A woman with some health problems is nevertheless able and anxious to perform the household tasks involved. She is willing and eager to work. He is anxious to employ her services. So . . . .

Why not simply let them strike their bargain without invoking and involving the ponderous, costly and time-consuming machinery of the U. S. Government and the State of Illinois? Such a program would, of course, be looked upon by the disciples of Statism as wrong, reprehensible and reactionary, and to propose it seriously is to invite their scornful condemnation.

There is, of course, another alternative. To mention it here is not to propose it, and certainly not to endorse it. I refer to the so-called underground system. Under it, neither employer nor employee makes any reports to government at any level. The wages are paid from hand to hand in cash on an agreed basis; nobody makes any reports; nobody pays any fees or taxes. Naturally such arrangements are not publicized, and nobody knows how widespread the practice may be.

Law-Breaking Encouraged

The evil in the “underground system” is that it encourages people to break the law, and causes disrespect for government. And the evil is not removed, even though it is perhaps slightly modified, by the gloomy fact that people who practice it do so to evade the senseless exactions of their own government!

Significant bits of light are cast on this problem in two letters received by my troubled friend. One was from the Nobel prize-winning economist and social philosopher, Dr. Milton Friedman. In his usual forthright way, Dr. Friedman said: “You wrote an excellent and clear letter to (the “high government official” above referred to) about the incredible paper work and taxes, just to employ a part-time housekeeper legally. What a mess we are in.”

By contrast, the other letter was from an assistant to the said high government official—written after some two month’s delay in response to an urgent follow-up by my friend. It said:

“The amount of mail received . . . . . in recent months makes it impossible for us to respond . . . . with as much detail as we would like. However, you may be sure that we have noted your remarks.”

Some day an inspired composer may set that line to soul-stirring music and give us a new National Anthem: “Brother, we have noted your remarks!”

Well . . . . there it is: One troubled and troubling echo from our statist society; one bit of honest pretest; one small, exasperating incident which, multiplied by millions, ends in national frustration, and points to bankruptcy. And a nagging question keeps intruding:

Is it possible—just possible—that somewhere in the crowded corridors of Washington and other capital cities there is room for the exercise of a little ordinary horse sense?

The soul of America was stirred to its depths in recent months by the awful implications of the world shaking Snail Darter Case. Perhaps no event of recent times has provided at once such a severe testing of our composite character, and such a clear indication of our national destiny.

Recall the situation: A big dam, designed to impound certain waters for the dual purpose of flood control and water conservation, was stopped in its tracks, so to speak, when somebody discovered that, if completed, the dam’s rising waters would seriously discommode a small colony of fishlets called Snail Darters.

Nobody had ever heard of them except a handful of ichthyologists concerned with marine esoterica, but no matter. The reaction was prompt and fearless. No more convincing example could be found, I suppose, of our concern for the welfare and safety of minorities. It should make us take heart. Our concern is not alone for the whales, sharks and tuna, but for the smallest of nature’s children!

The Snail Darters are about two inches long, and they exist in several types, or families. Those living in the area of the dam in question number, I believe it is estimated, at perhaps ten or fifteen thousand. The immediate problem was that these little creatures like shallow, active water; and the pressure and relative immobility of the impounded water might well be their undoing. Clearly, it was a tragic situation, a dramatic confrontation.

On the one hand, here were several thousand minnow sized fish, about to have their native habitat radically changed and their lives imperiled, if not terminated. On the other hand, below the dam and for miles around there were a large number of human beings who had been led to believe that the dam would protect them from floods and furnish them with plenty of water for irrigation. Clearly there was a conflict of interest. Clearly also, no person of conscience and compassion would let the rights and needs and conveniences of men and women take precedence over the comfort and safety of a colony of fish, be they big or little. After all, the fish were here first!

Certain relevant observations may be made here. First, the Snail Darters are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of piscatorial happiness. What right has Man, in his quest for safety, and in his relentless chase after things material, to interfere with the schedule of life which the Snail Darters have established as their own? Clearly, these little fish have a prior claim on the sympathies of all reasonable and compassionate creatures.

However, one’s indignation begins to lose pressure at this point, when one reflects that the same observation might be made with respect to another species. This one, indeed, is much better known than the Snail Darter was until recently. I mean those fascinating little invertebrates called Lumbricus Terrestris —namely, the Earth Worms. They too have been cruelly and shamefully treated. What right has a member of the human species to dig them up from their cozy moist burrows, impale them upon cruelly barbed hooks, and utilize their squirming death agonies for another ignoble and barbarous purpose—namely, to lure innocent fish to the fatal indignity of the torturing hook, and the slow suffocation of the waterless creel?

Questions of Propriety

It might also be noted that the Earthworms have another timely claim just now on our sympathy and understanding. You see, being hermaphrodites, they do not follow the normal patterns of sexuality—a life conditioning that should win them great sympathy among those people who are now so militant about the "rights" of sex deviates. But that, after all, is an aside.

Apart from questions of moral and social propriety, there is also the question of what business the federal government has meddling in such matters in the first place—whether in the life pattern of worms and snail darters, or in the damming and artificial distribution of water. But I suppose only a human troglodyte, attached mentally to the Dark Ages, would raise such a point.

However, a nice incidental question might be injected, namely, what of the waters themselves? They are things of nature, wild and free, cascading from mountain heights to lower levels, and finding haven at last in the mothering bosoms of the Oceans. In the matter of freedom, let’s be logical. What right does a government have to say to one sparkling stream, Go yonder in freedom, and to another, Stay here in sluggish damnation?

Fortunately, such questions occur less frequently these days than they might otherwise have done except for what was surely an act of preventive Providence. And that brings us to those Mayflower Ecologists, a small group of heroic souls that have been, alas, unknown and neglected.

Much has been made, of course, of the freedom loving independence of the Mayflower passengers as a whole—how brave they were, and adventurous; how willing they were to work and starve and sacrifice in the name and for the sake of freedom. And this is altogether fitting and proper. It is especially gratifying, I may add, to those who can discover a patronym and possibly an ancestor among them. All glory to their memory!

But among them was the small group of seers that has been denied the credit and recognition it deserves. Indeed, their names are not even mentioned in the history books, which goes to show the ingratitude we often display toward our true benefactors, and our callous insensitivity to what they have done for us.

What Might Have Been

But the Snail Darter Case has helped correct this longstanding injustice. Sensitive souls realize at last how fortunate it is for us that among those Mayflower adventurers there was a small but militant and fearless group of ecologists and environmentalists. Their names will never be known, but without their influence, and that of their spiritual descendants, dire things might have happened to our country.

Take that headstrong Governor Clinton, for example, who proposed to dig a canal across New York State, from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. He had visions of long strings of barges, bearing freight and even passengers, and encouraging commerce and industry, not only in the Mohawk Valley but along the Lake shores. He had the quaint notion that it would, as the booster’s phrase went, "open up the West." What nonsense! It would only have frightened the deer and disturbed wild life generally. Fortunately the project was killed in time, thanks to a devoted and fearless band of environmentalists who saw through the crass commercialism of the whole plan.

Then there was the crazy Welland scheme for a canal around, of all things, Niagara Falls. The theory was that freight could be carried by low cost water transport, through locks around the Falls, without disturbing their beauty, and to the great benefit of economic and social development. There was more promotional nonsense of similar kind. Fortunately it was killed in time and the Falls were saved.

But of course society still had to deal with those silly people up at what was known as the Soo, with their zany idea of connecting Lakes Huron and Superior for ship travel, with alleged economic benefits to the Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin northwest areas, and indirectly to the whole national economy. That scheme, too, got nipped in the bud—an environmental and ecological triumph that was no doubt greeted with enthusiasm by the otters, and which probably prevented great bypass inconvenience to the migratory Canadian geese.

Worst of all, perhaps, there was that fantastic scheme to connect the two great oceans by means of a canal across the Panamanian isthmus. How fortunate that the farsighted ecologists were able to stop that one! Otherwise, there’s no telling what might have happened. Such a vast ditch might have lowered the water tables of both continents, with disastrous effects upon the health and happiness of both muskrats and frogs. The toads might not have minded, being amphibians; but sheer disaster might have struck at sea, where the outflow of Pacific water might have altered the mating habits of the giant Galapagos turtles. This would have been tragic indeed.

So thank heaven for the Snail Darter Case, which served to bring these and some other matters into better perspective.

And thank heaven also for those unknown Mayflower ecologists and their sociological heirs!

***

Full Use of Potentialities

If the goal of mankind is to realize the potentialities of the species to the fullest, it becomes necessary to insure to all men the fullest possible personal freedom. Confining freedom of action to a few, in the totalitarian way, is simply unintelligent—not to mention its immorality; for such a limitation arbitrarily confines the quantity and quality of service to society which might otherwise be forthcoming.

John Stuart Mill put the case for personal freedom—and for the free enterprise system—in its ultimate form when he said: "The only constant and unfailing source of progress is liberty, for by it there are as many centers of improvement as there are individuals." Compulsion may force men to produce as much as their masters insist upon. I say "may," for it is doubtful that unfree men or slaves ever produce as much as their masters wish, even under the lash. But what is not doubtful at all is this: compulsion will not make men produce more and better things than the master themselves wish.

The theoretical maximum of production in an unfree society, therefore, is limited by the imagination of the few who are in control.

SYLVESTER PETRO, "Freedom and the Nature of Man"

No matter how far a field we may grope, our more serious speculations seem to follow a pattern that arises from the conditioning of our lives. That conditioning, in its starkest simplicity, is that we enter the world of the living, we exist in it for a period—and then we pass on.

Therefore we are concerned with where we came from, what we are doing and why, and where we are going. All the philosophies of mankind have been built about these three questions; and it is significant that we are always more interested in looking backward and forward—reliving the past and projecting the future—than we are in understanding, using, and enjoying the present. It is sad that we spend so much time and energy, both physical and emotional, in retrospect and anticipation, and so little in the conscious savoring and utilization of the present moment. Some scholars explain this by citing the legend of the Golden Age—the concept of a far-distant time when all mankind was happy, and of a future day when they shall be happy again. Thus the Garden of Eden, the Expulsion, and the hope of Paradise Regained. Thus the Heaven and Hell of nearly all religions.

Some other psychologists have their own explanation, which they call the theory of intra-uterine blessedness. They argue that the only time of perfect peace and comfort known to man is the period spent within the warm, protecting, nourishing body of his mother. That period, they say, was the Golden

Age, and all our groping toward a future state of bliss—toward tomorrow’s happiness—is but the vague hope of attaining once more the perfect contentment of the prenatal period. They have a point.

Facing the Present

The poet Swinburne, in one of his better moments, penned a significant phrase: "From hope and fear set free." In it he came close to the understanding of our constant backward-and-forward looking. If the demands of rhyme and meter had permitted him to add "regret" he might have completed the trilogy of emotions that keep our minds away from the present. For we regret only that which is past. We fear only that which may happen tomorrow—or this afternoon. And we are not hopeful about the present, only about the future—whether it is to be ten years or ten minutes hence.

But we live now, in this present moment. To be sure, the bit of existence called "now" extends infinitely across time, both into what we call the past, and into what we term the future. Warm memories of the past are pleasant things; hopeful anticipation of the future is part of our soaring optimism. But today, this hour, this instant—that is the moment of living. If it has its dark side, it comes usually from either regret or fear. But regret is of yesterday; fear is of tomorrow. Neither can touch today, save as a man thinketh in his heart.

Of course it is only the rare soul that can set itself free (as Swinburne phrased it) from hope and fear. It is only the near-to-God who are released from regret. Yet it is in the attainment of these perfections, or the close approach to them, that we come nearest to perfect peace.

But in the external, practical sense, there is another reason for being concerned about the present. There is much talk these days about the future of our country. Air waves and news columns are full of it. What about the dollar—is it safe? What about education—is it adequate? What about Social Security—is it solvent, and indeed, "secure"? What about our long-continued inflation? The increase of crime? Juvenile delinquency? Drug addiction? What of our relations with the rest of the world—NATO, SEATO, OAS? What are we going to do about . . . ?

Going to do! Future action! Actually, it is what we are doing now, today, this minute, that will determine our fate, rather than what we are planning to do. We are charting the future, not in our plans for it, but in our present actions. Man, said Emerson, is where he is by repeated choice. The present is explicitly the result of the past. Society, like life, is a continuous flow. Every act and Decision of today will determine our tomorrows.

To put it concretely, if we want to have an economy and a society that is based on freedom, we shall have to begin now to talk and think in terms of freedom, rather than in the clinches of continued and increasing statism, for the one is the negation of the other. Political candidates who profess to favor a free society and a free economy will have to talk and think about insuring freedom, rather than bidding for votes by promising first one and then another segment of society that each will be given special benefits and privileges not accorded to others, but paid for out of the common treasury. Businessmen who proclaim themselves as being for the free market philosophy will have to learn what underlies and under-girds such freedom, and stop saying, in effect, "I’m for freedom—but. . ."

Today Sets the Future

Plans for the future are fine if they are based on the concept of freedom. But the best laid plans of today may not be important when they are finally (if ever) brought to completion. But what is done, now, what is done now—this will determine what the future will be like. And surely no crystal ball or particular prescience is needed to predict a future that is based on insolvency—on a long-continued program of spending each year more than is taken in, going constantly in debt through borrowing, and printing more and more paper money on the basis of the artificial credit thus created. The history of nations tells the story.

And if disastrous inflation should come, as it has elsewhere in the world under similar conditions, the first to suffer would be the people of small means and limited income, for whose imagined "benefit" most of the big-spend programs are supposed to be initiated! If present-day legislators and other political leaders continue to pile debt on debt, with no thought of how that debt is to be discharged or even reduced, and if the weight of that debt, hanging over the economy, continues to undermine the value of our money—who will have benefited?

Is there a connection between the vision of a safe and beautiful future and the dwindling value of our money? Yes! Repeat . . . yes! And this is not to put a dollar tag on happiness or security or any of the other "human" values that are so glibly recited—and so little understood. Man does not live by bread alone, but the price of bread can be of great symbolic and practical importance. Ask any elderly German who remembers the bleak period between the wars when, because of inflation, a loaf of bread cost a million marks or more.

Ask any citizen of Argentina who has had the value of his life savings wiped out by the inflation that country experienced as a result of big spend-never-pay policies.

We can and should "live in the past" to the extent that we are willing to study history and profit from its lessons. We can and should "live in the future" to the degree that we understand it to be only an extension of the present, profoundly influenced by what we do today.

But NOW is the moment of life. Paradise may indeed be lost through the sins of ignorance, selfishness and indifference. It can be regained through sacrifice and self-denial and the exercise of wisdom. But it is better not to regret a Paradise that is lost, or anticipate one that is to be regained. Just as there is something of God in every person, so there is something of Paradise in every moment, if only it can be realized and cherished.

Today, this hour, this moment—this is the Golden Age.

When Jonah sat in the shade of his heaven-sent vine he was no doubt unaware (as he was of some other important things) that a time would come when the fruit of his shade vine would play an important, if transitory, role in the field of high finance.

The time, to be sure, was far down the centuries from Jonah’s day, and did not arrive till 1807. The place was a steamy but beautiful little island of the Caribbean. By that time the original Caribs had long since perished, and were replaced by Europeans, especially by Spanish in the east and French in the west—and by black slaves all over the place.

Slavery, of course, is always hate­ful and cruel; but there are degrees to the degradation it imposes; and the planters who had settled in the Artibonite Plaine of Saint Domin­gues had brought its horrors to a new depth of savagery. At long last came the inevitable explosion. Sud­denly the whole countryside was in flaming revolt.

And the slaves had able leaders: Oge, Boukman, Chavannes, and others of lesser fame—all of whom were soon killed. And then came three compelling figures, former slaves all, whose names were to be inscribed, quite literally, in blood: Toussaint, Dessalines, Christophe. Toussaint was nicknamed L’Ouver­ture because as a general he always seemed able to "open" things up for victory—or for escape. His two great lieutenants were: Jean Jacques Des­salines, unlettered and ferocious, but a great battle tactician; and Henry Christophe, a physical giant with the gift of leadership.

Christophe was born, it is be­lieved, on the British island of St. Kitts, which at that time was still called Saint Christopher. This may account for his last name, and also for the fact that though he was French in speech and name and sentiment, he always spelled his first name with the terminal English "y" instead of the French "i." Most likely he pronounced it Onree, but he spelled it Henry.

So much for the main actors. In a few swift and bloody years the dark drama of the tragic little black na­tion moved to its denouement. Tous­saint was tricked, captured, and al­lowed to die miserably in a frigid French prison. Dessalines, after a grotesque brief masquerade as "Emperor," was murdered by his own people. That left the towering Christophe, who became head of state, and who finally made himself king. But the king business came later.

In 1807 this exslave stable boy and sometime waiter was named President of the newly created Re­public of Haiti. It was a moment of glory for the dignified man who, as a menial, had been slapped and treated to other indignities. But it was also a moment of great prob­lems and sharp decisions.

For one thing, he headed a com­pletely bankrupt government. The land had been laid waste by the ravages of the revolt against the landed proprietors, the revolution against France, the wars with the Spaniards on the eastern end of the island, and by their own internecine butcheries. There was no currency system, and Christophe had no money and no reserves of any kind.

Needless to say, he could secure no credit abroad.

But Christophe was both a re­sourceful military leader and an able administrator. He could not read, but he knew the absolute necessity of a workable currency system. And he knew something else—namely, that the people he governed relied greatly on the homely gourd vine in their domestic economy, using its fruit, when dried and free of seeds and pulp, to make all kinds of household utensils—bottles, decanters, bowls, saucers, cups, even spoons and plates. The gourd, indeed, was about the nearest thing to a constant and general necessity in the simple life of the Haitian peasants. And the gourd utensils wore out quickly, broke eas­ily, and had to be replaced often.

As Christophe ascended to power a green crop of gourds was ripening. So he issued an edict that all gourds were the property of the state. He sent out collectors to seize them, and in a short time they had brought in and "deposited" the year’s crop at Cap Francois. That became the "re­serve" in Christophe’s "treasury," and he put an arbitrary value of 20 sous on each gourd, which estab­lished the ratio of five gourds to the French Franc. Then he waited a while.’

‘See pages 1089 of John Vandercook’s excel­lent book, Black Majesty, Harpers, 1928.

Gourds to Coffee to Gold

Soon the important coffee crop ripened. Coffee, along with cane for sugar, were the money crops of the island. But there was little sugar as yet, because the sugar mills had all been burned down in the wars. When the coffee beans were brought to market, Christophe bought them—and paid for them with the gourds he had previously expro­priated, sometimes from the coffee growers themselves! Then he resold the coffee to foreign traders—for gold; and before long he had a sub­stantial metal reserve and could put a gold supported currency into cir­culation. As one result of this re­markable adventure into sophis­ticated governmental finance, after 170 years the unit of currency in Haiti is still called the gourde. More significantly, the Christophe technique had become a potent, if unrecognized and unacknowledged, fixture in that form of fiscal legerdemain known today as deficit financing.

Not many Americans raise gourds these days, and converted cucur­bitaceous shells have little impor­tance in our national economy. But the gourds of Christophe are sym­bolic of other possessions of ours that are systematically diverted from their normal use by a modern and deadly version of the Christophe process.

Those possessions are the dollars which we have earned and tried to save and invest, but which are taken away from us by the hidden and insidious seizures of debt-created in­flation.

No analogy is here intended or implied between the Haitian trea­sury dilemma of 1807 and the mul­titudinous, mountainous, and worldwide profligacies of our own government. We are not here con­cerned with those balance of pay­ment problems occasioned by our many international involvements, but with the simple arithmetic of a perpetually unbalanced national budget, and the resultant gnawing away of our substance by the steady and relentless debasement of our money in relation to the things we would purchase with it.

Henry Christophe seized the peo­ple’s gourds to underwrite his money. That was the lawless proce­dure of a dictator, a piece of hard fisted brigandage. But it was a one­time expedient to meet an emer­gency, and was never repeated. Even so, it was an illegal act of ruthless seizure. And yet .. .

And yet . . . as between two methods of expropriation, the one lawless but visible and not con­tinued, the other legal but hidden and ruinously perpetuated—maybe there is something to be said, after all, for Christophe and his gourds!

When our fathers put themselves to the task of devising a fundamental law for the brand new nation they had created, they displayed great unity of purpose and breadth of vis­ion. They did not, in class-conscious fashion, ask, What can we do for the benefit of agriculture? Or, How can we help labor? Or, What will be best for industry? No, their sights were on an altogether different sort of target—and they expressed the es­sence of it in the first three words of the Constitution they were so care­fully and laboriously drafting: "We, the people."

Today, at a time when we are beset on all sides by the demands of this and that special interest, it would be fine if the leaders and exponents of all such groups would take a minute to read the one short paragraph that forms the preamble to that Constitution.

In passing, it is of interest to note that in a period of rather florid rhetoric the Founders restrained themselves remarkably at the really crucial moments. The Decla­ration of Independence, to be sure, is not an example of such reticence; but then, it was really a public rela­tions production—a propaganda document, designed to tell the world why a certain action had been ta­ken. It was prepared out of "a decent respect for the opinions of man­kind." It had to go into considerable detail.

But the "action paper," the thing that did the trick, was a little 47-word resolution introduced by Richard Henry Lee, which asserted quite simply that the American col­onies were, and of right ought to be, free and independent states. And it was so with the Constitution. Of course many words were required to spell out all its articles and sections; but when it came to setting down just what the basic law of the new nation was all about, the Founders laid it out fully in that one short paragraph.

They said it was to form a more perfect union; establish justice; in­sure domestic tranquility; provide for the common defense; promote the general welfare; and secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity.

That was it. That’s what they said it was all about—and it ought to be required reading to offset somewhat the recurrent proposals for the addi­tion of this or that million-dollar bureau to bring this or that alleged billion-dollar "benefit" to this or that group—or for the creation of this or that agency to regulate and control the minutiae of our lives.

And I now suddenly realize that the paragraph I have just written contains an example of the kind of compulsion I’m given to complain­ing about! Okay—so I will let it stand for that reason. Look: "It ought to be required reading." I know, I know—that’s a common con­versational stereotype, but its use illustrates the innate attitude toward compulsion that is at the root of super governmentalism. I think, or my particular elite group thinks, that the preamble is important—therefore everybody should be required to read it!

But to return to the Founders, in addition to being sure of their aims, they were very conscious of the source of their authority. When they set down a principle, or even a pro­cedure, they knew who, ultimately, was speaking. It was "we, the peo­ple."

Of course the great issues of statism versus freedom were not posed to our colonial forebears in the explicit terms of privilege and pref­erence such as we now hear. But the Founders were not ignorant of either history or human nature. They knew that a time would come when there would be demands for governmental favors, preferences, largesse; and they made no place for them, except inadvertently, per­haps, in the much-tortured gen­eral welfare clause; and the antici­pated demands for such extensions of government were answered once for all by Jefferson’s simple phrase: "The best governed are the least governed."

The Growth of Bureaucracy

History shows that it is the seem­ingly ineradicable tendency of men to vacillate between the extremes of government—from Jeffersonian simplicity to the imagined benefits (and inevitable restrictions) of com­plete statism. It is not argued in these paragraphs that we can return to the simple governmental forms that sufficed for our colonial and agrarian periods. We are a vast and complicated aggregation of aims, interests, economic problems, politi­cal processes and social respon­sibilities. But through the years we have erected in Washington and throughout the states a bureaucrat­ic monstrosity that is devouring our savings, crippling our economy, and stifling our initiative.

To some extent the cost and re­pressions of such overextension of government were felt in colonial times, and they aroused the anger of our sires, perhaps even more than the British denial of representative government had done. Jefferson himself was testy about it. As a philosophical statesman he was con­cerned about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; but as a tax­paying citizen he was both con­cerned and angered because the London bureaucracy had "sent hither a swarm of officers to harass our people and eat out their sub­stance."

What does that sentence signify in terms of present-day American ex­perience? Well, wholly apart from the several vast and ramified De­partments of the Federal es­tablishment—State, Commerce, Labor, Justice and so on—there are now sixty-one so-called Independent Agencies, plus seventy Boards, Committees and Commissions, that have been created by the Congress. I have no figures on the number of people employed in them, but it is of course very large; and for the gov­ernment as a whole, not counting those in the several military ser­vices, there are now very close to three million people on the Federal payroll!

A Costly Army

No question is here raised about the efficiency of those people, or their honesty and devotion. They are citizens, employed to do work projected by the Congress. But they do, "eat out our substance." They do cost money—millions, billions of it in the aggregate. And they do con­tribute to the accumulation of a debt that now exceeds the utterly incom­prehensible figure of 600 billion dol­lars.

Who owes that debt, and must finally pay it, one way or another? The government? Not really. The ultimate debtor: We, the people!

But the materiality of such dollar-statistics is really not what I am reaching for. Rather, I am trying to express the proper relationship of the citizen to his government and vice versa; and that relationship is not expressible ideally in terms of dollars or the cost of bread. To be sure, man does live by bread and the nutrients it symbolizes—not alone, of course, for there is a higher nourishment; but food and shelter are important needs, and even our moments of purest philosophy and warmest philanthropy are influenced and modified by the shape and size—and cost!—of our physical and political environment. Pseudo social scientists who envision the Super state as the Mother-Father image of the future seem happily unaware that a shattering blow can be dealt to both economic and politi­cal theorizing by such a crass bit of realism as the price of beans!

It is a far cry, from our present-day, Washington-centered politico-economic set up, back to the ideals of the Founders. It is the fashion these days in leftward circles to assume that the vast spate of so-called social legislation, and the resultant enor­mous cost and sprawling bureauc­racy, is all in keeping with the "rev­olutionary" ideas of the men who wrote the Constitution. Especially during these past two or three years, when we were in a Bicentennial euphoria, we have heard a lot of cant about the "radicals" and "revolu­tionaries" who sparked the Ameri­can War for Independence and de­vised the American form of govern­ment. A great deal of this maudlin output was either grossly overdrawn or flatly and ludicrously false.

What, after all, was the aim of those men who directed the Ameri­can destinies for some years before, and during, that fateful summer of 1787 when the Constitution was being drafted? Certainly it was not "revolution" in the modern sense of the term. Indeed, that word does not occur in the Declaration of Indepen­dence; and so far as I can discover, it was little used in the literature and oratory of the period. Even Patrick Henry’s impassioned plea was not for revolution, but for liberty. And when the term "revolution" was employed, it referred not so much to the act of separation from the mother country, as to the evolution of thinking among the American people—as when John Adams, years later, wrote that "the Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people." No, the Founders were not aiming at revolution, but reason; they were not out to destroy, but to build.

They had reluctantly fought an unwanted war—a war which, judged either by logic or logistics, they hadn’t a chance of winning. In that desperate gamble they were well served by the tenacity, cunning and superb generalship of the man from Mount Vernon, plus the wiles of Benjamin Franklin in luring France into the conflict. But now that was all past. Now they were on their own in the big world of nations. The makeshift, ramshackle machinery of the old Confederation, which had haltingly enabled them to ride out the war years, was a totally in­adequate craft for the waters upon which they were now embarked.

They started out, first of all, with a healthy fear of the very institution they were charged with creating—namely, government. Recognizing the imperative need for it in the regulation of human affairs, they were nevertheless fully aware of its potential threat to the self­same liberties it was designed to preserve. They were, for the most part, men of considerable schol­arship, versed in history and famil­iar with the writings of social and political philosophers like Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone.

Moreover, Adam Smith’s long-awaited Wealth of Nations had been published in 1776, and by the sum­mer of 1787, when the Constitution was being hammered out in Philadelphia, the Scotchman’s mas­terpiece had been widely read in America, as it had in England and on the Continent. The framers of the Constitution were almost certainly familiar with its major premises. They were not all paragons of wis­dom and virtue. They could and did play politics, quarrel, impute mo­tives, take advantage. Bitter wrangling developed between those who represented the smaller states like Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey and their opposite numbers from such big commonwealths as New York, Pennsylvania, Mas­sachusetts and Virginia. In other words, they were a convention of men. But they were enlightened men; and with all their differences they were devotedly committed to the task of making a nation.

They knew first of all that gov­ernment, of some kind, is necessary. The ideal thing would be for men to live together in harmony, without need of control or direction. Indeed, one of the delegates was soon to express this, in the so-called Federalist papers, published to win support for the Constitution. "If men were angels," he wrote, "no govern­ment would be necessary." And he went on: "In forming a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the gov­ernment to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself."

Limited Government

But men, alas, are not angels; and even if they were, conflicts might arise—witness Lucifer’s revolt, as chronicled at considerable length by John Milton. But let’s not be face­tious. Men being fallible creatures, we confront the simple fact that they need to be protected—first of all, from one another! Also the mechanics of their civilization, as they have matured through the cen­turies, layer by layer and culture by culture, on the several world stages—those mechanics, or rather mechanisms, require to be guarded, protected from abuse, and, to a min­imal degree, regulated. Hence gov­ernment.

Once in a whimsical moment I tabulated in verse the origin of one such civilizing mechanism. In my fable a primitive hunter, back from a wearying chase with a haunch of venison over his hairy shoulder, was downcast because he had shattered his last flint-head spear, and must spend much time and effort to fash­ion another. But his neighbor, a cripple who could not go a field to hunt, had several flint heads all chipped out—but no meat in his cave. So, in a great flash, it came to them that they could swap and each be the gainer. Thus trade was born; and I summarized its essence in two lines:

Each gave the thing he least required,

And gained the thing he most desired!

It was that simple principle, applied across the broad spectrum of man’s physical needs, which de­veloped into the socio-economic mechanisms that came to be known by such names as the division of labor, specialization, craftsmanship, industry, exchange, money—in short, the implements of trade, the Great Civilizer.

For it was not alone to physical comforts and necessities that the principle of exchange was applied beneficially. If it could enable the hunter, the fisherman, the tanner, the spinner, the weaver and a hundred other specialists to de­velop and ply their crafts through the trading of skill for skill as ex­pressed in product, it could also make possible a like extension in things of the mind. It could and did lead to the development of science and art and literature. The great principle of exchange, like a shuttle in the loom of time, helped weave the fabric of civilization.

Remove the Restrictions

By 1783 the American Colonies were, of course, heavily involved in all the ramifications of a commer­cial, industrial and agricultural economy. Under the restrictive British bureaucracy the rights of the Colonials in all these areas had often been impeded and at times ruthlessly restricted. Those charged with devising the new government were aware that the greatest possi­ble spirit of individual enterprise and initiative should be en­couraged—not by subsidy from public funds, nor by the relaxation of vigilance in upholding necessary laws, but by the removal or non-imposition of all unneeded restric­tions.

They wanted, it seems clear, a government under which Americans could pursue their respective inter­ests through peaceful production and exchange in the open market—buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, suppliers and customers, in a beneficial interchange.

Freedom! That was what they were after; not just relief from whimsical bureaucratic restrictions, but freedom to make, produce, trade, sell, buy, invent, invest, build, save, spend—freedom, in short, to live the sort of life that is natural and nor­mal to an industrious, inventive, adventurous and acquisitive people.

Acquisitive? Whoa there a mi­nute! Better be careful here. Better tread softly. You see, to acquire is to get; and in certain over-delicate cir­cles acquisition is equated with something like social piracy, as though "getting" anything is always done at someone else’s expense. And indeed it sometimes may be done so—and that’s where the State, rep­resented by the Law, comes in. In a negative sense, that’s what the State is for. But while Webster’s says that to acquire is to gain "by any means," it adds, "usually by one’s own exertions." And in that sense we have indeed been an ac­quisitive people—and three rousing cheers for it! Home ownership, com­petence, security, stability, indus­try, application, independence—these are at once the products and the motivation of acquisition. They are also the foundation stones of responsible government.

By creating a governmental envi­ronment favorable to personal in­itiative, the Founders laid the foun­dation for our greatness as a nation. Despite the drain of several wars

the long-felt burden of debt from the War for Independence itself, the ghastly toll of the Civil War, and the staggering outlays for the first and second World Wars—despite these colossal burdens, the nation grew, expanded and developed into the globe’s greatest power. And at the same time it exceeded all others in the material welfare of its people.

The big question now is: Where do we, the people, go from here? No account has been taken in these paragraphs of our more recent per­formances on the world stage and in our domestic economy, nor of the added debt, bitterness and loss of prestige that have resulted. That is an article—a book, a library! — in it­self.

The American problem today is not what we do about the world, but what we do about us, the people, and about us, the nation. Shall we re­sume our travels on a path of destiny—travels that have made us great and strong and useful in the world? Shall we rid ourselves of smothering debt through sufficient self-denial? Shall we once again be solvent as well as sovereign? Shall we halt the march to national bank­ruptcy? Shall we avoid the killing inflation that wipes out savings, de­stroys credit, and brings chaos?

If we do, who will benefit? If we do not, who will pay?

To both questions the answer is: We, the people.

Mr. Bradford Is well-known as a writer, speaker, and business organization consultant. He now lives in Ocala, Florida.

Our house guest was a handsome bachelor of around forty whom we had not seen since he was a teenage boy.. As a very young man he had left high school and joined the army, where he served out an enlistment of several years. Returned to civilian life, he finished high school and went through college by means of the G. I. Bill’s provisions. After that he got a good job with one of the government departments in a western state.

At the time he "dropped in" at our house he had been on that job perhaps fifteen years. He had never married, lived frugally, and saved up some money. Also, when his father died he found himself heir to a substantial legacy. This, plus his savings, he had prudently put at interest. With no family obligations, he figured he could live on the income thus generated. So he had quit his job and come to Florida to "look around." And he had got in touch with us for what pointers we might give him about desirable places to live in our adopted state.

We soon discovered, however, that the phrase "looking around" meant much more to him than seeking a new location. He also wanted, as he expressed it, to "find himself." But that, likewise, was not all. He had set himself, we found, a still bigger task—namely, to "make sense out of the world." So he was not seeking a new job but expected, as nearly as I could make out, to settle into a career of philosophical speculation.

What it all came down to, finally, was that this high school and university graduate, who was already at the threshold of middle age, looked upon himself as a kind of sociological lost sheep—a poor little lamb that had lost its way in a rather wicked world. Hence his desire to "find himself."

A Conflict of Interests

He seemed to feel, also, that there was some kind of conflict between having a job of any sort and also displaying a concerned interest in the political and economic fortunes of the human creature. But that, too, was not all. As I listened to what rapidly became a monologue he gradually let himself go, and I discerned that he seemed really unable to think beyond the familiar and time-worn cliches of the extreme and radical Left.

He thought just about everything in the United States was wrong and rotten. In stereotype terms he harped on the evils of poverty, the wickedness of Wall Street, the sins of Capitalism, the tragedy of slums, the barbarities of war—and so on . . . and on. During all this protracted denunciation of his own country, he revealed that he was an uncritical admirer of Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung, and especially of Fidel Castro. His admiration of those characters was equalled only by the fervor of his detestation of the American political and economic system.

"When a society like ours," he pontificated, "gets too rich, then the people at the bottom of the economic caste system suffer because their jobs are so poorly paid they have less respect for themselves and their position in society. This doesn’t happen in countries where most of the people are all poor together. It happens in industrial countries where wealth and affluence are flaunted continuously in front of the less fortunate people."

Later, with evident approval, he added: "Some people have claimed that if we got rid of competition, crime, and many jobs that wouldn’t be needed in a socialist economy, then every American could have the equivalent of a $20,000 income. . . . If people couldn’t gain status by competing economically then everyone would be more free to compete with themselves, that is, by realizing more of their own potential as a person. I don’t think there would be much crime, mental illness, discontent, or tension in such a world. We have never really had freedom, because what people mean by this is to get away from being oppressed by others so that in their turn they can turn on some one else and live well by the sweat of his work. No one has ever really wanted to eliminate the economic caste system. They merely wanted to get off the lower levels and then live better at the expense of those on the bottom."

(Lest you think I may have invented the rather turgid prose just quoted, I will explain here that it is taken from a letter he wrote a week or so after his visit in our home.)

On and on he went, in an endless and tiresome repetition of socialistic cliches and communist phrases. I put up with it for a whole day because he was our guest. But finally I had had enough, and told him bluntly that his sophomoric posturing was neither new nor original—that he was only repeating worn-out leftist cliches that I had read many years before, as a very young man, in various socialist journals that I perused avidly in those early days. He was merely echoing, I said, the tired old communistic jargon of the soap box agitator. At that he protested that he was not a communist, whereat I admonished him to stop talking like one, and advised him to season his politico-economic goulash with a dash of Adam Smith and a touch of Milton Friedman.

None Is Perfect

In doing this I was careful to explain that I was not an uncritical apologist for an economic system that sometimes suffered abuses. To defend capitalism, I said, was not to condone the misconduct of some capitalists. American capitalism, I admitted, has its crooks and thieves and petty tyrants and insensitive gougers, the same as socialism in England and Sweden or communism in Russia and Yugoslavia. But we have abundant statutes and legal processes to guard society against crooks, whether of the Right or Left; and especially we ought not to make the mistake of judging an economic mechanism by the deportment of the relatively few who use it improperly or criminally.

So what? Why bother with all this? Did it have any importance? Should I be concerned because one person chose to denigrate his own country and glorify its enemies?

Yes, I think I should, because that man was not alone. I have no way of knowing what percentage of his generation think and talk as he did, but it is probably considerable, because many of his age group were exposed to the same sort of leftist collegiate influence; and there are indications that present academic attitudes are doing little to bolster the faith of American students in their country and its institutions.

Several years ago I participated in a program that booked me as a "college visitor." Under its arrangement I would spend two and sometimes three days on a campus, usually with a formal lecture before the student assembly, and with visits to various classes, and one or more question and answer sessions. In those engagements I was amazed to discover the extent to which the same anti-business, pro-socialistic line was being followed, not by students alone, but by faculty members. I was not making pro-business talks. In my book, being a businessman does not confer any special degree of sanctity. My concern was with the principles of freedom; and I spoke for the freedom-from-too much-government philosophy that is well-known to Freeman readers. Yet more than once I was accused, not only by radical students but by left-leaning faculty members as well, of being an apologist for "big business." Would I fare any better today? I doubt it.

The casual visitor whose sophomoric diatribes inspired the writing of these paragraphs has long since vanished from my life. He was a rather pleasant chap, decent in his personal life, charitable in his instincts and impulses. Some traumatic experience of his youth may have warped his judgment about economic and political reality. Certainly he was quite practical about conserving his own cash—and blissfully unaware, the while, that he himself was a capitalist! I suppose he was really just a casualty of his cliche-ridden generation—a victim of the unbalanced exposure to radical propaganda that was experienced by the average college student of the forties and fifties—a barrage that was still in full thunder, as I have indicated, when I was a college visitor in the mid-sixties.

I note that a discouraging number of young people are still trying to "find themselves." Over and over again I am informed via television interviews and talk-show appearances that students are still working on the task of "putting it all together"—whatever that may mean. And as for "making sense out of the world," this appears to be a devout preoccupation of everybody under thirty!

Thinking vs. Working

Some of these Seekers after Truth, like our visitor, seem to feel that there is a disharmony or antagonism between laudably enlarging their view of life and the ordinary business of holding down a job and making a living. But the two things are not necessarily at odds, or in any way mutually exclusive.

To be sure, there are people who spend their energies in amassing money to the exclusion of other values, but that is because they are simply that kind of people. At the opposite extreme, they would spend Saturday evening at the neighborhood saloon instead of attending a free concert in the park. Poverty can indeed place severe restrictions upon intellectual development, and the possession of money does confer decided advantages; but these things are not conclusively determinant.

Of course when you attempt to "make sense out of the world" you set yourself a rather large task. The world has always been full of cruelty and selfishness and senselessness. It also exhibits amazing reservoirs of decency, devotion, dedication and human kindliness. In larger view, its peoples have always swung from extreme to extreme in their efforts to devise governmental mechanisms under which to regulate their relations with one another.

Alternately this has led to such triumphs as the Athens of Pericles, and to such chaos as was to be found in central Europe prior to Charlemagne. It has contrasted the intellectual achievements of the so-called Saracenic culture with the backward state of Christendom during the same period. And today it presents the conflicting ideologies found in the representative democracies, the dictatorships of the right, those of the left, and the hodge-podge of petty tyrannies that exist in some of the "emergent" states.

In all this welter of ideological conflict and experimentation, it has seemed to me that the best course for the individual is to make sense, so far as he can, out of his own life, rather than out of the billions of Lives that make up "the world."

In this effort he will be wise to place major emphasis on his own mental and spiritual development. since he can not live very richly in self-contemplation alone, he will relate himself to what goes on about him. But above all he will see inde^pendence and self-improvement, not lust as political or social ideals, but Is practical aspects of the business )f successful living. I can see no reason why he can not do these things while filling even a routine ob. The one thing is a matter of Dread and butter. The other is a thing of the spirit. But there is no necessary conflict between them.

The main thing, I suppose, is to travel hopefully, as enjoined by Robert Louis Stevenson; to follow Thomas Carlyle in the realization ;hat we move through mystery to mystery—but never to yield to his ^pessimistic conclusion that we proceed "from darkness and into darkness."

Two years before the Declaration of Independence was adopted, an Englishman arrived in Philadelphia to begin a new life — and it was none too soon for him.

He had spent several years at sea, worked at a number of poorly-paid employments, held one or two minor civil service appointments, dodged importunate creditors, and struggled to supplement his meager grammar school education by attending lectures on science. He was nearing forty and badly in need of a change. Now, thanks to a meeting with Benjamin Franklin in London, he was about to get it.

His name was Thomas Paine, and with his arrival in Philadelphia he stepped into the pages of American history. Later he would find a niche in French history as well. Franklin, impressed by Paine’s potential, had given him a letter to his son-in-law, Richard Bache; and Bache, in turn, put him in touch with Robert Aitkin, who was about to found the Pennsylvania Magazine. Paine helped him with that project, and for nearly two years served as editor of the new publication. By that time it was January of 1776 — a fateful year for America, and for Paine.

The breach between England and her American colonies had been widening, due on the one hand to skillful agitation by such Colonial spokesmen as the Adamses in New England and Jefferson, Henry and others in the south, and on the other hand to the incredible stupidity of a succession of British ministers and Colonial governors. The governors, especially, have scarcely been given their due as creators of discord. Looking back from 1975, it is hard to believe the arrogance and ruthlessness with which some of them conducted their administrations. To be sure, it was an age of ruthlessness in the management of public affairs; but distance from London seemed to bring out the worst in certain types of magistrate. Sir Edwin Sandys in Virginia and William Bradford at Plymouth are examples of the best in early colonial leadership; Sir Thomas Dale of Virginia, with his record of shooting, breaking and even burning those who opposed him, was probably the worst.

But a lot of history is involved between the settlement of Jamestown and Plymouth and the tense period that climaxed in 1776. Distance tends to telescope the decades, and it is hard to realize today that 187 years of experience, good and bad, had gone into the making of colonial America. In that long time, almost without their being aware of it, literally anew race of people, the Americans, had been forged into being.

Ready for Independence

We are apt to think of what we now call "The Spirit of ’76" as a mood of fiery rebellion on the one hand and of ruthless repression on the other. And both attitudes were indeed present. But quite apart from the heat of grievance and dispute, there were thoughtful men on both sides of the Atlantic who realized that a permanent state of union was not likely to be maintained between an insular England and a remote group of colonies that were plainly destined for great development and ultimate nationhood. Such an idea, however, was anathema to the American loyalists, and was utterly repugnant to those shortsighted British leaders who were not concerned with a long-range view of empire, but were determined to bring the rebellious colonials to their knees.

All this, however, leaves out of a account the attitude of the average citizen of Massachusetts, or Delaware, or Pennsylvania, or Virginia. They were confronted with a wrenching problem of psychology and habituation. Despite the fact that by 1776 the colonies were by no means exclusively, or even predominantly, populated by people of British origin, England, by force of long usage, was still regarded as the "mother country;" and by both sentiment and inertia the colonists generally were reluctant to dissolve the union.

They were angry over the tax policies of their overseas government; they were ready to resist stoutly the indignities they had been made to suffer; they were even prepared, at cost of blood and life, to fight the hated "Redcoats" — as they had demonstrated at Bunker Hill and elsewhere. But they were not yet quite ready to face the ultimate issue of separation. Somehow, they felt, reason would prevail. The "bonds of consanguinity" would be stronger than the divisive influences. In some way the present troubles would be resolved, the wounds would be healed, and all would be well. Hope springs eternal; and in the large affairs of a troubled mankind it is well that this is so; but hope wasn’t doing much for the cause of American independence in the early weeks of 1776.

Controls Imposed

The situation, in brief, was this: Around 1764 the British parliament enacted a bill known as the American Revenue Act. It was the first effort at raising money for the Crown in the colonies, and it aroused much opposition. It was followed in 1765 by the Quartering Act, which required the colonies to find barracks and supplies for British troops. Next, in the same year, came the detested Stamp Act. It was intended to reimburse the British government for about one-third of the outlay for a colonial military establishment which was, ostensibly at least, to protect the colonies from the Indians, the French, and other dangers.

In a different atmosphere the colonials might have accepted this as a reasonable division of costs. But the act was passed in England and imposed on the colonies ("Taxation without representation;") and it was constantly visible and irritating, because the stamps must be affixed to nearly everything the colonists used, even to dice and playing cards. It aroused great animosity, and it was repealed in 1766, partly through the efforts of William Pitt, but largely because of the devastating testimony given by the ubiquitous Benjamin Franklin, who appeared in London as an agent for Pennsylvania. But it left deep scars of resentment; and these were not healed by the Tea Act of April 1773, the additional Quartering Act of 1774, and the so-called Coercive Acts of the same year, which were designed to discipline Massachusetts by closing the Port of Boston.

All these and other grievances led to the calling of the First Continental Congress in September of 1774. Getting quickly down to business the Congress said (with 12 of the 13 colonies represented) that:

(a)      the Coercive Acts should not be obeyed;

(b)      Massachusetts should withhold taxes from London until those acts were repealed;

(c)      the people generally should arm and form their own militia; and

(d)      that stiff economic sanctions should be invoked against the British. 

But the Congress might have saved its breath and ink. Whitehall was obdurate… and so were the colonies. Lord North came forward with a Conciliation Plan, but the Lords would have none of it — and indeed, Parliament countered with the New England Restraining Act, which forbade first New England, and later New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina, to trade with any nation except Britain.

On February 2, 1775, the Second Massachusetts Provincial Congress met at Cambridge and framed measures that would prepare that Colony for war. On February 28 British troops landed at Salem to seize colonial military supplies. On April 18 some 700 British troops set out from Boston for Concord to destroy supplies known to be stored there; and that night three men — Dr. Samuel Prescott, Richard Dawes, and especially a silversmith named Paul Revere —galloped into immortality.

A Continental Army

Thereafter events moved with great speed. In May of 1775 the Second Continental Congress met and took a number of actions, the most significant of which was military — namely, to adopt the colonial forces (which by then were actually besieging the British in Boston) as a Continental Army; to authorize the raising of six companies of riflemen to march on Boston; and especially to elect George Washington as Commander in Chief of the American forces. Before he could get to Boston, however, the Battle of Breed’s Hill (to be known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, the nearby eminence originally selected for the Colonial position) was fought, and Ethan Allen had seized Ticonderoga and Crown Point. An undeclared war was rapidly getting into gear.

But what was the issue? The colonists were angry about unfair taxes and discriminatory laws. They resented the highhanded methods of the "home government"— a government they had no part in electing and in which they had no representation. They personified these and other evils in the corpulent image of King George, and damned him roundly. But are these the sort of issues that men will die for? Will they fight a long and bloody war over a tax on tea? After Breed’s Hill — what? With perhaps a third of the colonists strongly opposed to any war, how could they be led to support one over a matter of quartering some red-coated troopers?

As for creating a New Nation, which would have been an imaginative and emotional issue big enough for blood, hardly anybody was even thinking about it, and those who did were not at all enthusiastic about the idea. Benjamin Franklin, though he had long before written a plan for a union of the colonies as colonies, had small confidence that they could be formed into a nation. Patrick Henry is known as a great patriot, and so he was; but his patriotism was centered in the sovereign state of Virginia, even though at Philadelphia he had declared to the First Continental Congress "I am not a Virginian, but an American." But in the crunch he opposed the adoption of the Constitution because he thought the country was just too big for any one government to manage!

In short, what the colonial leaders needed was a gut issue —and they simply didn’t have it.

And so we come back to Thomas Paine. On the 9th of January 1776 he published at Philadelphia a little book — a pamphlet, really — with the title Common Sense. And in no time at all there was no longer any question about what the issue would be. It was Independence ! Not nationalism. Not nationhood —not yet, that is, except perhaps in the minds of a very few. Paine, indeed, came close to it in his "hints" on how to organize for independence, though even his concept seems to have been that of a federation of free colonies. No, not a new nation — not yet. That was something else. But independence! Just to be free of England and on their own!

American Independence: A Pearl of Great Price

Men saw at once that here was a value worth all it might cost. Paine put it clearly: "The object contended for ought always to bear some just proportion to the expense. The removal of North [then Prime Minister] or the whole detestable junta is a matter unworthy the millions we have expended…. If the whole continent must take up arms, if every man must be a soldier, it is scarcely worth our while to fight against a contemptible ministry only. Dearly, dearly do we pay for the repeal of the Acts if that is all we fight for."

Paine’s little book was read everywhere throughout the colonies, and with tremendous effect. Washington wrote of it that it had "worked a powerful change in the minds of many men." Paine was a master of biting invective, but he employed little of it in Common Sense. The argument for the most part (except when he paid his disrespects to kings in general and George III in particular) is calm, simple and effective. Nor did it lack passages of sardonic humor, as when he wrote: "Small islands… are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island."

Some members of the New York Provincial Congress, still loyal to England, considered issuing a pamphlet to answer Paine’s thesis; but they finally decided that it was unanswerable, as indeed it was. In a short time the book had been read all over the colonies — and from that time on there was very little question as to what the Continental Congress would do when it met in June. Common Sense had furnished the answer.

And common sense—not the book, but the frame of mind and habit of behavior denoted by the phrase — supplied the people of the new country with many another answer. When the weary years had dragged on to Yorktown and the war was ended, common sense led them to adopt in earnest the idea of a strong central government to replace the sprawling and conflicting authorities of the several colonies.

Common sense instructed them to make it simple and close to the people, and to limit its authority.

Common sense, plus a hot memory of past injustices, led them to avoid too much central domination, and to reserve great power and autonomy to the states. They were not intent upon making a government that should dominate their lives and regulate their occupations, but in creating and defining the minimums of power and authority necessary to guarantee their freedom.

Common sense told them that men work best where there is the least restraint upon their activities, other than what is necessary for the enforcement of laws that were enacted for the protection and benefit for all.

Common sense, some 40 years later, would lead them and their political heirs to complete the break with England by fighting the War of 1812.

Trial and Error

During that period the new young nation was going through a time of trial and error. Its leaders were feeling their way into nationhood and international status. No doubt there were misjudgments and blunders, since they too were men of passion, prejudice, occasional ignorance, and fallibility, like their fathers and great-grandchildren. Some years ago it became a kind of literary fad to point out their errors and dwell upon them at wearisome length.

Some historians and self-nominated social critics have ridiculed Washington himself as being rather pettily concerned with titles and protocol. They forget that he was a trail maker, ever conscious of the fact that he was the first President of a nation destined for a great role in the drama of world history. If he fussed over details of etiquette he was also meticulous in his conduct as head of state; and in both his social and official deportment he was guided mainly by the dictates of common sense. He wanted the new nation to develop its agriculture, trade and industry with the least possible restraint and interference by the government. The plain common sense born of his own experience in manufacturing, farming and land development cautioned him to avoid the dangers of unrelieved public debt, and he wrote solemn warnings against it.

Other leaders were equally influenced by the canons of ordinary good judgment. They were in the main idealists, even visionaries, as to the future of their country; but they were quite practical and down-to-earth in the important matter of keeping the country solvent and making its institutions work. They accepted the idea of a public debt (even Paine wrote approvingly of it) as an ordinary and recurrent fiscal phenomenon in the life of a going concern; but nobody was willing to spend the nation to the verge of bankruptcy.

Franklin‘s oft-quoted reply to the lady who, when the Constitutional Convention adjourned, asked him "What have you given us?" supplies the clue to a very pragmatic attitude then prevalent. He said, as most people now know, "A republic, madam — if you can keep it." Like most of his peers, he was well aware of the tendency people have always shown to load their governments down with adventitious paraphernalia — the machinery of special privilege, sumptuary regulations, social and political tinkerings, much of it haloed over with the aura of good intent, but all of it an ultimate tax burden on the average citizen and another handicap in his quest for human progress and freedom. If the Founders had needed an object lesson they had it glaringly before them in the worthless "Continentals" (paper money) they had been forced to issue in financing the war.

It Stands to Reason

Common sense! What a wealth of homely virtue the term implies! And what a service its exercise has been, in both great and small affairs. Let me recall a personal experience with it. Many years ago my wife and I were preparing to "restore" an old house we had purchased in northern Virginia. The memory of it fits into this article the more readily because we discovered that the place had actually belonged to George Washington at the time of his death. The house, which had become dilapidated, was in two sections. The two-story part, we knew from local records, had been built during the Civil War; but the lower log section was undoubtedly there when Washington owned the place, for in a careful listing of his properties attached to his will he mentioned that the place had "a good house" on it.

But I am reaching too far back. Our renovation, I assure you, was undertaken in fairly modern times, relatively speaking. Full of enthusiasm and good intent, we plunged into our project — and before we knew it we were up to our ears in blueprints, elevations, levels, heating systems, patios; all outside our expectations and certainly beyond our resources, which were slender. So we said woah-up, halted everything, caught our breath — and started over.

In our neighborhood there was a small-time house builder — a carpenter, in fact, who, with his two sons and a couple of neighbors, made a dependable construction team. He himself was a transplanted, twangy product of Maine, and he belongs in this chronicle because I am remembering two phrases he often used, both pertinent to our present discussion. With a yellow scratch pad and a stubby pencil, he went over the place with us, floor by floor and foot by foot, asking what we wanted, sometimes agreeing with our wishes by saying "Eyeh" (which is down-east for "yes") but often saying "no" quite firmly, and explaining why, structurally, it couldn’t or shouldn’t be done. And over and over, in explaining matters to us, he made use of two phrases: (a) "it stands to reason" and (b) "it’s just common sense." Before I leave him, let me record gratefully that his frequent appeals to reason and invocations of common sense saved us a great deal of money and finally gave us a house of real comfort, authenticity and beauty.

It stands to reason. It’s just plain common sense. Homely, potent phrases! When high-flown arguments load us down with rhetoric; when bureaucratic jargon confuses or misleads; then simple, common sense may well be the really dependable compass, in lieu of more sophisticated guidance. It is a safe rule, for statesmen as well as house builders. Indeed, it was often followed by the men who set the course of our country in its early days.

Nor was its use confined to the foundation builders alone. Towering figures of the later years, unversed in abstruse argument, resorted to its homely logic with great benefit to the nation. Writing of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, Carl Schurz lamented that the President had been greatly underestimated. "He is a man of profound feeling, correct and firm principles and incorruptible honesty," Schurz wrote; and he added that Lincoln "possesses to a remarkable degree the characteristic, God-given trait of this people — sound common sense."

The Aging Process Brings Fears and Doubts

The decades have slipped by and the nation has aged and grown. From less than three million people on the edge of a vast world new to men, we have become a 210 million people giant, spanning a continent — a nation of vast wealth, importance and influence. We are rich in achievement, science, culture. We should be the envy of the world, and in some ways we are. Yet we are deeply troubled. The way ahead is obscure. We fear for the present; we are doubtful about our future. Once rich in minerals and fossil energy, we now lag far behind some less "advanced" countries, and we are dependents in the markets of the world for some of the rarer ores, and for liquid fuel.  More than all this, we are bewildered in a fog of pseudo-economics, and are being misled into disastrous experiments by the influential devotees of this or that sociologic or economic "ism."

In the name of financial stability we have debased our money and cut in half at least, possibly to one-third, the buying power of the dollar holdings of our people — a bitter pill for those who possess some degree of wealth, but a disaster for those who do not. The process by which this is done is called "inflation" and it is made to appear as a whimsical kind of thing that just happens now and then, instead of the predictable result of certain actions — such as following a permanent policy of not paying our debts.

With a loudly professed interest in human welfare we have set up a governmentally operated old age pension system that has been broadened and extended until it now threatens to collapse unless further inroads are made into the earnings of everybody to support it. To the end of "protecting" consumers, we have passed regulatory laws and created enforcement agencies that have driven many producers frantic (and sometimes out of business) with nagging bureaucratic supervision and expensive, frustrating, duplicating paper work. Confronted with the greatest need we have ever known for energy in the form of fossil fuel, we have not only penalized the production of such fuels but have hampered the exploration necessary to find them.

All this at a time when we very badly need an active economy with high levels of employment, wages and corporate earnings.

Well… but these are themes for books, not paragraphs; and many books, indeed, have been written, and no doubt will be, about what happened to this country around the middle of the 20th Century. Perhaps it will be enough to pose here one or two questions in conclusion.

Act Responsibly

First, if the New York or Philadelphia or Boston of, say, 1800, had ever foolishly spent itself into bankruptcy, with no apparent regard for huge deficits annually incurred, — what would its leaders have done when finally confronted with fiscal reality? Run to Washington and beg a handout from the national government? Try to get the state legislature to bail them out? Cry to heaven that they were being mistreated by banks and other leaders? Or would they, like any sensible householder or any prudent housewife, face a few facts, cut out some frills, have a little less "fun" for a while, pay up their debts, balance their budget, and in general proceed like… well, like people of common sense?

Second, if the Federal government had failed for many years to live within its income, and if as a result it had accumulated a debt of some 500 billion dollars; and if the government had simply lost count of all the agencies and bureaus tucked away in its vast buildings in the Capitol and all over the country; and if the deficit for the current year was going to reach the staggering amount of sixty billion dollars….

Given such conditions, would President Adams or Monroe (or whoever) listen long to a lot of academic theoreticians and try out a number of time-worn expedients — or would they face reality, as ordinary people do in their affairs? Perhaps they might remember that Adam Smith had said, not long before, that "what is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarcely be folly in that of a great kingdom." If so, would they go on spending and running up ruinous deficits, or would they sensibly cut out some unnecessary or less urgent things, spend less than is to be taken in, apply the excess to paying off the debt, and so restore the nation’s credit and the value of its money? That’s a great oversimplification of a complex problem, perhaps — but is it also, maybe, just common sense? And finally, in surveying the current scene and trying to understand the American situation, we encounter the following episode: In recent months one of the television networks ran a series in which a reporter each day would visit an average family and ask how they were being affected by the depression. One such visit included two parents — young people perhaps in their middle thirties, and two sub-teenage children. Home scenes were shown — an average, well-kept middle class dwelling.

But this was the clincher: The father said his regular job (at $14,000 a year) simply didn’t give them enough to maintain a proper standard of living; so he was moonlighting on a job that paid him an additional $10,000 a year. And they were still having trouble making out on the $24,000 because, for one reason, the two children kept asking him for things, and he was forced to tell them he just couldn’t afford to buy them!

So, all things considered, perhaps one more question is in order at the end, as it was at the beginning:

Common sense… whatever happened to it?