Our Enemy, the State
Albert Jay Nock
[1935 / Part 6 of 7]
CHAPTER 5
IT is a commonplace that the persistence of an institution is due
solely to the state of mind that prevails towards it, the set of terms
in which men habitually think about it. So long, and only so long, as
those terms are favourable, the institution lives and maintains its
power; and when for any reason men generally cease thinking in those
terms, it weakens and becomes inert. At one time, a certain set of
terms regarding man's place in nature gave organized Christianity the
power largely to control men's consciences and direct their conduct;
and this power has dwindled to the point of disappearance, for no
other reason than that men generally stopped thinking in those terms.
The persistence of our unstable and iniquitous economic system is not
due to the power of accumulated capital, the force of propaganda, or
to any force or combination of forces commonly alleged as its cause.
It is due solely to a certain set of terms in which men think of the
opportunity to work; they regard this opportunity as something to be
given. Nowhere is there any other idea about it than that the
opportunity to apply labour and capital to natural resources for the
production of wealth is not in any sense a right, but a concession.[1]
This is all that keeps our system alive. When men cease to think in
those terms, the system will disappear, and not before.
It seems pretty clear that changes in the terms of thought affecting
an institution are but little advanced by direct means. They are
brought about in obscure and circuitous ways, and assisted by trains
of circumstance which before the fact would appear quite unrelated,
and their erosive or solvent action is therefore quite unpredictable.
A direct drive at effecting these changes comes as a rule to nothing,
or more often than not turns out to be retarding. They are so largely
the work of those unimpassioned and imperturbable agencies for which
Prince de Bismarck had such vast respect - he called them the imponderabilia
- that any effort which disregards them, or thrusts them violently
aside, will in the long-run find them stepping in to abort its fruit.
Thus it is that what we are attempting to do in this rapid survey of
the historical progress of certain ideas, is to trace the genesis of
an attitude of mind, a set of terms in which now practically everyone
thinks of the State; and then to consider the conclusions towards
which this psychical phenomenon unmistakably points. Instead of
recognizing the State as "the common enemy of all well-disposed,
industrious and decent men," the run of mankind, with rare
exceptions, regards it not only as a final and indispensable entity,
but also as, in the main, beneficent. The mass-man, ignorant of its
history, regards its character and intentions as social rather than
anti-social; and in that faith he is willing to put at its disposal an
indefinite credit of knavery, mendacity and chicane, upon which its
administrators may draw at will. Instead of looking upon the State's
progressive absorption of social power with the repugnance and
resentment that he would naturally feel towards the activities of a
professional-criminal organization, he tends rather to encourage and
glorify it, in the belief that he is somehow identified with the
State, and that therefore, in consenting to its indefinite
aggrandizement, he consents to something in which he has a share - he
is, pro tanto, aggrandizing himself. Professor Ortega y Gasset
analyzes this state of mind extremely well. The mass-man, he says,
confronting the phenomenon of the State, "sees it, admires it,
knows that there it is. . . . Furthermore, the mass-man sees
in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it,
anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose
that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or
problem, presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the
State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its
immense and unassailable resources. . . . When the mass suffers any
ill-fortune, or simply feels some strong appetite, its great
temptation is that permanent sure possibility of obtaining everything,
without effort, struggle, doubt, or risk, merely by touching a button
and setting the mighty machine in motion."
It is the genesis of this attitude, this state of mind, and the
conclusions which inexorably follow from its predominance, that we are
attempting to get at through our present survey. These conclusions may
perhaps be briefly forecast here, in order that the reader who is for
any reason indisposed to entertain them may take warning of them at
this point, and close the book.
The unquestioning, determined, even truculent maintenance of the
attitude which Professor Ortega y Gasset so admirably describes, is
obviously the life and strength of the State; and obviously too, it is
now so inveterate and so widespread - one may freely call it universal
- that no direct effort could overcome its inveteracy or modify it,
and least of all hope to enlighten it. This attitude can only be
sapped and mined by uncountable generations of experience, in a course
marked by recurrent calamity of a most appalling character. When once
the predominance of this attitude in any given civilization has become
inveterate, as so plainly it has become in the civilization of
America, all that can be done is to leave it to work its own way out
to its appointed end. The philosophic historian may content himself
with pointing out and clearly elucidating its consequences, as
Professor Ortega y Gasset has done, aware that after this there is no
more that one can do. "The result of this tendency," he
says, "will be fatal. Spontaneous social action will be broken up
over and over again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to
fructify.[2] Society will have to live for the State, man for
the governmental machine. And as after all it is only a machine, whose
existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it,[3]
the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left
bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more
gruesome than the death of a living organism. Such was the lamentable
fate of ancient civilization."
II
The revolution of 1776-1781 converted thirteen provinces, practically
as they stood, into thirteen autonomous political units, completely
independent, and they so continued until 1789, formally held together
as a sort of league, by the Articles of Confederation. For our
purposes, the point to be remarked about this eight-year period, 1781-
1789, is that administration of the political means was not
centralized in the federation, but in the several units of which the
federation was composed. The federal assembly, or congress, was hardly
more than a deliberative body of delegates appointed by the autonomous
units. It had no taxing-power, and no coercive power. It could not
command funds for any enterprise common to the federation, even for
war; all it could do was to apportion the sum needed, in the hope that
each unit would meet its quota. There was no coercive federal
authority over these matters, or over any matters; the sovereignty of
each of the thirteen federated units was complete.
Thus the central body of this loose association of sovereignties had
nothing to say about the distribution of the political means. This
authority was vested in the several component units. Each unit had
absolute jurisdiction over its territorial basis, and could partition
it as it saw fit, and could maintain any system of land-tenure that it
chose to establish.[4] Each unit set up its own trade-regulations.
Each unit levied its own tariffs, one against another, in behalf of
its own chosen beneficiaries. Each manufactured its own currency, and
might manipulate it as it liked, for the benefit of such individuals
or economic groups as were able to get effective access to the local
legislature. Each managed its own system of bounties, concessions,
subsidies, franchises, and exercised it with a view to whatever
private interest its legislature might be influenced to promote. In
short, the whole mechanism of the political means was non-national.
The federation was not in any sense a State; the State was not one,
but thirteen. Within each unit, therefore, as soon as the war was
over, there began at once a general scramble for access to the
political means. It must never be forgotten that in each unit society
was fluid; this access was available to anyone gifted with the
peculiar sagacity and resolution necessary to get at it. Hence one
economic interest after another brought pressure of influence to bear
on the local legislatures, until the economic hand of every unit was
against every other, and the hand of every other was against itself.
The principle of "protection," which as we have seen was
already well understood, was carried to lengths precisely comparable
with those to which it is carried in international commerce today, and
for precisely the same primary purpose - the exploitation, or in plain
terms the robbery, of the domestic consumer. Mr. Beard remarks that
the legislature of New York, for example, pressed the principle which
governs tariff- making to the point of levying duties on firewood
brought in from Connecticut and on cabbages from New Jersey - a fairly
close parallel with the
octroi that one still encounters at the gates of French towns.
The primary monopoly, fundamental to all others - the monopoly of
economic rent - was sought with redoubled eagerness.[5] The
territorial basis of each unit now included the vast holdings
confiscated from British owners, and the bar erected by the British
State's proclamation of 1763 against the appropriation of Western
lands was now removed. Professor Sakolski observes drily that "the
early land-lust which the colonists inherited from their European
forebears was not diminished by the democratic spirit of the
revolutionary fathers." Indeed not! Land-grants were sought as
assiduously from local legislatures as they had been in earlier days
from the Stuart dynasty and from colonial governors, and the mania of
land-jobbing ran apace with the mania of land-grabbing.[6] Among the
men most actively interested in these pursuits were those whom we have
already seen identified with them in pre-revolutionary days, such as
the two Morrises, Knox, Pickering, James Wilson and Patrick Henry; and
with their names appear those of Duer, Bingham, McKean, Willing,
Greenleaf, Nicholson, Aaron Burr, Low, Macomb, Wadsworth, Remsen,
Constable, Pierrepont, and others which now are less well remembered.
There is probably no need to follow out the rather repulsive trail of
effort after other modes of the political means. What we have said
about the foregoing two modes - tariffs and rental-value monopoly - is
doubtless enough to illustrate satisfactorily the spirit and attitude
of mind towards the State during the eight years immediately following
the revolution. The whole story of insensate scuffle for State-created
economic advantage is not especially animating, nor is it essential to
our purposes. Such as it is, it may be read in detail elsewhere. All
that interests us is to observe that during the eight years of
federation, the principles of government set forth by Paine and by the
Declaration continued in utter abeyance. Not only did the philosophy
of natural rights and popular sovereignty[7] remain as completely out
of consideration as when Mr. Jefferson first lamented its
disappearance, but the idea of government as a social institution
based on this philosophy was likewise unconsidered. No one thought of
a political organization as instituted "to secure these rights"
by processes of purely negative intervention - instituted, that is,
with no other end in view than the maintenance of "freedom and
security." The history of the eight-year period of federation
shows no trace whatever of any idea of political organization other
than the State-idea. No one regarded this organization otherwise than
as the organization of the political means, an all-powerful engine
which should stand permanently ready and available for the
irresistible promotion of this-or-that set of economic interests, and
the irremediable disservice of others; according as whichever set, by
whatever course of strategy, might succeed in obtaining command of its
machinery.
III
It may be repeated that while State power was well centralized under
the federation, it was not centralized in the federation, but in the
federated unit. For various reasons, some of them plausible, many
leading citizens, especially in the more northerly units, found this
distribution of power unsatisfactory; and a considerable compact group
of economic interests which stood to profit by a redistribution
naturally made the most of these reasons. It is quite certain that
dissatisfaction with the existing arrangement was not general, for
when the redistribution took place in 1789, it was effected with great
difficulty and only through a
coup d'État, organized by methods which if employed in
any other field than that of politics, would be put down at once as
not only daring, but unscrupulous and dishonourable.
The situation, in a word, was that American economic interests had
fallen into two grand divisions, the special interests in each having
made common cause with a view to capturing control of the political
means. One division comprised the speculating, industrial-commercial
and creditor interests, with their natural allies of the bar and
bench, the pulpit and the press. The other comprised chiefly the
farmers and artisans and the debtor class generally. From the first,
these two grand divisions were colliding briskly here and there in the
several units, the most serious collision occurring over the terms of
the Massachusetts constitution of 1780.[8] The State in each of the
thirteen units was a class-State, as every State known to history has
been; and the work of manuvring it in its function of enabling
the economic exploitation of one class by another went steadily on.
General conditions under the Articles of Confederation were pretty
good. The people had made a creditable recovery from the dislocations
and disturbances due to the revolution, and there was a very decent
prospect that Mr. Jefferson's idea of a political organization, which
should be national in foreign affairs and non-national in domestic
affairs might be found continuously practicable. Some tinkering with
the Articles seemed necessary - in fact, it was expected - but nothing
that would transform or seriously impair the general scheme. The chief
trouble was with the federation's weakness in view of the chance of
war, and in respect of debts due to foreign creditors. The Articles,
however, carried provision for their own amendment, and for anything
one can see, such amendment as the general scheme made necessary was
quite feasible. In fact, when suggestions of revision arose, as they
did almost immediately, nothing else appears to have been
contemplated.
But the general scheme itself was as a whole objectionable to the
interests grouped in the first grand division. The grounds of their
dissatisfaction are obvious enough. When one bears in mind the vast
prospect of the continent, one need use but little imagination to
perceive that the national scheme was by far the more congenial to
those interests, because it enabled an ever-closer centralization of
control over the political means. For instance, leaving aside the
advantage of having but one central tariff-making body to chaffer
with, instead of twelve, any industrialist could see the great primary
advantage of being able to extend his exploiting operations over a
nation-wide free-trade area walled-in by a general tariff; the closer
the centralization, the larger the exploitable area. Any speculator in
rental-values would be quick to see the advantage of bringing this
form of opportunity under unified control.[9] Any speculator in
depreciated public securities would be strongly for a system that
could offer him the use of the political means to bring back their
face-value.[10] Any shipowner or foreign trader would be quick to see
that his bread was buttered on the side of a national State which, if
properly approached, might lend him the use of the political means by
way of a subsidy, or would be able to back up some profitable but
dubious freebooting enterprise with "diplomatic representations"
or with reprisals.
The farmers and the debtor class in general, on the other hand, were
not interested in these considerations, but were strongly for letting
things stay, for the most part, as they stood. Preponderance in the
local legislatures gave them satisfactory control of the political
means, which they could and did use to the prejudice of the creditor
class, and they did not care to be disturbed in their preponderance.
They were agreeable to such modification of the Articles as should
work out short of this, but not to setting up a national [11] replica
of the British merchant-State, which they perceived was precisely what
the classes grouped in the opposing grand division wished to do. These
classes aimed at bringing in the British system of economics, politics
and judicial control, on a nation-wide scale; and the interests
grouped in the second division saw that what this would really come to
was a shifting of the incidence of economic exploitation upon
themselves. They had an impressive object-lesson in the immediate
shift that took place in Massachusetts after the adoption of John
Adams's local constitution of 1780. They naturally did not care to see
this sort of thing put into operation on a nation-wide scale, and they
therefore looked with extreme disfavour upon any bait put forth for
amending the Articles out of existence. When Hamilton, in 1780,
objected to the Articles in the form in which they were proposed for
adoption, and proposed the calling of a constitutional convention
instead, they turned the cold shoulder; as they did again to
Washington's letter to the local governors three years later, in which
he adverted to the need of a strong coercive central authority.
Finally, however, a constitutional convention was assembled, on the
distinct understanding that it should do no more than revise the
Articles in such a way, as Hamilton cleverly phrased it, as to make
them "adequate to the exigencies of the nation," and on the
further understanding that all the thirteen units should assent to the
amendments before they went into effect; in short, that the method of
amendment provided by the Articles themselves should be followed.
Neither understanding was fulfilled. The convention was made up wholly
of men representing the economic interests of the first division. The
great majority of them, possibly as many as four-fifths, were public
creditors; one-third were land-speculators; some were money-lenders;
one-fifth were industrialists, traders, shippers; and many of them
were lawyers. They planned and executed a coup d'État,
simply tossing the Articles of Confederation into the waste-basket,
and drafting a constitution de novo, with the audacious
provision that it should go into effect when ratified by nine units
instead of by all thirteen. Moreover, with like audacity, they
provided that the document should not be submitted either to the
Congress or to the local legislatures, but that it should go direct to
a popular vote![12]
The unscrupulous methods employed in securing ratification need not
be dwelt on here.[13] We are not indeed concerned with the moral
quality of any of the proceedings by which the constitution was
brought into being, but only with showing their instrumentality in
encouraging a definite general idea of the State and its functions,
and a consequent general attitude towards the State. We therefore go
on to observe that in order to secure ratification by even the nine
necessary units, the document had to conform to certain very exacting
and difficult requirements. The political structure which it
contemplated had to be republican in form, yet capable of resisting
what Gerry unctuously called "the excess of democracy," and
what Randolph termed its "turbulence and follies." The task
of the delegates was precisely analogous to that of the earlier
architects who had designed the structure of the British
merchant-State, with its system of economics, politics and judicial
control; they had to contrive something that could pass muster as
showing a good semblance of popular sovereignty, without the reality.
Madison defined their task explicitly in saying that the convention's
purpose was "to secure the public good and private rights against
the danger of such a faction [i.e., a democratic faction], and at the
same time preserve the spirit and form of popular government."
Under the circumstances, this was a tremendously large order; and the
constitution emerged, as it was bound to do, as a compromise-
document, or as Mr. Beard puts it very precisely, "a mosaic of
second choices," which really satisfied neither of the two
opposing sets of interests. It was not strong and definite enough in
either direction to please anybody. In particular, the interests
composing the first division, led by Alexander Hamilton, saw that it
was not sufficient of itself to fix them in anything like a permanent
impregnable position to exploit continuously the groups composing the
second division. To do this - to establish the degree of
centralization requisite to their purposes - certain lines of
administrative management must be laid down, which, once established,
would be permanent. The further task therefore, in Madison's phrase,
was to "administration" the constitution into such
absolutist modes as would secure economic supremacy, by a free use of
the political means, to the groups which made up the first division.
This was accordingly done. For the first ten years of its existence
the constitution remained in the hands of its makers for
administration in directions most favourable to their interests. For
an accurate understanding of the newly-erected system's economic
tendencies, too much stress can not be laid on the fact that for these
ten critical years "the machinery of economic and political power
was mainly directed by the men who had conceived and established it."[14]
Washington, who had been chairman of the convention, was elected
President. Nearly half the Senate was made up of men who had been
delegates, and the House of Representatives was largely made up of men
who had to do with the drafting or ratifying of the constitution.
Hamilton, Randolph and Knox, who were active in promoting the
document, filled three of the four positions in the Cabinet; and all
the federal judgeships, without a single exception, were filled by men
who had a hand in the business of drafting, or of ratification, or
both. Of all the legislative measures enacted to implement the new
constitution, the one best calculated to ensure a rapid and steady
progress in the centralization of political power was the judiciary
Act of 1789.[15] This measure created a federal supreme court of six
members (subsequently enlarged to nine), and a federal district court
in each state, with its own complete personnel, and a complete
apparatus for enforcing its decrees. The Act established federal
oversight of state legislation by the familiar device of "interpretation",
whereby the Supreme Court might nullify state legislative or judicial
action which for any reason it saw fit to regard as unconstitutional.
One feature of the Act which for our purposes is most noteworthy is
that it made the tenure of all these federal judgeships appointive,
not elective, and for life; thus marking almost the farthest
conceivable departure from the doctrine of popular sovereignty. The
first chief justice was John Jay, "the learned and gentle Jay,"
as Beveridge calls him in his excellent biography of Marshall. A man
of superb integrity, he was far above doing anything whatever in
behalf of the accepted principle that est boni judicis ampliare
jurisdictionem. Ellsworth, who followed him, also did nothing. The
succession, however, after Jay had declined a reappointment, then fell
to John Marshall, who, in addition to the control established by the
judiciary Act over the state legislative and judicial authority,
arbitrarily extended judicial control over both the legislative and
executive branches of the federal authority;[16] thus effecting as
complete and convenient a centralization of power as the various
interests concerned in framing the constitution could reasonably have
contemplated.[17]
We may now see from this necessarily brief survey, which anyone may
amplify and particularize at his pleasure, what the circumstances were
which rooted a certain definite idea of the State still deeper in the
general consciousness. That idea was precisely the same in the
constitutional period as that which we have seen prevailing in the two
periods already examined - the colonial period, and the eight-year
period following the revolution. Nowhere in the history of the
constitutional period do we find the faintest suggestion of the
Declaration's doctrine of natural rights; and we find its doctrine of
popular sovereignty not only continuing in abeyance, but
constitutionally estopped from ever reappearing. Nowhere do we find a
trace of the Declaration's theory of government; on the contrary, we
find it expressly repudiated. The new political mechanism was a
faithful replica of the old disestablished British model, but so far
improved and strengthened as to be incomparably more close-working and
efficient, and hence presenting incomparably more attractive
possibilities of capture and control. By consequence, therefore, we
find more firmly implanted than ever the same general idea of the
State that we have observed as prevailing hitherto - the idea of an
organization of the political means, an irresponsible and all-powerful
agency standing always ready to be put into use for the service of one
set of economic interests as against another.
IV
Out of this idea proceeded what we know as the "party system"
of political management, which has been in effect ever since. Our
purposes do not require that we examine its history in close detail
for evidence that it has been from the beginning a purely bipartisan
system, since this is now a matter of fairly common acceptance. In his
second term Mr. Jefferson discovered the tendency towards
bipartisanship,[18] and was both dismayed and puzzled by it. I have
elsewhere [19] remarked his curious inability to understand how the
cohesive power of public plunder works straight towards political
bipartisanship. In 1823, finding some who called themselves
Republicans favouring the Federalist policy of centralization, he
spoke of them in a rather bewildered way as "pseudo-Republicans,
but real Federalists." But most naturally any Republican who saw
a chance of profiting by the political means would retain the name,
and at the same time resist any tendency within the party to impair
the general system which held out such a prospect.[20] In this way
bipartisanship arises. Party designations become purely nominal, and
the stated issues between parties become progressively trivial; and
both are more and more openly kept up with no other object than to
cover from scrutiny the essential identity of purpose in both parties.
Thus the party system at once became in effect an elaborate system of
fetiches, which, in order to be made as impressive as possible, were
chiefly moulded up around the constitution, and were put on show as "constitutional
principles." The history of the whole post-constitutional period,
from 1789 to the present day, is an instructive and cynical exhibit of
the fate of these fetiches when they encounter the one only actual
principle of party action - the principle of keeping open the channels
of access to the political means. When the fetich of "strict
construction," for example, has collided with this principle, it
has invariably gone by the board, the party that maintained it simply
changing sides. The anti- Federalist party took office in 1800 as the
party of strict construction; yet, once in office, it played ducks and
drakes with the constitution, in behalf of the special economic
interests that it represented.[21] The Federalists were nominally for
loose construction, yet they fought bitterly every one of the opposing
party's loose-constructionist measures - the embargo, the protective
tariff and the national bank. They were constitutional nationalists of
the deepest dye, as we have seen; yet in their centre and stronghold,
New England, they held the threat of secession over the country
throughout the period of what they harshly called "Mr. Madison's
war," the War of 18l2, which was in fact a purely imperialistic
adventure after annexation of Floridan and Canadian territory, in
behalf of stiffening agrarian control of the political means; but when
the planting interests of the South made the same threat in 1861, they
became fervid nationalists again. Such exhibitions of pure fetichism,
always cynical in their transparent candour, make up the history of
the party system. Their
reductio ad absurdum is now seen as perhaps complete - one can
not see how it could go further - in the attitude of the Democratic
party towards its historical principles of state sovereignty and
strict construction. A fair match for this, however, is found in a
speech made the other day to a group of exporting and importing
interests by the mayor of New York - always known as a Republican in
politics - advocating the hoary Democratic doctrine of a low tariff!
Throughout our post-constitutional period there is not on record, as
far as I know, a single instance of party adherence to a fixed
principle, qua principle, or to a political theory, qua
theory. Indeed, the very cartoons on the subject show how widely it
has come to be accepted that party- platforms, with their cant of "issues,"
are so much sheer quackery, and that campaign-promises are merely
another name for thimblerigging. The workaday practice of politics has
been invariably opportunist, or in other words, invariably conformable
to the primary function of the State; and it is largely for this
reason that the State's service exerts its most powerful attraction
upon an extremely low and sharp-set type of individual.[22]
The maintenance of this system of fetiches, however, gives great
enhancement to the prevailing general view of the State. In that view,
the State is made to appear as somehow deeply and disinterestedly
concerned with great principles of action; and hence, in addition to
its prestige as a pseudo-social institution, it takes on the prestige
of a kind of moral authority, thus disposing of the last vestige of
the doctrine of natural rights by overspreading it heavily with the
quicklime of legalism; whatever is State-sanctioned is right. This
double prestige is assiduously inflated by many agencies; by a
State-controlled system of education, by a State- dazzled pulpit, by a
meretricious press, by a continuous kaleidoscopic display of State
pomp, panoply and circumstance, and by all the innumerable devices of
electioneering. These last invariably take their stand on the
foundation of some imposing principle, as witness the agonized cry now
going up here and there in the land, for a "return to the
constitution." All this is simply "the interested clamours
and sophistry," which means no more and no less than it meant
when the constitution was not yet five years old, and Fisher Ames was
observing contemptuously that of all the legislative measures and
proposals which were on the carpet at the time, he scarce knew one
that had not raised this same cry, "not excepting a motion for
adjournment."
In fact, such popular terms of electioneering appeal are uniformly
and notoriously what Jeremy Bentham called impostor-terms, and their
use invariably marks one thing and one only; it marks a state of
apprehension, either fearful or expectant, as the case may be,
concerning access to the political means. As we are seeing at the
moment, once let this access come under threat of straitening or
stoppage, the menaced interests immediately trot out the spavined,
glandered hobby of "state rights" or "a return to the
constitution," and put it through its galvanic movements. Let the
incidence of exploitation show the first sign of shifting, and we hear
at once from one source of "interested clamours and sophistry"
that "democracy" is in danger, and that the unparalleled
excellences of our civilization have come about solely through a
policy of "rugged individualism," carried out under terms of
"free competition"; while from another source we hear that
the enormities of laissez-faire have ground the faces of the
poor, and obstructed entrance into the More Abundant Life.[23]
The general upshot of all this is that we see politicians of all
schools and stripes behaving with the obscene depravity of degenerate
children; like the loose-footed gangs that infest the railway-yards
and purlieus of gas-houses, each group tries to circumvent another
with respect to the fruit accruing to acts of public mischief. In
other words, we see them behaving in a strictly historical manner.
Professor Laski's elaborate moral distinction between the State and
officialdom is devoid of foundation. The State is not, as he would
have it, a social institution administered in an anti-social way. It
is an anti-social institution, administered in the only way an
anti-social institution can be administered, and by the kind of person
who, in the nature of things, is best adapted to such service.
Footnotes to Chapter 5
- Consider, for example, the
present situation. Our natural resources, while much depleted, are
still great; our population is very thin, running something like
twenty or twenty-five to the square mile; and some millions of
this population are at the moment "unemployed," and
likely to remain so because no one will or can "give them
work." The point is not that men generally submit to this
state of things, or that they accept it as inevitable, but that
they see nothing irregular or anomalous about it because of their
fixed idea that work is something to be given.
- The present paralysis of
production, for example, is due solely to State intervention, and
uncertainty concerning further intervention.
- It seems to be very
imperfectly understood that the cost of State intervention must be
paid out of production, this being the only source from which any
payment for anything can be derived. Intervention retards
production; then the resulting stringency and inconvenience enable
further intervention, which in turn still further retards
production; and this process goes on until, as in Rome, in the
third century, production ceases entirely, and the source of
payment dries up.
- As a matter of fact, all
thirteen units merely continued the system that had existed
throughout the colonial period - the system which gave the
beneficiary a monopoly of rental-values as well as a monopoly of
use-values. No other system was ever known in America, except in
the short-lived state of Deseret, under the Mormon polity.
- For a brilliant summary of
post-revolutionary land-speculation, cf. Sakolski, op.
cit., ch. 11.
- Mr. Sakolski very justly
remarks that the mania for land-jobbing was stimulated by the
action of the new units in offering lands by way of settlement of
their public debts, which led to extensive gambling in the various
issues of "land-warrants." The list of eminent names
involved in this enterprise includes Wilson C. Nicholas, who later
became governor of Virginia; "Light Horse Harry" Lee,
father of the great Confederate commander; General John Preston,
of Smithfield; and George Taylor, brother-in-law of Chief Justice
Marshall. Lee, Preston and Nicholas were prosecuted at the
instance of some Connecticut speculators, for a transaction
alleged as fraudulent; Lee was arrested in Boston, on the eve of
embarking for the West Indies. They had deeded a tract, said to be
of 300,000 acres, at ten cents an acre, but on being surveyed, the
tract did not come to half that size. Frauds of this order were
extremely common.
- The new political units
continued the colonial practice of restricting the suffrage to
taxpayers and owners of property, and none but men of considerable
wealth were eligible to public office. Thus the exercise of
sovereignty was a matter of economic right, not natural right.
- This was the uprising known as
Shays's Rebellion, which took place in 1786. The creditor division
in Massachusetts had gained control of the political means, and
had fortified its control by establishing a constitution which was
made to bear so hardly on the agrarian and debtor division that an
armed insurrection broke out six years later, led by Daniel Shays,
for the purpose of annulling its onerous provisions, and
transferring control of the political means to the latter group.
This incident affords a striking view in miniature of the State's
nature and teleology. The rebellion had a great effect in
consolidating the creditor division and giving plausibility to its
contention for the establishment of a strong coercive national
State. Mr. Jefferson spoke contemptuously of this contention, as "the
interested clamours and sophistry of speculating, shaving and
banking institutions"; and of the rebellion itself he
observed to Mrs. John Adams, whose husband had most to do with
drafting the Massachusetts constitution, "I like a little
rebellion now and then. . . . The spirit of resistance to
government is so valuable that I wish it to be always kept alive.
It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to
be exercised at all." Writing to another correspondent at the
same time, he said earnestly, "God forbid we should ever be
twenty years without such a rebellion." Obiter dicta
of this nature, scattered here and there in Mr. Jefferson's
writings, have the interest of showing how near his instinct led
him towards a clear understanding of the State's character.
- Professor Sakolski observes
that after the Articles of Confederation were supplanted by the
constitution, schemes of land-speculation "multiplied with
renewed and intensified energy." Naturally so, for as he
says, the new scheme of a national State got Strong support from
this class of adventurers because they foresaw that rental-values
"must be greatly increased by an efficient federal
government."
- More than half the delegates
to the constitutional convention of 1787 were either investors or
speculators in the public funds. Probably sixty per cent of the
values represented by these securities were fictitious, and were
so regarded even by their holders.
- It may be observed that at
this time the word "national" was a term of obloquy,
carrying somewhat the same implications that the word "fascist"
carries in some quarters today. Nothing is more interesting than
the history of political terms in their relation to the shifting
balance of economic advantage - except, perhaps, the history of
the partisan movements which they designate, viewed in the same
relation.
- The obvious reason for this,
as the event showed, was that the interests grouped in the first
division had the advantage of being relatively compact and easily
mobilized. Those in the second division, being chiefly agrarian,
were loose and sprawling, communications among them were slow, and
mobilization difficult.
- They have been noticed by
several recent authorities, and are exhibited fully in Mr. Beard's
monumental Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of
the United States.
- Beard, op. cit.,
p. 337.
- The principal measures
bearing directly on the distribution of the political means were
those drafted by Hamilton for funding and assumption, for a
protective tariff, and for a national bank. These gave practically
exclusive use of the political means to the classes grouped in the
first grand division, the only modes left available to others
being patents and copyrights. Mr. Beard discusses these measures
with his invariable lucidity and thoroughness, op. cit.,
ch. VIII. Some observations on them which are perhaps worth
reading are contained in my Jefferson, ch. V.
- The authority of the Supreme
Court was disregarded by Jackson, and overruled by Lincoln, thus
converting the mode of the State temporarily from an oligarchy
into an autocracy. It is interesting to observe that just such a
contingency was foreseen by the framers of the constitution, in
particular by Hamilton. They were apparently well aware of the
ease with which, in any period of crisis, a quasi-republican mode
of the State slips off into executive tyranny. Oddly enough, Mr.
Jefferson at one time considered nullifying the Alien and Sedition
Acts by executive action, but did not do so. Lincoln overruled the
opinion of Chief Justice Taney that suspension of the habeas
corpus was unconstitutional, and in consequence the mode
of the State was, until 1865, a monocratic military despotism. In
fact, from the date of his proclamation of blockade, Lincoln ruled
unconstitutionally throughout his term. The doctrine of "reserved
powers" was knaved up ex post facto as a
justification of his acts, but as far as the intent of the
constitution is concemed, it was obviously a pure invention. In
fact, a very good case could be made out for the assertion that
Lincoln's acts resulted in a permanent radical change in the
entire system of constitutional "interpretation" - that
since his time "interpretations" have not been
interpretations of the constitution, but merely of public policy;
or, as our most acute and profound social critic put it, "th'
Supreme Court follows th' iliction rayturns." A strict
constitutionalist might indeed say that the constitution died in
1861, and one would have to scratch one's head pretty diligently
to refute him.
- Marshall was appointed by
John Adams at the end of his Presidential term, when the interests
grouped in the first division were becoming very anxious about the
opposition developing against them among the exploited interests.
A letter written by Oliver Wolcott to Fisher Ames gives a good
idea of where the doctrine of popular sovereignty stood; his
reference to military measures is particularly striking. He says,
"The steady men in Congress will attempt to extend the
judicial department, and I hope that their measures will be very
decided. It is impossible in this country to render an army an
engine of government; and there is no way to combat the state
opposition but by an efficient and extended organization of
judges, magistrates, and other civil officers." Marshall's
appointment followed, and also the creation of twenty-three new
federal judgeships. Marshall's cardinal decisions were made in the
cases of Marbury, of Fletcher, of McCulloch, of Dartmouth College,
and of Cohens. It is perhaps not generally understood that as the
result of Marshall's efforts, the Supreme Court became not only
the highest law- interpreting body, but the highest law-making
body as well; the precedents established by its decisions have the
force of constitutional law. Since 1800, therefore, the actual
mode of the State in America is normally that of a small and
irresponsible oligarchy! Mr. Jefferson, regarding Marshall quite
justly as "a crafty chief judge who sophisticates the law to
his mind by the turn of his own reasoning," made in 1821 the
very remarkable prophecy that "our government is now taking
so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to
destruction, to wit: by consolidation first, and then corruption,
its necessary consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the
federal judiciary; the other two branches the corrupting and
corrupted instruments." Another prophetic comment on the
effect of centralization was his remark that "when we must
wait for Washington to tell us when to sow and when to reap, we
shall soon want bread." A survey of our present political
circumstances makes comment on these prophecies superfluous.
- He had observed it in the
British State some years before, and spoke of it with vivacity. "The
nest of office being too small for all of them to cuddle into at
once, the contest is eternal which shall crowd the other out. For
this purpose they are divided into two parties, the Ins and the
Outs." Why he could not see that the same thing was bound to
take place in the American State as an effect of causes identical
with those which brought it about in the British State, is a
puzzle to students. Apparently, however, he did not see it,
notwithstanding the sound instinct that made him suspect parties,
and always kept him free from party alliances. As he wrote
Hopkinson in 1789, "I never submitted the whole system of my
opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion,
in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was
capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last
degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven
but with a party, I would not go there at all."
- Jefferson, p.
274. The agrarian-artisan-debtor economic group that elected Mr.
Jefferson took title as the Republican party (subsequently renamed
Democratic) and the opposing group called itself by the old
preconstitutional title of Federalist.
- An example, noteworthy only
because uncommonly conspicuous, is seen in the behaviour of the
Democratic senators in the matter of the tariff on sugar, in
Cleveland's second administration. Ever since that incident, one
of the Washington newspapers has used the name "Senator
Sorghum" in its humorous paragraphs, to designate the typical
venal jobholder.
- Mr. Jefferson was the first
to acknowledge that his purchase of the Louisiana territory was
unconstitutional; but it added millions of acres to the sum of
agrarian resource, and added an immense amount of prospective
voting-strength to agrarian control of the political means, as
against control by the financial and commercial interests
represented by the Federalist party. Mr. Jefferson justified
himself solely on the ground of public policy, an interesting
anticipation of Lincoln's self-justification in 1861, for
confronting Congress and the country with a like fait
accompli - this time, however, executed in behalf of
financial and commercial interests as against the agrarian
interest.
- Henry George made some very
keen comment upon the almost incredible degradation that he saw
taking place progressively in the personnel of the State's
service. It is perhaps most conspicuous in the Presidency and the
Senate, though it goes on pari passu elsewhere and
throughout. As for the federal House of Representatives and the
state legislative bodies, they must be seen to be believed.
- Of all the impostor-terms in
our political glossary these are perhaps the most flagrantly
impudent, and their employment perhaps the most flagitious. We
have already seen that nothing remotely resembling democracy has
ever existed here; nor yet has anything resembling free
competition, for the existence of free competition is obviously
incompatible with any exercise of the political means, even the
feeblest. For the same reason, no policy of rugged individualism
has ever existed; the most that rugged individualism has done to
distinguish itself has been by way of running to the State for
some form of economic advantage. If the reader has any curiosity
about this, let him look up the number of American business
enterprises that have made a success unaided by the political
means, or the number of fortunes accumulated without such aid.
Laissez-faire has become a term of pure
opprobrium; those who use it either do not know what it means, or
else wilfully pervert it. As for the unparalleled excellences of
our civilization, it is perhaps enough to say that the statistics
of our insurance-companies now show that four-fifths of our people
who have reached the age of sixty-five are supported by their
relatives or by some other form of charity.
Part
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