Our Enemy, the State
Albert Jay Nock
[1935 / Part 5 of 7]
CHAPTER 4
After conquest and confiscation have been effected, and the State set
up, its first concern is with the land. The State assumes the right of
eminent domain over its territorial basis, whereby every landholder
becomes in theory a tenant of the State. In its capacity as ultimate
landlord, the State distributes the land among its beneficiaries on
its own terms. A point to be observed in passing is that by the
State-system of land-tenure each original transaction confers two
distinct monopolies, entirely different in their nature, inasmuch as
one concerns the right to labour-made property, and the other concerns
the right to purely law-made property. The one is a monopoly of the
use-value of land; and the other, a monopoly of the economic rent of
land. The first gives the right to keep other persons from using the
land in question, or trespassing on it, and the right to exclusive
possession of values accruing from the application of labour to it;
values, that is, which are produced by exercise of the economic means
upon the particular property in question. Monopoly of economic rent,
on the other hand, gives the exclusive right to values accruing from
the desire of other persons to possess that property; values which
take their rise irrespective of any exercise of the economic means on
the part of the holder.[1]
Economic rent arises when, for whatsoever reason, two or more persons
compete for the possession of a piece of land, and it increases
directly according to the number of persons competing. The whole of
Manhattan Island was bought originally by a handful of Hollanders from
a handful of Indians for twenty-four dollars' worth of trinkets. The
subsequent "rise in land-values," as we call it, was brought
about by the steady influx of population and the consequent high
competition for portions of the island's surface; and these ensuing
values were monopolized by the holders. They grew to an enormous size,
and the holders profited accordingly; the Astor, Wendel, and Trinity
Church estates have always served as classical examples for study of
the State-system of land-tenure.
Bearing in mind that the State is the organization of the political
means - that its primary intention is to enable the economic
exploitation of one class by another - we see that it has always acted
on the principle already cited, that expropriation must precede
exploitation. There is no other way to make the political means
effective. The first postulate of fundamental economics is that man is
a land-animal, deriving his subsistence wholly from the land.[2] His
entire wealth is produced by the application of labour and capital to
land; no form of wealth known to man can be produced in any other way.
Hence, if his free access to land be shut off by legal preëmption,
he can apply his labour and capital only with the land-holder's
consent, and on the landholder's terms; in other words, it is at this
point, and this point only, that exploitation becomes practicable.[3]
Therefore the first concern of the State must be invariably, as we
find it invariably is, with its policy of land-tenure.
I state these elementary matters as briefly as I can; the reader may
easily find a full exposition of them elsewhere.[4] I am here
concerned only to show why the State system of land-tenure came into
being, and why its maintenance is necessary to the State's existence.
If this system were broken up, obviously the reason for the State's
existence would disappear, and the State itself would disappear with
it.[5] With this in mind, it is interesting to observe that although
all our public policies would seem to be in process of exhaustive
review, no publicist has anything to say about the State system of
land-tenure. This is no doubt the best evidence of its importance.[6]
Under the feudal State there was no great amount of traffic in land.
When William, for example, set up the Norman State in England after
conquest and confiscation in 1066-76, his associate banditti, among
whom he parcelled out the confiscated territory, did nothing to speak
of in the way of developing their holdings, and did not contemplate
gain from the increment of rental-values. In fact, economic rent
hardly existed; their fellow-beneficiaries were not in the market to
any great extent, and the dispossessed population did not represent
any economic demand. The feudal régime was a régime of
status, under which landed estates yielded hardly any rental-value,
and only a moderate use-value, but carried an enormous insignia-value.
Land was regarded more as a badge of nobility than as an active asset;
its possession marked a man as belonging to the exploiting class, and
the size of his holdings seems to have counted for more than the
number of his exploitable dependents.[7] The encroachments of the
merchant-State, however, brought about a change in these
circumstances. The importance of rental-values was recognized, and
speculative trading in land became general.
Hence in a study of the merchant-State as it appeared full-blown in
America, it is a point of utmost consequence to remember that from the
time of the first colonial settlement to the present day, America has
been regarded as a practically limitless field for speculation in
rental-values.[8] One may say at a safe venture that every colonial
enterpriser and proprietor after Raleigh's time understood economic
rent and the conditions necessary to enhance it. The Swedish, Dutch
and British trading-companies understood this; Endicott and Winthrop,
of the autonomous merchant-State on the Bay, understood it; so did
Penn and the Calverts; so did the Carolinian proprietors, to whom
Charles II granted a lordly belt of territory south of Virginia,
reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific; and as we have seen, Roger
Williams and Clarke understood it perfectly. Indeed, land-speculation
may be put down as the first major industry established in colonial
America. Professor Sakolski calls attention to the fact that it was
flourishing in the South before the commercial importance of either
negroes or tobacco was recognized. These two staples came fully into
their own about 1670 - tobacco perhaps a little earlier, but not much
- and before that, England and Europe had been well covered by a
lively propaganda of Southern landholders, advertising for
settlers.[9]
Mr. Sakolski makes it clear that very few original enterprisers in
American rental-values ever got much profit out of their ventures.
This is worth remarking here as enforcing the point that what gives
rise to economic rent is the presence of a population engaged in a
settled exercise of the economic means, or as we commonly put it, "working
for a living" - or again, in technical terms, applying labour and
capital to natural resources for the production of wealth. It was no
doubt a very fine dignified thing for Carteret, Berkeley, and their
associate nobility to be the owners of a province as large as the
Carolinas, but if no population were settled there, producing wealth
by exercise of the economic means, obviously not a foot of it would
bear a pennyworth of rental-value, and the proprietors' chance of
exercising the political means would therefore be precisely nil.
Proprietors who made the most profitable exercise of the political
means have been those - or rather, speaking strictly, the heirs of
those - like the Brevoorts, Wendels, Whitneys, Astors, and Goelets,
who owned land in an actual or prospective urban centre, and held it
as an investment rather than for speculation.
The lure of the political means in America, however, gave rise to a
state of mind which may profitably be examined. Under the feudal
State, living by the political means was enabled only by the accident
of birth, or in some special cases by the accident of personal favour.
Persons outside these categories of accident had no chance whatever to
live otherwise than by the economic means. No matter how much they may
have wished to exercise the political means, or how greatly they may
have envied the privileged few who could exercise it, they were unable
to do so; the feudal régime was strictly one of status. Under
the merchant-State, on the contrary, the political means was open to
anyone, irrespective of birth or position, who had the sagacity and
determination necessary to get at it. In this respect, America
appeared as a field of unlimited opportunity. The effect of this was
to produce a race of people whose master-concern was to avail
themselves of this opportunity. They had but the one spring of action,
which was the determination to abandon the economic means as soon as
they could, and at any sacrifice of conscience or character, and live
by the political means. From the beginning, this determination has
been universal, amounting to monomania.[10] We need not concern
ourselves here with the effect upon the general balance of advantage
produced by supplanting the feudal State by the merchant-State; we may
observe only that certain virtues and integrities were bred by the régime
of status, to which the régime of contract appears to be
inimical, even destructive. Vestiges of them persist among peoples who
have had a long experience of the régime of status, but in
America, which has had no such experience, they do not appear. What
the compensations for their absence may be, or whether they may be
regarded as adequate, I repeat, need not concern us; we remark only
the simple fact that they have not struck root in the constitution of
the American character at large, and apparently can not do so.
II
It was said at the time, I believe, that the actual causes of the
colonial revolution of 1776 would never be known. The causes assigned
by our schoolbooks may be dismissed as trivial; the various partisan
and propagandist views of that struggle and its origins may be put
down as incompetent. Great evidential value may be attached to the
long line of adverse commercial legislation laid down by the British
State from 1651 onward, especially to that portion of it which was
enacted after the merchant-State established itself firmly in England
in consequence of the events of 1688. This legislation included the
Navigation Acts, the Trade Acts, acts regulating the colonial
currency, the act of 1752 regulating the process of levy and distress,
and the procedures leading up to the establishment of the Board of
Trade in 1696.[11] These directly affected the industrial and
commercial interests in the colonies, though just how seriously is
perhaps an open question - enough at any rate, beyond doubt, to
provoke deep resentment.
Over and above these, however, if the reader will put himself back
into the ruling passion of the time, he will at once appreciate the
import of two matters which have for some reason escaped the attention
of historians. The first of these is the attempt of the British State
to limit the exercise of the political means in respect of
rental-values.[12] In 1763 it forbade the colonists to take up lands
lying westward of the source of any river flowing through the Atlantic
seaboard. The dead-line thus established ran so as to cut off from preëmption
about half of Pennsylvania and half of Virginia and everything to the
west thereof. This was serious. With the mania for speculation running
as high as it did, with the consciousness of opportunity, real or
fancied, having become so acute and so general, this ruling affected
everybody. One can get some idea of its effect by imagining the state
of mind of our people at large if stock-gambling had suddenly been
outlawed at the beginning of the last great boom in Wall Street a few
years ago.
For by this time the colonists had begun to be faintly aware of the
illimitable resources of the country lying westward; they had learned
just enough about them to fire their imagination and their avarice to
a white heat. The seaboard had been pretty well taken up, the
free-holding farmer had been pushed back farther and farther,
population was coming in steadily, the maritime towns were growing.
Under these conditions, "western lands" had become a centre
of attraction. Rental-values depended on population, the population
was bound to expand, and the one general direction in which it could
expand was westward, where lay an immense and incalculably rich domain
waiting for preëmption. What could be more natural than that the
colonists should itch to get their hands on this territory, and
exploit it for themselves alone, and on their own terms, without risk
of arbitrary interference by the British State? - and this of
necessity meant political independence. It takes no great stress of
imagination to see that anyone in those circumstances would have felt
that way, and that colonial resentment against the arbitrary
limitation which the edict of 1763 put upon the exercise of the
political means must therefore have been great.
The actual state of land-speculation during the colonial period will
give a fair idea of the probabilities in the case. Most of it was done
on the company-system; a number of adventurers would unite, secure a
grant of land, survey it, and then sell it off as speedily as they
could. Their aim was a quick turnover; they did not, as a rule,
contemplate holding the land, much less settling it - in short, their
ventures were a pure gamble in rental-values.[13] Among these
pre-revolutionary enterprises was the Ohio Company, formed in 1748
with a grant of half a million acres; the Loyal Company, which like
the Ohio Company, was composed of Virginians; the Transylvania, the
Vandalia, Scioto, Indiana, Wabash, Illinois, Susquehannah, and others
whose holdings were smaller.[14] It is interesting to observe the
names of persons concerned in these undertakings; one can not escape
the significance of this connexion in view of their attitude towards
the revolution, and their subsequent career as statesmen and patriots.
For example, aside from his individual ventures, General Washington
was a member of the Ohio Company, and a prime mover in organizing the
Mississippi Company. He also conceived the scheme of the Potomac
Company, which was designed to raise the rental-value of western
holdings by affording an outlet for their produce by canal and portage
to the Potomac River, and thence to the seaboard. This enterprise
determined the establishment of the national capital in its present
most ineligible situation, for the proposed terminus of the canal was
at that point. Washington picked up some lots in the city that bears
his name, but in common with other early speculators, he did not make
much money out of them; they were appraised at about $20,000 when he
died.
Patrick Henry was an inveterate and voracious engrosser of land lying
beyond the deadline set by the British State; later he was heavily
involved in the affairs of one of the notorious Yazoo companies,
operating in Georgia. He seems to have been most unscrupulous. His
company's holdings in Georgia, amounting to more than ten million
acres, were to be paid for in Georgia scrip, which was much
depreciated. Henry bought up all these certificates that he could get
his hands on, at ten cents on the dollar, and made a great profit on
them by their rise in value when Hamilton put through his measure for
having the central government assume the debts they represented.
Undoubtedly it was this trait of unrestrained avarice which earned him
the dislike of Mr. Jefferson, who said, rather contemptuously, that he
was "insatiable in money."[15]
Benjamin Franklin's thrifty mind turned cordially to the project of
the Vandalia Company, and he acted successfully as promoter for it in
England in 1766. Timothy Pickering, who was Secretary of State under
Washington and John Adams, went on record in 1796 that "all I am
now worth was gained by speculations in land." Silas Deane,
emissary of the Continental Congress to France, was interested in the
Illinois and Wabash Companies, as was Robert Morris, who managed the
revolution's finances; as was also James Wilson, who became a justice
of the Supreme Court and a mighty man in post-revolutionary
land-grabbing. Wolcott of Connecticut, and Stiles, president of Yale
College, held stock in the Susquehannah Company; so did Peletiah
Webster, Ethan Allen, and Jonathan Trumbull, the "Brother
Jonathan," whose name was long a sobriquet for the typical
American, and is still sometimes so used. James Duane, the first mayor
of New York City, carried on some quite considerable speculative
undertakings; and however indisposed one may feel towards entertaining
the fact, so did the "Father of the Revolution" himself -
Samuel Adams.
A mere common-sense view of the situation would indicate that the
British State's interference with a free exercise of the political
means was at least as great an incitement to revolution as its
interference, through the Navigation Acts, and the Trade Acts, with a
free exercise of the economic means. In the nature of things it would
be a greater incitement, both because it affected a more numerous
class of persons, and because speculation in land-values represented
much easier money. Allied with this is the second matter which seems
to me deserving of notice, and which has never been properly reckoned
with, as far as I know, in studies of the period.
It would seem the most natural thing in the world for the colonists
to perceive that independence would not only give freer access to this
one mode of the political means, but that it would also open access to
other modes which the colonial status made unavailable. The
merchant-State existed in the royal provinces complete in structure,
but not in function; it did not give access to all the modes of
economic exploitation. The advantages of a State which should be
wholly autonomous in this respect must have been clear to the
colonists, and must have moved them strongly towards the project of
establishing one.
Again it is purely a common-sense view of the circumstances that
leads to this conclusion. The merchant-State in England had emerged
triumphant from conflict, and the colonists had plenty of chance to
see what it could do in the way of distributing the various means of
economic exploitation, and its methods of doing it. For instance,
certain English concerns were in the carrying trade between England
and America, for which other English concerns built ships. Americans
could compete in both these lines of business. If they did so, the
carrying-charges would be regulated by the terms of this competition;
if not, they would be regulated by monopoly, or, in our historic
phrase, they could be set as high as the traffic would bear. English
carriers and shipbuilders made common cause, approached the State and
asked it to intervene, which it did by forbidding the colonists to
ship goods on any but English-built and English-operated ships. Since
freight-charges are a factor in prices, the effect of this
intervention was to enable British shipowners to pocket the difference
between monopoly-rates and competitive rates; to enable them, that is,
to exploit the consumer by employing the political means.[16] Similar
interventions were made at the instance of cutlers, nailmakers,
hatters, steelmakers, etc.
These interventions took the form of simple prohibition. Another mode
of intervention appeared in the customs-duties laid by the British
State on foreign sugar and molasses.[17] We all now know pretty well,
probably, that the primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the
exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable
from sheer robbery.[18] All the reasons regularly assigned are
debatable; this one is not, hence propagandists and lobbyists never
mention it. The colonists were well aware of this reason, and the best
evidence that they were aware of it is that long before the Union was
established, the merchant-enterprisers and industrialists were ready
and waiting to set upon the new-formed administration with an
organized demand for a tariff.
It is clear that while in the nature of things the British State's
interventions upon the economic means would stir up great resentment
among the interests directly concerned, they would have another effect
fully as significant, if not more so, in causing those interests to
look favourably on the idea of political independence. They could
hardly have helped seeing the positive as well as the negative
advantage that would accrue from setting up a State of their own,
which they might bend to their own purposes. It takes no great amount
of imagination to reconstruct the vision that appeared before them of
a merchant-State clothed with full powers of intervention and
discrimination, a State which should first and last "help
business," and which should be administered either by mere agents
or by persons easily manageable, if not by persons of actual interests
like to their own. It is hardly presumable that the colonists
generally were not intelligent enough to see this vision, or that they
were not resolute enough to risk the chance of realizing it when the
time could be made ripe; as it was, the time was ripened almost before
it was ready.[19] We can discern a distinct line of common purpose
uniting the interests of the merchant-enterpriser with those of the
actual or potential speculator in rental-values - uniting the
Hancocks, Gores, Otises, with the Henrys, Lees, Wolcotts, Trumbulls -
and leading directly towards the goal of political independence.
The main conclusion, however, towards which these observations tend,
is that one general frame of mind existed among the colonists with
reference to the nature and primary function of the State. This frame
of mind was not peculiar to them; they shared it with the
beneficiaries of the merchant-State in England, and with those of the
feudal State as far back as the State's history can be traced.
Voltaire, surveying the débris of the feudal State, said that
in essence the State is "a device for taking money out of one set
of pockets and putting it into another." The beneficiaries of the
feudal State had precisely this view, and they bequeathed it unchanged
and unmodified to the actual and potential beneficiaries of the
merchant-State. The colonists regarded the State as primarily an
instrument whereby one might help oneself and hurt others; that is to
say, first and foremost they regarded it as the organization of the
political means. No other view of the State was ever held in colonial
America. Romance and poetry were brought to bear on the subject in the
customary way; glamorous myths about it were propagated with the
customary intent; but when all came to all, nowhere in colonial
America were actual practical relations with the State ever determined
by any other view than this.[20]
III
The charter of the American revolution was the Declaration of
Independence, which took its stand on the double thesis of "unalienable"
natural rights and popular sovereignty. We have seen that these
doctrines were theoretically, or as politicians say, "in
principle," congenial to the spirit of the English
merchant-enterpriser, and we may see that in the nature of things they
would be even more agreeable to the spirit of all classes in American
society. A thin and scattered population with a whole wide world
before it, with a vast territory full of rich resources which anyone
might take a hand at preëmpting and exploiting, would be strongly
on the side of natural rights, as the colonists were from the
beginning; and political independence would confirm it in that
position. These circumstances would stiffen the American
merchant-enterpriser, agrarian, forestaller and industrialist alike in
a jealous, uncompromising, and assertive economic individualism.
So also with the sister doctrine of popular sovereignty. The
colonists had been through a long and vexatious experience of State
interventions which limited their use of both the political and
economic means. They had also been given plenty of opportunity to see
how these interventions had been managed, and how the interested
English economic groups which did the managing had profited at their
expense. Hence there was no place in their minds for any political
theory that disallowed the right of individual self-expression in
politics. As their situation tended to make them natural-born economic
individualists, so also it tended to make them natural-born
republicans.
Thus the preamble of the Declaration hit the mark of a cordial
unanimity. Its two leading doctrines could easily be interpreted as
justifying an unlimited economic pseudo-individualism on the part of
the State's beneficiaries, and a judiciously managed exercise of
political self-expression by the electorate. Whether or not this were
a more free-and-easy interpretation than a strict construction of the
doctrines will bear, no doubt it was in effect the interpretation
quite commonly put upon them. American history abounds in instances
where great principles have, in their common understanding and
practical application, been narrowed down to the service of very
paltry ends. The preamble, nevertheless, did reflect a general state
of mind. However incompetent the understanding of its doctrines may
have been, and however interested the motives which prompted that
understanding, the general spirit of the people was in their favour.
There was complete unanimity also regarding the nature of the new and
independent political institution which the Declaration contemplated
as within "the right of the people" to set up. There was a
great and memorable dissension about its form, but none about its
nature. It should be in essence the mere continuator of the
merchant-State already existing. There was no idea of setting up
government, the purely social institution which should have no
other object than, as the Declaration put it, to secure the natural
rights of the individual; or as Paine put it, which should contemplate
nothing beyond the maintenance of freedom and security - the
institution which should make no positive interventions of any kind
upon the individual, but should confine itself exclusively to such
negative interventions as the maintenance of freedom and security
might indicate. The idea was to perpetuate an institution of another
character entirely, the State, the organization of the
political means; and this was accordingly done.
There is no disparagement implied in this observation; for, all
questions of motive aside, nothing else was to be expected. No one
knew any other kind of political organization. The causes of American
complaint were conceived of as due only to interested and culpable
mal-administration, not to the essentially anti-social nature of the
institution administered. Dissatisfaction was directed against
administrators, not against the institution itself. Violent dislike of
the form of the institution - the monarchical form - was
engendered, but no distrust or suspicion of its nature. The character
of the State had never been subjected to scrutiny; the coöperation
of the Zeitgeist was needed for that, and it was not yet to be
had.[21] One may see here a parallel with the revolutionary movements
against the Church in the sixteenth century - and indeed with
revolutionary movements in general. They are incited by abuses and
misfeasances, more or less specific and always secondary, and are
carried on with no idea beyond getting them rectified or avenged,
usually by the sacrifice of conspicuous scapegoats. The philosophy of
the institution that gives play to these misfeasances is never
examined, and hence they recur promptly under another form or other
auspices,[22] or else their place is taken by others which are in
character precisely like them. Thus the notorious failure of reforming
and revolutionary movements in the long-run may as a rule be found due
to their incorrigible superficiality.
One mind, indeed, came within reaching distance of the fundamentals
of the matter, not by employing the historical method, but by a
homespun kind of reasoning, aided by a sound and sensitive instinct.
The common view of Mr. Jefferson as a doctrinaire believer in the
stark principle of "states' rights" is most incompetent and
misleading. He believed in states' rights, assuredly, but he went much
farther; states' rights were only an incident in his general system of
political organization. He believed that the ultimate political unit,
the repository and source of political authority and initiative,
should be the smallest unit; not the federal unit, state unit or
county unit, but the township, or, as he called it, the "ward."
The township, and the township only, should determine the delegation
of power upwards to the county, the state, and the federal units. His
system of extreme decentralization is interesting and perhaps worth a
moment's examination, because if the idea of the State
is ever displaced by the idea of government, it seems probable
that the practical expression of this idea would come out very nearly
in that form.[23] There is probably no need to say that the
consideration of such a displacement involves a long look ahead, and
over a field of view that is cluttered with the débris of a
most discouraging number, not of nations alone, but of whole
civilizations. Nevertheless it is interesting to remind ourselves that
more than a hundred and fifty years ago, one American succeeded in
getting below the surface of things, and that he probably to some
degree anticipated the judgment of an immeasurably distant future.
In February, 1816, Mr. Jefferson wrote a letter to Joseph C. Cabell,
in which he expounded the philosophy behind his system of political
organization. What is it, he asks, that has "destroyed liberty
and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under
the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into
one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or
of the aristocrats of a Venetian senate." The secret of freedom
will be found in the individual "making himself the depository of
the powers respecting himself, so far as he is competent to them, and
delegating only what is beyond his competence, by a synthetical
process, to higher and higher orders of functionaries, so as to trust
fewer and fewer powers in proportion as the trustees become more and
more oligarchical." This idea rests on accurate observation, for
we are all aware that not only the wisdom of the ordinary man, but
also his interest and sentiment, have a very short radius of
operation; they can not be stretched over an area of much more than
township-size; and it is the acme of absurdity to suppose that any man
or any body of men can arbitrarily exercise their wisdom, interest and
sentiment over a state-wide or nation-wide area with any kind of
success. Therefore the principle must hold that the larger the area of
exercise, the fewer and more clearly defined should be the functions
exercised. Moreover, "by placing under everyone what his own eye
may superintend," there is erected the surest safeguard against
usurpation of function. "Where every man is a sharer in the
direction of his ward-republic, or of some of the higher ones, and
feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not
merely at an election one day in the year, but every day; . . . he
will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power
wrested from him by a Cæsar or a Bonaparte."
No such idea of popular sovereignty, however, appeared in the
political organization that was set up in 1789 - far from it. In
devising their structure, the American architects followed certain
specifications laid down by Harington, Locke and Adam Smith, which
might be regarded as a sort of official digest of politics under the
merchant-State; indeed, if one wished to be perhaps a little inurbane
in describing them - though not actually unjust - one might say that
they are the merchant-State's defence-mechanism.[24] Harington laid
down the all-important principle that the basis of politics is
economic - that power follows property. Since he was arguing against
the feudal concept, he laid stress specifically upon landed property.
He was of course too early to perceive the bearings of the
State-system of land-tenure upon industrial exploitation, and neither
he nor Locke perceived any natural distinction to be drawn between
law-made property and labour-made property; nor yet did Smith perceive
this clearly, though he seems to have had occasional indistinct
glimpses of it. According to Harington's theory of economic
determinism, the realization of popular sovereignty is a simple
matter. Since political power proceeds from land-ownership, a simple
diffusion of land-ownership is all that is needed to insure a
satisfactory distribution of power.[25] If everybody owns, then
everybody rules. "If the people hold three parts in four of the
territory," Harington says, "it is plain there can neither
be any single person nor nobility able to dispute the government with
them. In this case therefore, except force be interposed, they govern
themselves."
Locke, writing a half-century later, when the revolution of 1688 was
over, concerned himself more particularly with the State's positive
confiscatory interventions upon other modes of property-ownership.
These had long been frequent and vexatious, and under the Stuarts they
had amounted to unconscionable highwaymanry. Locke's idea therefore
was to copper-rivet such a doctrine of the sacredness of property as
would forever put a stop to this sort of thing. Hence he laid it down
that the first business of the State is to maintain the absolute
inviolability of general property-rights; the State itself might not
violate them, because in so doing it would act against its own primary
function. Thus in Locke's view, the rights of property took precedence
even over those of life and liberty; and if ever it came to the pinch,
the State must make its choice accordingly.[26]
Thus while the American architects assented "in principle"
to the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty, and found
it in a general way highly congenial as a sort of voucher for their
self-esteem, their practical interpretation of it left it pretty well
hamstrung. They were not especially concerned with consistency; their
practical interest in this philosophy stopped short at the point which
we have already noted, of its presumptive justification of a ruthless
economic pseudo-individualism, and an exercise of political
self-expression by the general electorate which should be so managed
as to be, in all essential respects, futile. In this they took precise
pattern by the English Whig exponents and practitioners of this
philosophy. Locke himself, whom we have seen putting the natural
rights of property so high above those of life and liberty, was
equally discriminating in his view of popular sovereignty. He was no
believer in what he called "a numerous democracy," and did
not contemplate a political organization that should countenance
anything of the kind.[27] The sort of organization he had in mind is
reflected in the extraordinary constitution he devised for the royal
province of Carolina, which established a basic order of politically
inarticulate serfdom. Such an organization as this represented about
the best, in a practical way, that the British merchant-State was ever
able to do for the doctrine of popular sovereignty.
It was also about the best that the American counterpart of the
British merchant-State could do. The sum of the matter is that while
the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty afforded a
set of principles upon which all interests could unite, and
practically all did unite, with the aim of securing political
independence, it did not afford a satisfactory set of principles on
which to found the new American State. When political independence was
secured, the stark doctrine of the Declaration went into abeyance,
with only a distorted simulacrum of its principles surviving. The
rights of life and liberty were recognized by a mere constitutional
formality left open to eviscerating interpretations, or, where these
were for any reason deemed superfluous, to simple executive disregard;
and all consideration of the rights attending "the pursuit of
happiness" was narrowed down to a plenary acceptance of Locke's
doctrine of the preëminent rights of property, with law-made
property on an equal footing with labour-made property. As for popular
sovereignty, the new State had to be republican in form, for no other
would suit the general temper of the people; and hence its peculiar
task was to preserve the appearance of actual republicanism without
the reality. To do this, it took over the apparatus which we have seen
the English merchant-State adopting when confronted with a like task -
the apparatus of a representative or parliamentary system. Moreover,
it improved upon the British model of this apparatus by adding three
auxiliary devices which time has proved most effective. These were,
first, the device of the fixed term, which regulates the
administration of our system by astronomical rather than political
considerations - by the motion of the earth around the sun rather than
by political exigency; second, the device of judicial review and
interpretation, which, as we have already observed, is a process
whereby anything may be made to mean anything; third, the device of
requiring legislators to reside in the district they represent, which
puts the highest conceivable premium upon pliancy and venality, and is
therefore the best mechanism for rapidly building up an immense body
of patronage. It may be perceived at once that all these devices tend
of themselves to work smoothly and harmoniously towards a great
centralization of State power, and that their working in this
direction may be indefinitely accelerated with the utmost economy of
effort.
As well as one can put a date to such an event, the surrender at
Yorktown marks the sudden and complete disappearance of the
Declaration's doctrine from the political consciousness of America.
Mr. Jefferson resided in Paris as minister to France from 1784 to
1789. As the time for his return to America drew near, he wrote
Colonel Humphreys that he hoped soon "to possess myself anew, by
conversation with my countrymen, of their spirit and ideas. I know
only the Americans of the year 1784. They tell me this is to be much a
stranger to those of 1789." So indeed he found it. On arriving in
New York and resuming his place in the social life of the country, he
was greatly depressed by the discovery that the principles of the
Declaration had gone wholly by the board. No one spoke of natural
rights and popular sovereignty; it would seem actually that no one had
ever heard of them. On the contrary, everyone was talking about the
pressing need of a strong central coercive authority, able to check
the incursions which "the democratic spirit" was likely to
incite upon "the men of principle and property."[28] Mr.
Jefferson wrote despondently of the contrast of all this with the sort
of thing he had been hearing in the France which he had just left "in
the first year of her revolution, in the fervour of natural rights and
zeal for reformation." In the process of possessing himself anew
of the spirit and ideas of his countrymen, he said, "I can not
describe the wonder and mortification with which the
table-conversations filled me." Clearly, though the Declaration
might have been the charter of American independence, it was in no
sense the charter of the new American State.
Footnotes to Chapter 4
- The economic rent of the
Trinity Church estate in New York City, for instance, would be as
high as it is now, even if the holders had never done a stroke of
work on the property. Landowners who are holding a property "for
a rise" usually leave it idle, or improve it only to the
extent necessary to clear its taxes; the type of building commonly
called a "taxpayer" is a familiar sight everywhere.
Twenty-five years ago a member of the New York City Tax Commission
told me that by careful estimate there was almost enough vacant
land within the city limits to feed the population, assuming that
all of it were arable and put under intensive cultivation!
- As a technical term in
economics, land includes all natural resources,
earth, air, water, sunshine, timber and minerals in situ,
etc. Failure to understand this use of the term has seriously
misled some writers, notably Count Tolstoy.
- Hence there is actually no
such thing as a "labour-problem," for no encroachment on
the rights of either labour or capital can possibly take place
until all natural resources within reach have been preëmpted.
What we call the "problem of the unemployed" is in no
sense a problem, but a direct consequence of State-created
monopoly.
- For fairly obvious reasons
they have no place in the conventional courses that are followed
in our schools and colleges.
- The French school of
physiocrats, led by Quesnay, du Pont de Nemours, Turgôt,
Gournay and le Trosne - usually regarded as the founders of the
science of political economy - broached the idea of destroying
this system by the confiscation of economic rent; and this idea
was worked out in detail some years ago in America by Henry
George. None of these writers, however, seemed to be aware of the
effect that their plan would produce upon the State itself.
Collectivism, on the other hand, proposes immeasurably to
strengthen and entrench the State by confiscation of the use-value
as well as the rental-value of land, doing away with private
proprietorship in either.
- If one were not aware of the
highly explosive character of this subject, it would be almost
incredible that until three years ago, no one has ever presumed to
write a history of land-speculation in America. In 1932, the firm
of Harpers published an excellent work by Professor Sakolski,
under the frivolous catch-penny title of The Great
American Land Bubble. I do not believe that anyone can
have a competent understanding of our history or of the character
of our people, without hard study of this book. It does not
pretend to be more than a preliminary approach to the subject, a
sort of path-breaker for the exhaustive treatise which someone,
preferably Professor Sakolski himself, should be undertaking; but
for what it is, nothing could be better. I am making liberal use
of it throughout this section.
- Regard for this
insignia-value or token-value of land has shown an interesting
persistence. The rise of the merchant-State, supplanting the régime
of status by the régime of contract, opened the way for men
of all sorts and conditions to climb into the exploiting class;
and the new recruits have usually shown a hankering for the old
distinguishing sign of their having done so, even though the rise
in rental-values has made the gratification of this desire
progressively costly.
- If our geographical
development had been determined in a natural way, by the demands
of use instead of the demands of speculation, our western frontier
would not yet be anywhere near the Mississippi River. Rhode Island
is the most thickly-populated member of the Union, yet one may
drive from one end of it to the other on one of its "through"
highways, and see hardly a sign of human occupancy. All
discussions of "over-population" from Malthus down, are
based on the premise of legal occupancy instead of actual
occupancy, and are therefore utterly incompetent and worthless.
Oppenheimer's calculation, made in 1912, to which I have already
referred, shows that if legal occupation were abolished, every
family of five persons could possess nearly twenty acres of land,
and still leave about two-thirds of the planet unoccupied. Henry
George's examination of Malthus's theory of population is well
known, or at least, easily available. It is perhaps worth mention
in passing that exaggerated rental-values are responsible for the
perennial troubles of the American single-crop farmer. Curiously,
one finds this fact set forth in the report of a farm-survey,
published by the Department of Agriculture about fifty years ago.
- Mr. Chinard, professor in the
Faculty of Literature at Johns Hopkins, has lately published a
translation of a little book, hardly more than a pamphlet, written
in 1686 by the Huguenot refugee Durand, giving a description of
Virginia for the information of his fellow-exiles. It strikes a
modern reader as being very favourable to Virginia, and one is
amused to read that the landholders who had entertained Durand
with an eye to business, thought he had not laid it on half thick
enough, and were much disgusted. The book is delightfully
interesting, and well worth owning.
- It was the ground of
Chevalier's observation that Americans had "the morale of an
army on the march," and of his equally notable observations
on the supreme rule of expediency in America.
- For a most admirable
discussion of these measures and their consequences, cf. Beard,
op. cit., vol. I, pp. 191-220.
- In principle, this had been
done before; for example, some of the early royal land-grants
reserved mineral-rights and timber-rights to the Crown. The Dutch
State reserved the right to furs and pelts. Actually, however,
these restrictions did not amount to much, and were not felt as a
general grievance, for these resources had been but little
explored.
- There were a few exceptions,
but not many; notably in the case of the Wadsworth properties in
Western New York, which were held as an investment and leased out
on a rental-basis. In one, at least, of General Washington's
operations, it appears that he also had this method in view. In
1773 he published an advertisement in a Baltimore newspaper,
stating that he had secured a grant of about twenty thousand acres
on the Ohio and Kanawha rivers, which he proposed to open to
settlers on a rental-basis.
- Sakolski, op. cit.,
ch. 1.
- It is an odd fact that among
the most eminent names of the period, almost the only ones
unconnected with land-grabbing or land-jobbing, are those of the
two great antagonists, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.
Mr. Jefferson had a gentleman's distaste for profiting by any form
of the political means; he never even went so far as to patent one
of his many useful inventions. Hamilton seems to have cared
nothing for money. His measures made many rich, but he never
sought anything from them for himself. In general, he appears to
have had few scruples, yet amidst the riot of greed and rascality
which he did most to promote, he walked worthily. Even his
professional fees as a lawyer were absurdly small, and he remained
quite poor all his life.
- Raw colonial exports were
processed in England, and reëxported to the colonies at
prices enhanced in this way, thus making the political means
effective on the colonists both going and coming.
- Beard, op. cit.,
vol. I, p. 195, cites the observation current in England at the
time, that seventy-three members of the Parliament that imposed
this tariff were interested in West Indian sugar-plantations.
- It must be observed, however,
that free trade is impracticable so long as land is kept out of
free competition with industry in the labour-market. Discussions
of the rival policies of free trade and protection invariably
leave this limitation out of account, and are therefore nugatory.
Holland and England, commonly spoken of as free-trade countries,
were never really such; they had only so much freedom of trade as
was consistent with their special economic requirements. American
free-traders of the last century, such as Sumner and Godkin, were
not really free-traders; they were never able - or willing - to
entertain the crucial question why, if free trade is a good thing,
the conditions of labour were no better in free-trade England
than, for instance, in protectionist Germany, but were in fact
worse. The answer is, of course, that England had no unpreëmpted
land to absorb displaced labour, or to stand in continuous
competition with industry for labour.
- The immense amount of labour
involved in getting the revolution going, and keeping it going, is
not as yet exactly a commonplace of American history, but it has
begun to be pretty well understood, and the various myths about it
have been exploded by the researches of disinterested historians.
- The influence of this view
upon the rise of nationalism and the maintenance of the national
spirit in the modern world, now that the merchant-State has so
generally superseded the feudal State, may be perceived at once. I
do not think it has ever been thoroughly discussed, or that the
sentiment of patriotism has ever been thoroughly examined for
traces of this view, though one might suppose that such a work
would be extremely useful.
- Even now its coöperation
seems not to have got very far in English and American
professional circles. The latest English exponent of the State,
Professor Laski, draws the same set of elaborate distinctions
between the State and officialdom that one would look for if he
had been writing a hundred and fifty years ago. He appears to
regard the State as essentially a social institution, though his
observations on this point are by no means clear. Since his
conclusions tend towards collectivism, however, the inference
seems admissible.
- As, for example, when one
political party is turned out of office, and another put in.
- In fact, the only
modification of it that one can foresee as necessary is that the
smallest unit should reserve the taxing-power strictly to itself.
The larger units should have no power whatever of direct or
indirect taxation, but should present their requirements to the
townships, to be met by quota. This would tend to reduce the
organizations of the larger units to skeleton form, and would
operate strongly against their assuming any functions but those
assigned them, which under a strictly governmental régime
would be very few - for the federal unit, indeed, extremely few.
It is interesting to imagine the suppression of every bureaucratic
activity in Washington today that has to do with the maintenance
and administration of the political means, and see how little
would be left. If the State were superseded by government,
probably every federal activity could be housed in the Senate
Office Building - quite possibly with room to spare.
- Harington published the Oceana
in 1656. Locke's political treatises were published in 1690.
Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth
of Nations appeared in 1776.
- This theory, with its
corollary that democracy is primarily an economic rather than a
political status, is extremely modern. The Physiocrats in France,
and Henry George in America, modified Harington's practical
proposals by showing that the same results could be obtained by
the more convenient method of a local confiscation of economic
rent.
- Locke held that in time of war
it was competent for the State to conscript the lives and
liberties of its subjects, but not their property. It is
interesting to remark the persistence of this view in the practice
of the merchant-State at the present time. In the last great
collision of competing interests among merchant-States, twenty
years ago, the State everywhere intervened at wholesale upon the
rights of life and liberty, but was very circumspect towards the
rights of property. Since the principle of absolutism was
introduced into our constitution by the income-tax amendment,
several attempts have been made to reduce the rights of property,
in time of war, to an approximately equal footing with those of
life and liberty; but so far, without success.
- It is worth going through the
literature of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century to
see how the words "democracy" and "democrat"
appear exclusively as terms of contumely and reprehension. They
served this purpose for a long time both in England and America,
much as the terms "bolshevism" and "bolshevist"
serve us now. They were subsequently taken over to become what
Bentham called "impostor-terms," in behalf of the
existing economic and political order, as synonymous with a purely
nominal republicanism. They are now used regularly in this way to
describe the political system of the United States, even by
persons who should know better - even, curiously, by persons like
Bertrand Russell and Mr. Laski, who have little sympathy with the
existing order. One sometimes wonders how our revolutionary
forefathers would take it if they could hear some flatulent
political thimblerigger charge them with having founded "the
great and glorious democracy of the West."
- This curious collocation of
attributes belongs to General Henry Knox, Washington's secretary
of war, and a busy speculator in land-values. He used it in a
letter to Washington, on the occasion of Shays's Rebellion in
1786, in which he made an agonized plea for a strong federal army.
In the literature of the period, it is interesting to observe how
regularly a moral superiority is associated with the possession of
property.
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