Niccolo Machiavelli the Visionary -1892 Article

Machiavelli the Visionary 1892

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The reader of Machiavelli's "Prince" meets with a disappointment when he turns to its author's life. Instead of finding, as he expects, a statesman of indomitable ambition, relentless will, and unscrupulous ingenuity, he finds only a timid and irresolute doctrinaire. Niccolo Machiavelli was at the mercy of his times. He dallied first with good and then with evil. Indecisive in emergencies, he brought upon himself the contempt both of the good and the bad, and so mismanaged his affairs,with all his time-serving, that he died in poverty and neglect. His book, "The Prince," was the masterly work of a theorist who lacked the one pre-eminent amiability of theorists, comparative innocence of evil. Though he was a close, accurate, and shrewd observer of all the political machinations of his time, he proved by his life that it is one thing to observe shrewdly, and quite another thing to perform skillfully. With all his cunning he was visionary—at once a cynic and an enthusiast.

Born in Florence in 1469, Machiavelli early attached himself to the political fortunes of his native city, and by the close of the century had attained the rank of second chancellor and secretary. He was employed in many embassies of varying importance, where he watched, always with interest and often with admiration, the unscrupulous courses of the Italian popes and princes, above all of Caesar Borgia. Here his reports and comments were of invaluable service to his superiors. On his return he was permitted to organize the Florentine militia. He entered on the scheme in high feather and with disinterested zeal. His enthusiasm was contagious, and his country-men put their chief confidence for protection in his native soldiery, only to find it disastrously incompetent and untrustworthy in an emergency. Even more impracticable was the extravagant scheme, with which he identified himself, of altering the course of the river Arno that hostile Pisa might be deprived of all communication with the sea; a scheme which came much nearer draining the Florentine treasury than draining the bed of the Arno. In the bitter factional struggles which soon after followed in Florence, he courageously adhered to the falling fortunes of his party till it was too late to gain any worldly advantage by desertion, when, with a sudden and futile cowardice, he made abject overtures to the conquerors, and then, as many an impoverished author has written for a pittance a treatise on the secret of wealth, so Machiavelli, his country overrun by enemies and himself in exile, attempted to pick up a little political patronage by writing an essay on the best method of acquiring a princedom.

To quote his latest biographer, no man was less Machiavellian than Machiavelli. Political self-advancement was bread and meat—the sum of life—to his ideal "Prince." So self-centered was this "Prince" that l'etat c'est moi might have been his motto. The State centered about his person, and the world centered about his State. His selfishness took on heroic proportions. Machiavelli himself, on the other hand, so far from diligently seeking self-advancement, was constantly neglecting his own interests to indulge in far-away and impossible day-dreams —in daydreams of a mighty Italian empire which should reproduce the classic grandeur of ancient Rome. He was absorbed in his visions of a future united Italy. His more humdrum moments were spent in scheming and manipulating in behalf of the rights and usurpations of his native city. Only such scraps of time as he had left were used in "looking out for number one."

Artful dissimulation was another of the characteristics of the "Prince" whom Machiavelli depicted. Offensive naivete characterized the depictor. Indeed, the very frankness of his essays shows how little of a Machiavellian Machiavelli was. Had the "Prince" himself written a book, he would have filled it, no doubt, with highly moral sentiments, that he might dupe the people. Machiavelli, when he wrote, blabbed out all his knavery. "There is a ruler at this time," says Machiavelli, "who has nothing in his mouth but fidelity and peace, and yet, had he exercised either the one or the other, they had robbed him before this both of his power and reputation." Machiavelli was so unsagacious as to have nothing in his mouth but faithlessness and intrigue. No wonder, then, that he lost both his reputation and his power. He fell far short of the duplicity of Frederick the Great, who publicly denounced the immorality of "The Prince," while secretly profiting by much of its unscrupulous advice!

In his books, indeed, Machiavelli had the courage of his immoral convictions; but in his life he lacked the audacity of evil. He had no stomach for cruelty. His letters from the bloody court of Caesar Borgia, we are told, "betray a certain agonized terror beneath a veil of cynicism." He banished the memory of horrible sights by writing ribald letters full of salacious scandal to his cronies in Florence. It was, indeed, the shamefaced consciousness of his own timidity which made him envy with an exaggerated admiration the bold, superhuman criminality of the Borgias. He belonged to that class of whom he said contemptuously: "They do not know how to be honorably bad, or perfectly good; and as a completely wicked act has some greatness or some element of generosity in it, so they cannot perform it." As the cripple often looks with envious wonder on the vigor of the bully, and occasionally mistakes bullying for prowess, so Machiavelli often mistook effrontery in evil for courage. He had enough moral scruple to keep from brazen evil; he had enough humane sentiment to be frequently amiable even to his enemies; but he had too little moral sense not to envy the more unscrupulous and hard-hearted. Their purposes were his ideals. With wonderful literary skill he magnified and depicted their aims in his imaginative sketch, "The Prince."

Machiavelli worshiped worldly success with an enthusiasm that made him visionary. He was as fanatically wedded to his theory of the salvation of society by political management as the most bigoted Anabaptist could be to his theory of an antinomian justification by faith. He held the orthodox belief in the total depravity of man. He was so convinced that all men were liars that even the most scandalous news he looked upon with some slight suspicion. He believed that men were evil by nature and good only by necessity, and trusted to a gigantic absolute despotism, maintained by force and fraud, to bring about that necessity. Such morals as he had were jesuitical; he believed that the end justified the means. But the end he had in mind was far beyond human reach, and the means he suggested were in some measure the invention of the imagination. If Machiavelli was great, it was not because he was shrewd and practical, it was because he was an imaginative thinker and a clear and audaciously frank writer.

His masterpiece, "The Prince," is not the work of a successful practical politician, as it is generally supposed to be. If there be virtue in it, it has not that virtue. But it is, in the first place, a wonderful work of art, fit to stand above the "Barry Lyndon" of Thackeray, above the "Cenci" of Shelley, by the side of the Satan of "Paradise Lost" and the Iago of Shakespeare. It has all the qualities of great art — clearness, unity, energy. It personifies remorseless ambition. It typifies in gigantic figure the politicians of Machiavelli's day. It holds a magnifying mirror up to an important aspect of nature—to the political Italy of the Renaissance—to humanity at its worst. Men have always dared to be a worse thing than they have dared to say. Machiavelli dared say it.

For a more important reason, "The Prince" is a great book. Its author had a genius for abstract reasoning. He was a born maxim-maker. He created the science of modern politics. To do it, he divorced it from all morality. But in this he did not differ in method from the old-school political economist, while much might be said for the method of both. To be sure, there can be no such thing as successful government or commerce utterly divorced from morality, just as truly as there can be nothing of merely two dimensions. Yet, as geometricians have worked out many problems in two dimensions, so Machiavelli has worked out many problems in government without any consideration of morality. It was, however, a serious practical defect in his theories that he forgot that there is some such thing as moral law even in the most depraved communities, and that the worst of men have consciences, often quite sensitive to other people's sins. The life of Machiavelli, as depicted by the painstaking and authoritative specialist, Professor Pasquale Villari, is the life of a "scholar in politics." As a text-book on government, no book compares with "The Prince" for suggestiveness, just as the work-of many another impractical theorist has furnished, in its less degree, suggestion; as a depiction of character, few books are more graphic and powerful, though that character is in part the creature of the imagination; but Machiavellianism as set forth in "The Prince," and Machiavellianism as a whole, never has succeeded in the world, and there is no likelihood that it ever will.

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Birth Rates and the New Anne of Green Gables

Birth Rates are at Historic Lows and Here's a Major Reason

For 100 years, the US government has tracked the birth rate. It is now at historic lows. There are many reasons, but one has to do with the dramatic change in the way society regards the economic value of kids.

To illustrate the point, let’s reflect on the continuing popularity of Anne of Green Gables, the 1908 book by Canadian writer Lucy M. Montgomery. Yes, it is charming, and ridiculously so. It’s beyond me why the new Netflix rendering (Anne with an E) is getting bad reviews. It’s probably because so many people are attached to the book and the myriad previous cinematic renderings. Still, I find the new one delightful in every way, and I’ve been thinking on precisely why.

Before the Progressive Era, children were regarded as aspiring adults with as many responsibilities as they could handle. 

Beyond the solid acting and timeless story of a brilliant orphan growing up and finding her way in the world, the show introduces us into a time gone by. It is set on Prince Edward Island sometime in the late 19th century, before cars, phones, and indoor temperature control. So, sure, that’s different. So is the language and cultural mores.
The Status of Kids 
That’s not what truly strikes us, however. What is dazzling to watch is the completely different relationship between kids and adults that existed then. The status of kids in society was unlike today.
They were aspiring adults and given as many responsibilities as they could handle within their range of competence, which was always shifting in the direction of more and more.

There was no Department of Labor and Department of Human Resources to "protect" them from living full lives. Kids in those days were regarded as valuable because they were tangibly productive. They worked, gained skills, and produced for their families or otherwise worked for businesses here and there. They were assets. As they gained skills, discipline, and a work ethic, they could become ever more valuable to their custodians and communities. This is a major reason why people wanted them. And the kids, in turn, were socialized to be grateful to their benefactors whether at home or work.

And notice from the story of Anne that a main job of kids in those days was to care for people in their aging years. So kids were valuable on both ends of the life spectrum: as co-workers when the kids are young and then as helpers as their custodians age.

What’s different today? Now kids are mostly a financial cost and defined as such, because the law, educational system, and welfare state make it that way. Oh sure, people still love their kids. Emotionally and spiritually, we speak piously and beautifully of the infinite value of their lives. 
And, of course, everyone agrees. There is a social status that comes with having kids and they can be an entryway to new friend networks. 

And yet. Let’s talk dollars and cents. When considering whether to have kids, people know that they will contribute little to household management, and nothing positive to the bottom line, and then they must consider how much they will have to spend. You can look it up on online cost calculators. For example, if you are married and want two kids in the American South, you are going to spend $732K. That’s a daunting figure, and that’s before you start shelling out for college.

In return for which, they offer...the infinite value of their very existence.

Is it any wonder that the birthrate has fallen to its lowest level in more than 100 years? Yes, there are other reasons having to do with technology and greater economic certainty. Still, if you forcibly reduce the value of anything, and people have any choice over it, they will produce less and less of it. This is precisely what has happened to the status of children over the last century.

Why Would You Want to Be Anne?
How did this happen? Let’s look at the story of Anne.

If you forcibly reduce the value of anything, and people have any choice over it, they will produce less and less of it.

Anne is 13 years old when the story starts. She has lived a very hard life due to circumstances beyond her control. She had lived in the orphanage but gets a new start when a family adopts her, in order to get a obtain a worker who only needs room and board. The family asked for a boy from the orphanage but there was some mix up and they sent a girl. The adoptive family (an aging brother and sister) reluctantly agree to keep her only after she charms them and proves that she can bring productivity to the household. She shows off her skills, among which include her incredible erudition.
It was a much poorer world, obviously, and only the rich kids could afford to be in school full time. Anne was mostly self taught but she loved reading, dreaming, fantasizing, imagining. She read whenever she could, by candlelight, exhausted at the end of the day. And she was brilliant, even without focus or being institutionalized.

A reason this story has riveted children for so many generations comes down to the challenges, opportunities, tragedies, and triumphs she experiences in an exciting, varied, interesting life – which is to say, a life in an economically free society. She was a child in a world that aspired for her to become an adult, and deal with actual adult-like tasks and responsibilities. Yes, that involved schooling but this was not forced and it was not the only purpose of her life. She could even drink wine! 

Back then, kids were not nationalized by the state, their every move controlled by public institutions, and forbidden from working by the government. They were challenged with as many adult responsibilities as they could handle. That Anne works hard, can do anything a boy can do, picks up vast skills, and her path of learning is largely unscripted is a real source of delight for readers and viewers. She proves herself up to the task.

What Changed?
Soon after the book was written, public policy concerning kids began to change. Public schooling was made nearly universal in the developed world. Private schooling began its long path of decline to the point that by mid-century they were operated either by churches or only available to the rich. These public schools entered on the trajectory of every government project: planned, managed from the top, treating every student as an unindividuated unit of an aggregate, soldiers in a. kid army, each put through the paces for twelve years.

During the New Deal, “Child labor” was completely banned. It remains so today, with rare exceptions.

Then school was made compulsory in the Progressive Era. Families and kids had no choice. In such a world, would Anne have been adopted? Why would she be? Instead of realizing her value, she would have been stuffed into a holding cell for twelve years, and her caretakers would have been fiduciarily responsible for providing room and board with no compensation. There would have been no market for her person at all.

A couple of decades later, public policy went the full way. During the New Deal, “Child labor” was completely banned. It remains so today, with rare exceptions (you can be a child actor and you can work for your family business). Mostly kids are denied their inherent human rights to work and prevented from being valuable to others according to their own skills and desires.

The law books say you can work from 14 but the limits are too strict and the paperwork too long. Even at 16, there are jobs you can have and jobs you are allowed to accept. You aren’t really free to earn money serving others until you are 18, by which time kids are socialized to want to do anything but that.

And all of this is done for their well being.

Then governments instituted Social Security, medical care for the aged, and publicly funded homes for the “retired.” That lets kids completely off the hook for taking care of their parents. The inverse also becomes true: they are less valuable to parents because they are no longer necessary for end-of-life care.

Public policy killed the value of kids in the world, denying their rights to choose, work, and serve others.

The upshot is that public policy killed the value of kids in the world, denying their rights to choose, work, and serve others. Society literally decided to devalue them to the point that they are all cost when young and unnecessary when their caretakers are old.

It’s even worse. Kids today are corralled into collectives defined by age, given an authority figure to lord over them and lecture them for 12 years, and the only job they are allowed to have is to cough back the information the teacher tells them, sitting in desks, day after day for the whole of their growing up.

When we discover that the kids are bored and misbehave, we stuff them full of drugs, belittle them, jail them for misbehavior, and finally turn them out into the world at the age of 18 with no skills, work ethic, or knowledge of what it means actually to succeed in life. 

We no longer live in an agricultural or even industrial age that was physically grueling (the great excuse for why we stop allowing them remunerative work). In digital times, there are whole worlds of safe work that kids could do while learning and enjoying life. Kids would have such better lives. 

We just don’t allow it.

We think Anne’s orphanage was cruel. But she escaped because an adoptive family saw her value. She found her groove. At least she didn’t grow up in today’s regimented, regulated, exclusionary world from which there is no escape for any kids, ever.

Bring Back Green Gables
My own theory of why we love this book and can’t get enough of the movies about a story so far back in time is simple: kids in those days were regarded by society as real human beings with rights and dignity and opportunity. They could live full and wonderful lives. They lived real lives as part of real life.

Their rights were not systematically violated by the law in the name of helping them. The Progressives came along and deployed the violence of the state to make their lives better, and here we are today. 

Is it any wonder that we are nostalgic about the life of kids in those days? And is it any wonder that people have to think very carefully about producing them today?

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

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The Cruelty of Charity By Margaret Sanger 1922

The Cruelty of Charity By Margaret Sanger 1922 (Abridged)

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"Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles."~Herbert Spencer

The last century has witnessed the rise and development of philanthropy and organized charity. Coincident with the all-conquering power of machinery and capitalistic control, with the unprecedented growth of great cities and industrial centers, and the creation of great proletarian populations, modern civilization has been confronted, to a degree hitherto unknown in human history, with the complex problem of sustaining human life in surroundings and under conditions flagrantly dysgenic.

The program, as I believe all competent authorities in contemporary philanthropy and organized charity would agree, has been altered in aim and purpose. It was first the outgrowth of humanitarian and altruistic idealism, perhaps not devoid of a strain of sentimentalism, of an idealism that was aroused by a desperate picture of human misery intensified by the industrial revolution. It has developed in later years into a program not so much aiming to succor the unfortunate victims of circumstances, as to effect what we may term social sanitation. Primarily, it is a program of self-protection. Contemporary philanthropy, I believe, recognizes that extreme poverty and overcrowded slums are veritable breeding-grounds of epidemics, disease, delinquency and dependency. Its aim, therefore, is to prevent the individual family from sinking to that abject condition in which it will become a much heavier burden upon society.

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There is no need here to criticize the obvious limitations of organized charities in meeting the desperate problem of destitution. We are all familiar with these criticisms: the common indictment of "inefficiency" so often brought against public and privately endowed agencies. The charges include the high cost of administration; the pauperization of deserving poor, and the encouragement and fostering of the "undeserving"; the progressive destruction of self-respect and self-reliance by the paternalistic interference of social agencies; the impossibility of keeping pace with the ever-increasing multiplication of factors and influences responsible for the perpetuation of human misery; the misdirection and misappropriation of endowments; the absence of interorganization and coordination of the various agencies of church, state, and privately endowed institutions; the "crimes of charity" that are occasionally exposed in newspaper scandals. These and similar strictures we may ignore as irrelevant to our present purpose, as inevitable but not incurable faults that have been and are being eliminated in the slow but certain growth of a beneficent power in modern civilization. In reply to such criticisms, the protagonist of modern philanthropy might justly point to the honest and sincere workers and disinterested scientists it has mobilized, to the self-sacrificing and hard-working executives who have awakened public attention to the evils of poverty and the menace to the race engendered by misery and filth.

Even if we accept organized charity at its own valuation, and grant that it does the best it can, it is exposed to a more profound criticism. It reveals a fundamental and irremediable defect. Its very success, its very efficiency, its very necessity to the social order, are themselves the most unanswerable indictment. Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease.

Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the "failure" of philanthropy, but rather at its success.

These dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have to-day produced their full harvest of human waste, of inequality and inefficiency, were fully recognized in the last century at the moment when such ideas were first put into practice. Readers of Huxley's attack on the Salvation Army will recall his penetrating and stimulating condemnation of the debauch of sentimentalism which expressed itself in so uncontrolled a fashion in the Victorian era. One of the most penetrating of American thinkers, Henry James, Sr., sixty or seventy years ago wrote: "I have been so long accustomed to see the most arrant deviltry transact itself in the name of benevolence, that the moment I hear a profession of good will from almost any quarter, I instinctively look around for a constable or place my hand within reach of a bell-rope. My ideal of human intercourse would be a state of things in which no man will ever stand in need of any other man's help, but will derive all his satisfaction from the great social tides which own no individual names. I am sure no man can be put in a position of dependence upon another, without the other's very soon becoming-if he accepts the duties of the relation-utterly degraded out of his just human proportions. No man can play the Deity to his fellow man with impunity-I mean, spiritual impunity, of course. For see: if I am at all satisfied with that relation, if it contents me to be in a position of generosity towards others, I must be remarkably indifferent at bottom to the gross social inequality which permits that position, and, instead of resenting the enforced humiliation of my fellow man to myself in the interests of humanity, I acquiesce in it for the sake of the profit it yields to my own self-complacency. I do hope the reign of benevolence is over; until that event occurs, I am sure the reign of God will be impossible."

To-day, we may measure the evil effects of "benevolence" of this type, not merely upon those who have indulged in it, but upon the community at large. These effects have been reduced to statistics and we cannot, if we would, escape their significance.

Organized charity is thus confronted with the problem of feeble-mindedness and mental defect. But just as the State has so far neglected the problem of mental defect until this takes the form of criminal delinquency, so the tendency of our philanthropic and charitable agencies has been to pay no attention to the problem until it has expressed itself in terms of pauperism and delinquency. Such "benevolence" is not merely ineffectual; it is positively injurious to the community and the future of the race.

But there is a special type of philanthropy or benevolence, now widely advertised and advocated, both as a federal program and as worthy of private endowment, which strikes me as being more insidiously injurious than any other. This concerns itself directly with the function of maternity, and aims to supply GRATIS medical and nursing facilities to slum mothers. Such women are to be visited by nurses and to receive instruction in the "hygiene of pregnancy"; to be guided in making arrangements for confinements; to be invited to come to the doctor's clinics for examination and supervision. They are, we are informed, to "receive adequate care during pregnancy, at confinement, and for one month afterward." Thus are mothers and babies to be saved. "Childbearing is to be made safe." The work of the maternity centers in the various American cities in which they have already been established and in which they are supported by private contributions and endowment, it is hardly necessary to point out, is carried on among the poor and more docile sections of the city, among mothers least able, through poverty and ignorance, to afford the care and attention necessary for successful maternity. Now, as the findings of Tredgold and Karl Pearson and the British Eugenists so conclusively show, and as the infant mortality reports so thoroughly substantiate, a high rate of fecundity is always associated with the direst poverty, irresponsibility, mental defect, feeble-mindedness, and other transmissible taints. The effect of maternity endowments and maternity centers supported by private philanthropy would have, perhaps already have had, exactly the most dysgenic tendency. The new government program would facilitate the function of maternity among the very classes in which the absolute necessity is to discourage it.

Such "benevolence" is not merely superficial and near-sighted. It conceals a stupid cruelty, because it is not courageous enough to face unpleasant facts. Aside from the question of the unfitness of many women to become mothers, aside from the very definite deterioration in the human stock that such programs would inevitably hasten, we may question its value even to the normal though unfortunate mother. For it is never the intention of such philanthropy to give the poor over-burdened and often undernourished mother of the slum the opportunity to make the choice herself, to decide whether she wishes time after to time to bring children into the world. It merely says "Increase and multiply: We are prepared to help you do this." Whereas the great majority of mothers realize the grave responsibility they face in keeping alive and rearing the children they have already brought into the world, the maternity center would teach them how to have more. The poor woman is taught how to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid bringing into the world her eighth.

Such philanthropy, as Dean Inge has so unanswerably pointed out, is kind only to be cruel, and unwittingly promotes precisely the results most deprecated. It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.

On the other hand, the program is an indication of a suddenly awakened public recognition of the shocking conditions surrounding pregnancy, maternity, and infant welfare prevailing at the very heart of our boasted civilization. So terrible, so unbelievable, are these conditions of child-bearing, degraded far below the level of primitive and barbarian tribes, nay, even below the plane of brutes, that many high-minded people, confronted with such revolting and disgraceful facts, lost that calmness of vision and impartiality of judgment so necessary in any serious consideration of this vital problem. Their "hearts" are touched; they become hysterical; they demand immediate action; and enthusiastically and generously they support the first superficial program that is advanced. Immediate action may sometimes be worse than no action at all. The "warm heart" needs the balance of the cool head. Much harm has been done in the world by those too-good-hearted folk who have always demanded that "something be done at once."

They do not stop to consider that the very first thing to be done is to subject the whole situation to the deepest and most rigorous thinking. As the late Walter Bagehot wrote in a significant but too often forgotten passage:

"The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that on the whole it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does more good or harm. Great good, no doubt, philanthropy does, but then it also does great evil. It augments so much vice, it multiplies so much suffering, it brings to life such great populations to suffer and to be vicious, that it is open to argument whether it be or be not an evil to the world, and this is entirely because excellent people fancy they can do much by rapid action, and that they will most benefit the world when they most relieve their own feelings; that as soon as an evil is seen, `something' ought to be done to stay and prevent it. One may incline to hope that the balance of good over evil is in favor of benevolence; one can hardly bear to think that it is not so; but anyhow it is certain that there is a most heavy debt of evil, and that this burden might almost all have been spared us if philanthropists as well as others had not inherited form their barbarous forefathers a wild passion for instant action."

It is customary, I believe, to defend philanthropy and charity upon the basis of the sanctity of human life. Yet recent events in the world reveal a curious contradiction in this respect. Human life is held sacred, as a general Christian principle, until war is declared, when humanity indulges in a universal debauch of bloodshed and barbarism, inventing poison gases and every type of diabolic suggestion to facilitate killing and starvation. Blockades are enforced to weaken and starve civilian populations-women and children. This accomplished, the pendulum of mob passion swings back to the opposite extreme, and the compensatory emotions express themselves in hysterical fashion. Philanthropy and charity are then unleashed. We begin to hold human life sacred again. We try to save the lives of the people we formerly sought to weaken by devastation, disease and starvation. We indulge in "drives," in campaigns of relief, in a general orgy of international charity.

We are thus witnessing to-day the inauguration of a vast system of international charity. As in our more limited communities and cities, where self-sustaining and self-reliant sections of the population are forced to shoulder the burden of the reckless and irresponsible, so in the great world community the more prosperous and incidentally less populous nations are asked to relieve and succor those countries which are either the victims of the wide-spread havoc of war, of militaristic statesmanship, or of the age-long tradition of reckless propagation and its consequent over-population.

The people of the United States have recently been called upon to exercise their traditional generosity not merely to aid the European Relief Council in its efforts to keep alive three million, five hundred thousand starving children in Central Europe, but in addition to contribute to that enormous fund to save the thirty million Chinese who find themselves at the verge of starvation, owing to one of those recurrent famines which strike often at that densely populated and inert country, where procreative recklessness is encouraged as a matter of duty. The results of this international charity have not justified the effort nor repaid the generosity to which it appealed. In the first place, no effort was made to prevent the recurrence of the disaster; in the second place, philanthropy of this type attempts to sweep back the tide of miseries created by unrestricted propagation, with the feeble broom of sentiment. As one of the most observant and impartial of authorities on the Far East, J. O. P. Bland, has pointed out: "So long as China maintains a birth-rate that is estimated at fifty-five per thousand or more, the only possible alternative to these visitations would be emigration and this would have to be on such a scale as would speedily overrun and overfill the habitable globe. Neither humanitarian schemes, international charities nor philanthropies can prevent widespread disaster to a people which habitually breeds up to and beyond the maximum limits of its food supply." Upon this point, it is interesting to add, Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip has likewise pointed out the inefficacy and misdirection of this type of international charity.

Mr. Bland further points out: "The problem presented is one with which neither humanitarian nor religious zeal can ever cope, so long as we fail to recognize and attack the fundamental cause of these calamities. As a matter of sober fact, the benevolent activities of our missionary societies to reduce the deathrate by the prevention of infanticide and the checking of disease, actually serve in the end to aggravate the pressure of population upon its food-supply and to increase the severity of the inevitably resultant catastrophe. What is needed for the prevention, or, at least, the mitigation of these scourges, is an organized educational propaganda, directed first against polygamy and the marriage of minors and the unfit, and, next, toward such a limitation of the birth-rate as shall approximate the standard of civilized countries. But so long as Bishops and well meaning philanthropists in England and America continue to praise and encourage `the glorious fertility of the East' there can be but little hope of minimizing the penalties of the ruthless struggle for existence in China, and Nature's law will therefore continue to work out its own pitiless solution, weeding out every year millions of predestined weaklings."

This rapid survey is enough, I hope, to indicate the manifold inadequacies inherent in present policies of philanthropy and charity. The most serious charge that can be brought against modern "benevolence" is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression. Philanthropy is a gesture characteristic of modern business lavishing upon the unfit the profits extorted from the community at large. Looked at impartially, this compensatory generosity is in its final effect probably more dangerous, more dysgenic, more blighting than the initial practice of profiteering and the social injustice which makes some too rich and others too poor.

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The Yellow Press, Fake News 100 Years Ago (1907 Article)

The Yellow Press, the Fake News of 100 Years Ago (1907 Article) by Charles Whibley

IF all countries may boast the Press which they deserve, America’s desert is small indeed. No civilised country in the world has been content with newspapers so grossly contemptible as those which are read from New York to the Pacific Coast. The journals known as Yellow would be a disgrace to the Black Republic, and it is difficult to understand the state of mind which can tolerate them. Divorced completely from the world of truth and intelligence, they present nothing which an educated man would desire to read. They are said to be excluded from clubs and from respectable houses. But even if this prohibition were a fact, their proprietors need feel no regret. We are informed by the Yellowest of Editors that his burning words are read every day by five million men and women.

What, then, is the aspect and character of these Yellow Journals? As they are happily strange on our side the ocean, they need some description. They are ill-printed, over-illustrated sheets, whose end and aim are to inflame a jaded or insensitive palate. They seem to address the half-blind eye and the sluggish mind of the imbecile. The wholly unimportant information which they desire to impart is not conveyed in type of the ordinary shape and size. The “scare” headlines are set forth in letters three inches in height. It is as though the editors of these sheets are determined to exhaust your attention. They are not content to tell you that this or that inapposite event has taken place. They pant, they shriek, they yell. Their method represents the beating of a thousand big drums, the blare of unnumbered trumpets, the shouted blasphemies of a million raucous throats. And if, with all this noise dinning in your car, you are persuaded to read a Yellow sheet, which is commonly pink in colour, you are grievously disappointed. The thing is not even sensational. Its “scare” headlines do but arouse a curiosity which the “brightest and brainiest" reporter in the United States is not able to satisfy.

Of what happens in the great world you will find not a trace in the Yellow Journals. They betray no interest in politics, in literature, or in the fine arts. There is nothing of grave importance which can be converted into a “good story.” That a great man should perform a great task is immaterial. Noble deeds make no scandal, and are therefore not worth reporting. But if you can discover that the great man has a hidden vice, or an eccentric taste in boots or hats, there is "copy" ready to your hand. All things and all men must be reduced to a dead level of imbecility. The Yellow Press is not obscene-it has not the courage for that. Its proud boast is that it never prints a line that a father might not read to his daughter. It is merely personal and impertinent. No one's life is secure from its spies. No privacy is sacred. Mr Stead's famous ideal of an ear at every keyhole is magnificently realised in America. A hundred reporters are ready, at a moment's notice, to invade houses, to uncover secrets, to molest honest citizens with indiscreet questions. And if their victims are unwilling to respond, they pay for it with public insult and malicious invention. Those who will not bow to the common tyrant of the Press cannot complain if words are ascribed to them which they never uttered, if they are held guilty of deeds from which they would shrink in horror. Law and custom are alike powerless to fight this tyranny, which is the most ingenious and irksome form of blackmail yet invented.

The perfect newspaper, if such were possible, would present to its readers a succinct history of each day as it passes. It would weigh with a scrupulous hand the relative importance of events. It would give to each department of human activity no more than its just space. It would reduce scandal within the narrow limits which ought to confine it. Under its wise auspices murder, burglary, and suicide would be deposed from the eminence upon which idle curiosity has placed them. Those strange beings known as public men would be famous not for what their wives wear at somebody else’s “At Home,” but for their own virtues and attainments. The foolish actors and actresses, who now believe themselves the masters of the world, would slink away into entrefilets on a back page. The perfect newspaper, in brief, would resemble a Palace of Truth, in which deceit was impossible and vanity ridiculous. It would crush the hankerers after false reputations, it would hurl the imbecile from the mighty seats which they try to fill, and it would present an invaluable record to future generations.

What picture of its world does the Yellow Press present? A picture of colossal folly and unpardonable indiscretion. If there be a museum which preserves these screaming sheets, this is the sort of stuff which in two thousand years will puzzle the scholars: “Mrs Jones won’t admit Wedding,” “Millionaires Bet on a Snake Fight,” “Chicago Church Girl Accuses Millionaire,” “Athletics make John D. forget his Money.” These are a few pearls hastily strung together, and they show what jewels of intelligence are most highly prized by the Greatest Democracy on earth. Now and again the editor takes his readers into his confidence and asks them to interfere in the affairs of persons whom they will never know. Here, for instance, is a characteristic problem set by an editor whose knowledge of his public exceeds his respect for the decencies of life: “What Mrs Washington ought to do. Her husband Wall Street Broker. Got tired of Her and Deserted. But Mrs Washington, who still loves him dearly, Is determined to win him back. And here is the Advice of the Readers of this Journal.” Is it not monstrous—this interference with the privacy of common citizens? And yet this specimen has an air of dignity compared with the grosser exploits of the hired eavesdropper. Not long since there appeared in a Sunday paper a full list, with portraits and biographies, of all the ladies in New York who are habitual drunkards. From which it is clear that the law of libel has sunk into oblivion, and that the cowhide is no longer a useful weapon.

The disastrous effect upon the people of such a Press as I have described is obvious. It excites the nerves of the foolish, it presents a hideously false standard of life, it suggests that nobody is sacred for the omnipotent eavesdropper, and it preaches day after day at the top of its husky voice the gospel of snobbishness. But it is not merely the public manners which it degrades; it does its best to hamper the proper administration of the law. In America trial by journalism has long supplemented, and goes far to supplant, trial by jury. If a murder be committed its detection is not left to the officers of the police. A thousand reporters, cunning as monkeys, active as sleuth-hounds, are on the track. Whether it is the criminal that they pursue or an innocent man is indifferent to them. Heedless of injustice, they go in search of “copy.” They interrogate the friends of the victim, and they uncover the secrets of all the friends and relatives he may have possessed. They care not how they prejudice the public mind, or what wrong they do to innocent men. If they make a fair trial impossible, it matters not. They have given their tired readers a new sensation, they have stimulated gossip in a thousand tenement houses, and justice may fall in ruins so long as they sell another edition. And nobody protests against their unbridled licence, not even when they have made it an affair of the utmost difficulty and many weeks to empanel an unprejudiced jury.

The greatest opportunity of the Yellow Press came a brief year ago, when a Mr H. K. Thaw murdered an accomplished architect. The day after the murder the trial began in the newspapers, and it has been “run as a serial” ever since. The lives of the murderer and his victim were uncovered with the utmost effrontery. The character of the dead man was painted in the blackest colours by cowards, who knew that they were secure from punishment. The murderer’s friends and kinsmen were all compelled to pay their tribute to the demon of publicity. The people was presented with plans of the cell in which the man Thaw was imprisoned, while photographs of his wife and his mother were printed day after day that a silly mob might note the effect of anguish on the human countenance. And, not content with thus adorning the tale, the journals were eloquent in pointing the moral. Sentimental spinsters were invited to warn the lady typewriters of America that death and ruin inevitably overtake the wrongdoer. Stern-eyed clergymen thought well to anticipate justice in sermons addressed to erring youth. Finally, a plébiscite decided, by 2 to 1, that Thaw should immediately be set free. And when you remember the arrogant tyranny of the Yellow Journals, you are surprised that at the mere sound of the people’s voice the prison doors did not instantly fly open.

You are told, as though it were no more than a simple truth, that the Yellow Press —-the journals owned by Mr Hearst — not merely made the Spanish-American War, but procured the assassination of Mr McKinley. The statement seems incredible, because it is difficult to believe that such stuff as these should have any influence either for good or evil. The idle gossip and flagrant scandal which are its daily food do not appear to be efficient leaders of opinion. But it is the Editorial columns which do the work of conviction, and they assume an air of gravity which may easily deceive the unwary. And their gravity is the natural accompaniment of scandal. There is but a slender difference between barbarity and sentimentalism. The same temper which delights in reading of murder and sudden death weeps with anguish at the mere hint of oppression. No cheek is so easily bedewed by the unnecessary tear as the cheek of the ruffian — and those who compose the “editorials” for Mr Hearst’s papers have cynically realised this truth. They rant and they cant and they argue, as though nothing but noble thoughts were permitted to lodge within the poor brains of their readers. Their favourite gospel is the gospel of Socialism. They tell the workers that the world is their inalienable inheritance, that skill and capital are the snares of the evil one, and that nothing is worth a reward save manual toil. They pretend for a moment to look with a kindly eye upon the Trusts, because, when all enterprises and industries are collected into a small compass, the people will have less trouble in laying hands upon them. In brief, they teach the supreme duty of plunder in all the staccato eloquence at their command. For the man whose thrift and energy have helped him to success they have nothing but contempt. They cannot think of the criminal without bursting into tears. And, while they lay upon the rich man the guilty burden of his wealth, they charge the community with the full responsibility for the convict’s misfortune. Such doctrines, insidiously taught, and read day after day by the degenerate and unrestrained, can only have one effect, and that effect, no doubt, the “editorials” of the Yellow Press will some day succeed in producing.

The result is, of course, revolution, and revolution is being carefully and insidiously prepared after the common fashion. Not a word is left unsaid that can flatter the criminal or encourage the thriftless. Those who are too idle to work but not too idle to read the Sunday papers are told that the wealth of the country is theirs, and it will be the fault of their own inaction, not of the Yellow Press, if they do not some day lay violent hands upon it. And when they are tired of politics the Yellow Editors turn to popular philosophy or cheap theology for the solace of their public. To men and women excited by the details of the last murder they discourse of the existence of God in short, crisp sentences, — and I know not which is worse, the triviality of the discourse or its inappositeness. They preface one of their most impassioned exhortations with the words: “If you read this, you will probably think you have wasted time.” This might with propriety stand for the motto of all the columns of all Mr Hearst’s journals, but here it is clearly used in the same hope which inspires the sandwichman to carry on his front the classic legend: “Please do not look on my back.” But what is dearest to the souls of these editors is a mean commonplace. One leader, which surely had a triumphant success, is headed, “What the Bartender Sees.” And the exordium is worthy so profound a speculation. “Did you ever stop to think,” murmurs the Yellow philosopher, “of all the strange beings that pass before him?" There’s profundity for you! There’s invention! Is it wonderful that five million men and women read these golden words, or others of a like currency, every day?

And politics, theology, and philosophy are all served up in the same thick sauce of sentiment. The “baby” seems to play a great part in the Yellow morality. One day you are told, “A baby can educate a man"; on another you read, “Last week’s baby will surely talk some day,” and you are amazed, as at a brilliant discovery. And you cannot but ask, To whom are these exhortations addressed? To children or to idiots? The grown men and women, even of Cook County, can hardly regard such poor twaddle as this with a serious eye. And what of the writers? How can they reconcile their lofty tone, which truly is above suspicion, with the shameful sensationalism of their news-columns? They know not the meaning of sincerity. If they believed that “last week’s baby would talk some day,” they would suppress their reporters. In short, they are either blind or cynical. From these alternatives there is no escape, and for their sakes, as well as for America’s, I hope they write with their tongue in their cheeks.

The style of the Yellow Journals is appropriate to their matter. The headlines live on and by the historic present, and the text is as bald as a paper of statistics. It is the big type that does the execution. The “story” itself, to use the slang of the newspaper, is seldom either humorous or picturesque. Bare facts and vulgar incidents are enough for the public, which cares as little for wit as for sane writing. One fact only can explain the imbecility of the Yellow Press: it is written for immigrants, who have but an imperfect knowledge of English, who prefer to see their news rather than to read it, and who, if they must read, can best understand words of one syllable and sentences of no more than five words.

For good or evil, America has the sole claim to the invention of the Yellow Press. It came, fully armed, from the head of its first proprietor. It owes nothing to Europe, nothing to the traditions of its own country. It grew out of nothing, and, let us hope, it will soon disappear into nothingness. The real Press of America was rather red than yellow. It had an energy and a character which still exist in some more reputable sheets, and which are the direct antithesis of Yellow sensationalism. The horsewhip and revolver were as necessary to its conduct as the pen and inkpot. If the editors of an older and wiser time insulted their enemies, they were ready to defend themselves, like men. They did not eavesdrop and betray. They would have scorned to reveal the secrets of private citizens, even though they did not refrain their hand from their rivals. Yet, with all their brutality, they were brave and honourable, and you cannot justly measure the degradation of the Yellow Press unless you cast your mind a little farther back and contemplate the achievement of another generation.

The tradition of journalism came to America from England. ‘The Sun,’ ‘The Tribune,’ and ‘The Post,’ as wise and trustworthy papers as may be found on the surface of the globe, are still conscious of their origin, though they possess added virtues of their own. ‘The New York Herald,’ as conducted by James Gordon Bennett the First, modeled its scurrilous energy upon the Press of our own eighteenth century. The influence of Junius and the pamphleteers was discernible in its columns, and many of its articles might have been signed by Wilkes himself. But there was something in ‘The Herald’ which you would seek in vain in Perry’s ‘Morning Chronicle' say, or ‘The North Briton,’ and that was the free-and-easy style of the backwoods. Gordon Bennett grasped as well as any one the value of news. He boarded vessels far out at sea that he might forestall his rivals. In some respects he was as “yellow” as his successor, whose great exploit of employing a man convicted of murder to report the trial of a murderer is not likely to be forgotten. On the other hand, he set before New York the history of Europe and of European thought with appreciation and exactitude. He knew the theatre of England and France more intimately than most of his contemporaries, and he did a great deal to encourage the art of acting in his own country. But above all things he was a fighter, both with pen and fist. He had something of the spirit which inspired the old mining-camp. “We never saw the man we feared,” he once said, “nor the woman we had not some liking for.” That healthy, if primitive, sentiment breathes in all his works. And his magnanimity was equal to his courage. “I have no objection to forgive enemies,” he wrote, “particularly after I have trampled them under my feet.” This principle guided his life and his journal, and, while it gave a superb dash of energy to his style, it put a wholesome fear into the hearts and heads of his antagonists.

One antagonist there was who knew neither fear nor forgetfulness, and he attacked Bennett again and again. Bennett returned his blows, and then made most admirable “copy” of the assault. The last encounter between the two is so plainly characteristic of Bennett’s style that I quote his description in his own words. “As I was leisurely pursuing my business yesterday in Wall Street,” wrote Bennett, “collecting the information which is daily disseminated in ‘The Herald,’ James Watson Webb came up to me, on the northern side of the street— said something which I could not hear distinctly, then pushed me down the stone steps leading to one of the brokers’ offices, and commenced fighting with a species of brutal and demoniac desperation characteristic of a fury. My damage is a scratch, about three-quarters of an inch in length, on the third finger of the left hand, which I received from the iron railing I was forced against, and three buttons torn from my vest, which my tailor will reinstate for six cents. His loss is a rent from top to bottom of a very beautiful black coat, which cost the ruflian $40, and a blow in the face which may have knocked down his throat some of his infernal teeth for all I know. Balance in my favour $39.94. As to intimidating me, or changing my course, the thing cannot be done. Neither Webb nor any other man shall, or can, intimidate me. . . . I maybe attacked, I may be assailed, I may be killed, I may be murdered, but I will never succumb.”

There speaks the true Gordon Bennett, and his voice, though it may be the voice of a ruffian, is also the voice of a man who is certainly courageous and is not without humour. It is not from such a tradition as that, that the Yellow Press emerged. It does not want much pluck to hang about and sneak secrets. It is the pure negation of humour to preach socialism in the name of the criminal and degenerate. And the Yellow Press owes its vices to none of its predecessors, but to its own inherent stupidity. To judge America by this product would be monstrous unfair, but it corresponds perforce to some baser quality in the cosmopolitans of the United States, and it cannot be overlooked. As it stands, it is the heaviest indictment of the popular taste that can be made. There is no vice so mean as impertinent curiosity, and it is upon this curiosity that the Yellow Press meanly lives and meanly thrives.

What is the remedy? There is none, unless time brings with it a natural reaction. It is as desperate a task to touch the Press as to change the Constitution. The odds against reform are too great. A law to check the exuberance of newspapers would never survive the attacks of the news-papers themselves. Nor is it only in America that reform is necessary. The Press of Europe, also, has strayed so far from its origins as to be a danger to the State. In their inception the newspapers were given freedom, that they might expose and check the corruption and dishonesty of politicians. It was thought that publicity was the best cure for intrigue. For a while the liberty of the Press seemed justified. It is justified no longer. The licence which it assumed has led to far worse evils than those which it was designed to prevent. In other words, the slave has become a tyrant, and where is the statesman who shall rid us of this tyranny? Failure alone can kill what lives only upon popular success, and it is the old-fashioned, self-respecting journals which are facing ruin. Prosperity is with the large circulations, and a large circulation is no test of merit. Success is made neither by honesty nor wisdom. The people will buy what flatters its vanity or appeals to its folly. And the Yellow Press will flourish, with its headlines and its vulgarity, until the mixed population of America has sufficiently mastered the art of life and the English tongue to demand something better wherewith to solace its leisure than scandal and imbecility. -CHARLES WHIBLEY.

Anne Hutchinson: The Spirit of Religious Liberty

Anne Hutchinson: The Spirit of Religious Liberty

Each week, Mr. Reed will relate the stories of people whose choices and actions make them heroes. See the table of contents for previous installments.

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Opinions of Anne Hutchinson have, shall we say, covered the waterfront.
In his masterful tome, Conceived in Liberty, 20th-century economist and libertarian historian Murray Rothbard cast her as a staunch individualist and the greatest threat to the “despotic Puritanical theocracy of Massachusetts Bay.”

John Winthrop, the 2nd, 6th, 9th, and 12th governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, thought she was a “hell-spawned agent of destructive anarchy” and “a woman of haughty and fierce carriage, a nimble wit and active spirit, a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man.”

The state of Massachusetts apparently agrees with Rothbard. A monument in the State House in Boston today calls her a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration.” She was, in fact, the preeminent female crusader for a free society in 18th-century New England, for which she paid first with banishment and ultimately with her life.

The story is bound intimately to the “antinomian” or “free grace” controversy involving both religion and gender. It raged in Massachusetts for the better part of two years, from 1636 to 1638. Hutchinson was an unconventional, charismatic woman who dared to challenge church doctrine as well as the role of women in even discussing such things in a male-dominated society. In Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, historian Emery Battis wrote,

Gifted with a magnetism which is imparted to few, she had, until the hour of her fall, warm adherents far outnumbering her enemies, and it was only by dint of skillful maneuvering that the authorities were able to loosen her hold on the community.

Antinomianism literally means “against the law” and was a term of derision applied against Hutchinson and her “free grace” followers. While the Puritan establishment in Massachusetts argued, as good “Reformers” of the day did, that Christian understanding derived from scripture alone (“Sola Scriptura”), the antinomians placed additional emphasis on an “inner light” by which the Holy Spirit imparted wisdom and guidance to believing individuals, one at a time.

“As I do understand it,” Hutchinson herself explained, “laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway. He who has God’s grace in his heart cannot go astray.”

As America’s first feminist, and a woman of conscience and principle, Anne Hutchinson planted seeds of libertarianism that would grow and help establish a new nation a little more than a century later.

Barely a century after Martin Luther sparked the great divide known as the Reformation, the Protestant leaders of Massachusetts saw antinomianism as dangerously heretical. Their theological forebears broke from Rome in part because they saw the teachings of priests, bishops and popes as the words of presumptuous intermediaries — diversions by mortals from the divine word of God. When Anne Hutchinson and other antinomians spoke of this supplemental “inner light,” it seemed to the Puritan establishment that the Reformation itself was being undone. Worse still, Hutchinson accused church leaders in Massachusetts of reverting to the pre-Reformation notion of “justification by works” instead of the Martin Luther/John Calvin perspective of justification by faith alone through God’s “free grace.”

In England where she was born in 1591, Hutchinson had followed the teachings of the dynamic preacher John Cotton, from whom she traced some of her anti-establishment ideas. When Cotton was compelled to leave the country in 1633, Hutchinson and her family followed him to New England. There she would live until her death just 10 years later, stirring up one fuss after another and serving as an active midwife and caregiver to the sick simultaneously. That she found the time to do all this while raising 15 children of her own is a tribute to her energy and passion.

Hutchinson organized discussion groups (“conventicles”) attended by dozens of women and eventually many men, too. This in itself was a bold move. It was empowering especially to the women, who were supposed to remain quiet and subordinate to their husbands, particularly in matters of religion and governance. But Hutchinson’s meetings were full of critical talk about the “errors” in recent sermons and the intolerant ways in which the men of Massachusetts ran the colony. Her influence grew rapidly and by all accounts, Boston became a stronghold of antinomianism while the countryside aligned with the establishment. It was only a matter of time before religious and gender differences spilled over into politics.

In 1636, Hutchinson and her antinomian, “free grace” allies such as Cotton, Reverend John Wheelwright, and Governor Henry Vale came under blistering attack by the orthodox Puritan clergy. In churches and public meetings, they were assailed as heretics and disturbers of the peace who threatened the very existence of the Puritan experiment in New England. Accusations of immoral sexual conduct, thoroughly unfounded, swirled in the flurry. Cotton was sidelined by the pressure. Wheelwright was found guilty of “contempt & sedition” for having “purposely set himself to kindle and increase” strife within the colony and was banished from Massachusetts. Vale was defeated for reelection and a Hutchinson enemy, John Winthrop, became governor in 1637. Despite initial wavering under the intense pressure, Hutchinson held firm.

In November 1637, Winthrop arranged for Hutchinson to be put on trial on the charge of slandering the ministers of Massachusetts Bay. He declared that she had “troubled the peace of the commonwealth and churches” by promoting unsanctioned opinions and holding unauthorized meetings in her home. Though she had never voiced her views outside of the conventicles she held, or ever signed any statements or petitions about them, Winthrop portrayed her as a coconspirator who had goaded others to challenge authority. Before the court, with Hutchinson present, he charged:

You have spoken divers things as we have been informed [which are] very prejudicial to the honour of the churches and ministers thereof, and you have maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.

Hutchinson mostly stonewalled the prosecution, but occasionally shot back with a fiery rejoinder like this one: “Do you think it not lawful for me to teach women, and why do you call me to teach the court?”

The first day of the trial went reasonably well for her. One biographer, Richard Morris, said she “outfenced the magistrates in a battle of wits.” Another biographer, Eve LaPlante, wrote, “Her success before the court may have astonished her judges, but it was no surprise to her. She was confident of herself and her intellectual tools, largely because of the intimacy she felt with God.”
The second day didn’t go so well after a moment of high drama when Hutchinson cut loose with this warning:

You have no power over my body, neither can you do me any harm — for I am in the hands of the eternal Jehovah, my Saviour. I am at his appointment, the bounds of my habitation are cast in heaven, no further do I esteem of any mortal man than creatures in his hand, I fear none but the great Jehovah, which hath foretold me of these things, and I do verily believe that he will deliver me out of your hands. Therefore take heed how you proceed against me — for I know that, for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin you and your posterity and this whole state.

What Winthrop and his prosecutors hadn’t yet proved, Hutchinson handed them in one stroke. This was all the evidence of “sedition” and “contempt of court” that they needed. She was convicted, labeled an instrument of the devil and “a woman not fit for our society,” and banished from Massachusetts Bay. This was the verdict of her civil trial. She would be detained for four months under house arrest, rarely able to see her family, until a church trial that would determine her fate as a member of the Puritan faith. In that trial, because she would not admit to certain theological mistakes, she was formally excommunicated with this denunciation from Reverend Thomas Shepard:

I do cast you out and deliver you up to Satan ... and account you from this time forth to be a Heathen and a Publican ... I command you in the name of Christ Jesus and of this Church as a Leper to withdraw yourself out of the Congregation.

Hutchinson, her husband William, and their children departed Boston in April 1638. They trudged for nearly a week in the snow to get to Providence, Rhode Island, founded by Roger Williams as a haven for persecuted minorities. Five years later, on a terrible day in August 1643, Anne and her entire family but for one daughter were massacred by marauding Siwanoy Indians.

The woman who rocked a colony was gone, but as Rothbard writes, “the spirit of liberty that she embodied and kindled was to outlast the despotic theocracy of Massachusetts Bay.”

As America’s first feminist, and a woman of conscience and principle, Anne Hutchinson planted seeds of libertarianism that would grow and help establish a new nation a little more than a century later.
For further information, see:

• “Sir Henry Vane: America’s First Revolutionary” by Sean Gabb
• “Individualist Feminism: The Lost Tradition” by Wendy McElroy
• Murray Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty
• Emery Battis’s Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
• Francis J. Bremer’s Anne Hutchinson: Troubler of the Puritan Zion
• Eve LaPlante’s American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed is President of the Foundation for Economic Education and the author of the book Real Heroes: Inspiring True Stories of Courage, Character and Conviction. Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Socialism Means Material & National Decay by Frederick Millar 1907

Socialism Means Material and National Decay by Frederick Millar 1907

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ONE of the most striking features of recent political life has been the appearance and growth of what is known as socialism. Those who profess the socialist creed assert that the poverty and misery of modern life arise from the inequality produced by the free play of competition. They propose to substitute for competition the regulation of industry by the State. In the socialist State there would be no money and no wages. The industry of the country would be organised and managed by the State, as the Post Office is now. The State would own all the land and all the instruments of production—farms, mines, mills, shops, railways, and ships. Goods of all kinds would be produced and distributed for use, and not for sale, in such quantities as were needed. Hours of labour would be fixed, and every citizen would take what he or she desired from the common stock. Food, clothing, lodging, fuel, transit, amusement, and everything else would be supplied by the State. The socialists assert that, if the socialist régime were established, the evils which attend modern life would disappear, inequality of condition would be largely abolished, and prosperity and happiness would be universally diffused.

The doctrines of socialism have been propagated with considerable energy and zeal. The confidence with which the socialists have asserted their dogmas has exercised a considerable influence on the public mind, and many people who do not accept their teaching feel in a vague kind of way that, sooner or later, socialism is inevitable. Confident assertion, however, is not a satisfactory substitute for proof, and it does not follow that because a creed is propagated with zeal it is necessarily true. There are many who dissent from the teaching of socialism, and distrust the claims which it puts forward. It is right that they should give expression to their views.

It is constantly asserted by socialists as a principal reason for advocating their creed that poverty and misery are growing, and that the social residuum is an increasing mass. The moment this assertion is examined it is found to be untrue. It is unnecessary to go beyond our own country. Wages are going up, while prices are coming down, and food is becoming cheaper. The steady lowering of the death-rate is itself a conclusive proof that the average life is much less trying than it was a hundred years ago, and that socialists are wrong when they say that poverty and misery are on the increase.

Mr. Herbert Spencer has called attention to the curious fact that the more things improve, the more people talk of their badness. A hundred years ago, when drunkenness was common, nobody said a word against it. Now, when it is steadily decreasing, people are crying out for measures of repressive legislation, instead of leaving it to disappear under the influences which have been working against it in the past. Formerly, when the condition of women was far inferior to that of men and they were the drudges of the family, no protest was made; now, when their claims are put before those of men and they are the objects of attention and consideration, we hear talk of the “new woman,” and of woman’s rights and woman’s grievances. In all departments of social life the same tendency appears.

There may be disadvantages attaching to a system of social life based on competition; but the question is whether the evils now suffered are not less than would be suffered under another system. The opponent of socialism maintains that efforts for mitigation along the lines followed thus far are more likely to succeed than efforts along lines long since abandoned. Under the feudal system life was carried on by compulsory co-operation. Society took a military form. The social grades corresponded with the ranks of an army, and the people were primarily soldiers. As in an army absolute submission to superiors and rigid performance of prescribed duties are strictly enforced, so under the feudal system life was carried on by compulsory co-operation. In the course of time, however, the system of compulsory co-operation was gradually replaced by one of voluntary co-operation. The part of the community devoted to war grew less and less. Towns sprang up, where life was not military, but industrial. Men grew out of the feudal system. Their labour, instead of being at the disposal of their feudal superiors, was left to their own disposal, to be employed in the way most advantageous to themselves. Services were bought and sold like corn or cattle. Competition replaced compulsory co-operation.

The improvement in social life, however, did not stop restlessness or silence complaints. Mr. Spencer has pointed out that, just as the best easy chair becomes wearisome after a time, so the restlessness generated by pressure against the conditions of existence perpetually prompts the desire to try a new position. It is the same with humanity. Having by long strides emancipated itself from the hard discipline of the ancient régime, and having discovered that the new regime into which it has grown, though relatively easy, is not without stresses and pains, its impatience with these prompts the wish to try another system, which other system is in principle, if not in appearance, the same as that which during past generations was escaped from with much rejoicing. Men forget that all permanent improvement of social conditions is very gradual. “One would have thought it sufficiently clear to everybody,” says Mr. Spencer, “that the great changes taking place in this world of ours are uniformly slow ..... ..Did it not require nearly the whole Christian era to abolish slavery and serfdom in Europe? Did not a hundred generations live and die while picture-writing grew into printing?” Nothing but the slow modification of human nature by the discipline of social life can produce permanently advantageous changes.

Under socialism there is to be no money. There will be a common stock of necessaries and conveniences. Men will be paid in certificates of social labour-time, which will entitle them to a certain proportion of the Common stock. Socialists say that it would be possible to fix the amount of the common stock by finding out how many hours a day for how many days in a year every working member of a given community would have to work, in order that every individual in such community should have exactly as much of everything as he or she wanted. How is the supply to be fixed? There is no article of consumption, not even bread itself, for which the demand does not so vary from day to day that it is impossible to say how much of it will be required. An instance may be taken. Let it be supposed that under socialism the State officials estimate that, under ordinary circumstances, the town of A requires 10,000 tons of coal during the month of October, which are supplied from the B coalpit. From some cause or other the demand of A for coal suddenly falls. Under the present system things adjust themselves at once. The miners work half time, or prices are lowered to induce people to buy. Under socialism full work must always be provided for the miners, and prices are never lowered. The socialist system gets out of gear at once.

If the citizens of the socialist State are to be paid in certificates of labour-time, how is the value of different kinds of labour to be fixed? What is the value of an hour of a sailor’s work as compared with an hour of a mason’s work? Professor Jevons says it is “impossible to compare a priori the productive powers of a navvy, a carpenter, an iron-puddler, a barrister, and a schoolmaster.” How is the value of an inventor’s labour to be fixed? “I will not ask,” says one writer, “what would have been the ‘social labour-value’ of James Watt’s time when he sat watching the lid of his mother’s tea-kettle being lifted up by the steam. But it is fair to ask what Boulton would have done if, instead of being a private capitalist, he had been a socialist industrial chief when Watt proposed to him to make experiments on the condensing steam-engine. Would he have had resources at his disposal? It is very doubtful. If he were paid his salary as overseer in labour certificates, we may certainly say not. Would he have felt justified in taking up the ‘social labour-time’ of the workmen under his supervision in making experiments of a costly nature, which, for all he could possibly foresee, might come to nothing?”

The whole conception that men are paid for labour is unsound. Labour has no value of its own. If a man spends his time in making articles which nobody wants, his labour is worthless. If a man cuts down a tree for a meal, the meal is given for the service, not for the labour expended in rendering the service. The owner of the tree pays the man because the tree which was formerly standing is now out down, not because the man has performed so much labour. Where two men are engaged in different kinds of work, the comparison is not between their labour, but between the things which have been respectively produced by their labour.

Under socialism life would be carried on under compulsion. Each man’s employment would be fixed for him by the State, and he would be compelled to accept the remuneration fixed for him by his superiors. There could be no voluntary exchange of labour and produce, as this would produce competition. If twelve men wanted to be physicians and the State did not want more than six, the State would refuse to allow the remaining six to follow the profession for which they felt themselves suited.

The State would groan under an intolerable load of officialdom. The more advanced the organisation, the greater is the development of the machinery required for regulating it. If the whole life of the people were regulated by the State, the administration needed would be enormous. Well may Schaffle ask “whether the commonwealth of the socialists would be able to cope with the enormous socialistic book-keeping, and to estimate heterogeneous labour correctly according to socialistic units of labour-time.” At present the distribution of the necessaries and conveniences of life is left to private enterprise. Under socialism public officials would take the place of private enterprise. It is appalling to think of the army of officials who would manage the affairs of the nation. Imagine the staffs required for producing every article of food and clothing; for distributing them to everybody everywhere; for carrying on every farm, factory, business house, mine, and railway; for superintending the national roads, canals, and shipping; for exporting and importing goods (if such a thing is possible under socialism, which is doubtful); for managing the gas, water, tramways, and electric power required for every town; for conducting those services already managed by the State: the Post Office, the police, the army, and the navy. What would become of the poor worker? On the Continent, where officialdom and bureaucracy are much more developed than in England, there are constant complaints of the tyranny and brutality of officials. Even in England there is a strong tendency for joint-stock companies, labour unions, railway companies, and societies of all kinds, to fall under the dominion of the permanent staffs. What would be the state of England if our national life were under the control of one huge permanent staff? Life would resolve itself into one gigantic system of castes. Grade upon grade of officials would rise one above the other, each intermarrying within itself, and gradually hardening into a caste. Under such a consolidated mass of superiors how would the man fare who disliked his occupation and wished to enter a more congenial one, or who thought his merits entitled him to a greater proportion of the common stock than he was getting, or who considered that more work was allotted to him than was just?

Under voluntary co-operation as at present carried on, the organisers, as distinguished from the labourers, are restrained from taking too great a share of the produce of labour by public opinion, unions among the workmen, and other causes. Under compulsory co-operation, the organisers and regulators would seek their own interests without being restrained by combinations of free workers. Their power would grow and ramify and consolidate till it became irresistible. It is said that the energetic working man would be successful under socialism. But he is so under private enterprise. The shiftless or idle man can only be made to work by want. If socialism applies the spur of want, how is it better than individualism? If the prison or the scourge be applied, is socialism not worse than individualism?

In considering "the production of wealth, the socialists have always laid undue stress on labour as distinguished from capital. Adam Smith, who is often called the father of political economy, described labour as the cause of wealth, leaving out of consideration the two other necessary agents, land and capital. This error has run through the teaching of most subsequent economists, and is responsible for many of the errors of socialism. Labour is the cause of wealth, say the socialists; therefore the man who labours is entitled to the wealth. The landowner who controls the original and indestructible powers of the soil, which he has not created by his own labour, is held to be an agent of injustice. The capitalist, who has not created his wealth by his own labour, is declared to have no right to it. He has acquired his wealth, says the socialist, at the expense of the worker.

This teaching is wrong. Labour and wealth are not indissolubly united. It is possible to have labour without wealth, as already pointed out. It is possible to acquire wealth without labour. If a man fills his cellar with wine, or stocks his lake with fish, or his wood with some valuable wild animal which needs no human care, he will often acquire wealth by simple efflux of time. If the teaching of the socialists were true, and labour were the measure of wealth, any manufacture which employed much labour would be lucrative. If we wanted to know whether a large employer of labour was wealthy, we should merely have to look at his wages bill. As a matter of fact, everyone knows this would be no criterion. The proper method would be to go to his ledger, and ascertain his profits after he had paid his workers and sold his goods.

"His surplus is his wealth. The surplus would not have been there without labour; but, as every bankrupt too well knows, there may be the labour without the surplus ..... ..The surplus is the reward which accrues to the merchant for satisfying certain human desires better than anyone else. The wealth of the capitalist is not obtained at the expense of the workers, but represents the value of his services to the community." [MacPherson’s “Adam Smith," p. 101.]

Karl Marx and the socialist school greatly exaggerated the proportion of the produce of labour which falls to capital. As has been already said, if the socialist estimate was a just one, every manufacture which employed much labour would be lucrative. This is not the case. If the profits of capital, as distinguished from labour, were what socialists represent them, co-operative working men’s associations would speedily multiply, for by placing labour and capital in the same hands they would almost inevitably succeed. It is notorious that a multitude of these societies have totally failed. Marx concentrated attention wholly on the few instances of great gain, entirely overlooking the many risks and .. failures which attend commercial enterprise.

The political economists who laid so much stress on labour were led into another error. They took a too materialistic view of it. They overlooked the part played by the intellect in producing wealth. They wrote as if wealth were produced by mere manual labour, and as if the men who organised and directed it had no part in the matter, except that of appropriating the fruits, forgetting that it would be just as reasonable to ascribe the whole merit of the victory of Austerlitz to the French privates, and to refuse all share to Napoleon. There has been an enormous growth of wealth during the past century. It was natural that workers brought up on the theory that labour was the cause of wealth should think when they saw this increase of wealth that they were being cheated out of their share. “The socialist propaganda, however,” says Mr. MacPherson, “gets a severe check when it is recognised that the great increase in the national wealth is not the creation of labour, in the manual sense, but, as Mr. Mallock clearly and ably demonstrates, the creation of labour under the direction of intellect. Sir Robert Giffen, a few years ago, calculated that wealth in Great Britain was progressing twice as fast as population. This increase manifestly is not due to any exertion of labour, in the sense of the term as used by Smith, Ricardo, and Mill. The increase is due to the increased power of man over nature, in the form of scientific discoveries and inventions, and in the marvellous organising power of the captains of industry.”

Under the reign of machinery the wages of labour are increasing at a greater ratio than the profits of Capital. In a highly complex state, where mechanical appliances are strained to the utmost in order to produce both quality and quantity, the demand is for the highest type of workman. Intelligence becomes an important factor in the race for mechanical superiority; consequently, it becomes the highest possible economy to give high wages for good workmen. As the object of high wages is to Cheapen the cost of production, it follows that the worker, being also a consumer, benefits in the cheapening of products brought about by his highly-paid labour. Thus the worker benefits in a twofold manner—by higher wages and by the increased purchasing power of wages. Further, a reduction in the price puts commodities within the reach of a large class who were previously unable to consume them, and the market is thereby extended, thus enlarging the income without raising the profit. In brief, increased wages are given to increased intelligence, which again leads to increased production, thus widening the labour area, and, by making a still further demand upon intelligence, again reacting beneficially on wages. During the present century the wealth of the working classes has greatly increased, especially in countries where manufactures are most developed and machinery most employed; but that increase is due to many causes besides the manual labour of the working classes themselves.

A common habit of socialists is to speak of capitalists as if they belonged to one class, cut off from the rest of the world, and selfishly battening on the labour of the remaining classes. The capitalist is denounced as a vampire and a robber. If this is true, then thousands of working men are robbers. Have you £50 in the savings bank? Do you own your own house? Are you a shareholder in a co-operative society, or a member of a friendly society? Then you are a capitalist and a robber. Any socialistic policy which would confiscate the property of the rich would equally confiscate the property of the poor. There is an immense amount of property in the hands of the working classes. Land and capital are mainly owned in very small shares by an enormous number of people. It may be interesting to give a few figures. Mr. Mallock has shown, first, that the entire rental derived from land is only sixteen per cent of the total assessed to income tax; secondly, that large landowners—that is, owners who hold more than a thousand acres—receive less than twenty-nine million pounds per annum in rental, while the remaining seventy million pounds of rental is divided among nine hundred and fifty thousand landowners, whose rentals average £76 a year; and, thirdly, that if the whole of the land were confiscated and its rental appropriated by the community, the result would be to give each man about twopence a day, and each woman about three-halfpence. [W. H. Mallock’s “ Labour and the Popular Welfare."] If only the land of those who held more than a thousand acres were divided, the total sum to be dealt with would be less than twenty-nine million pounds per annum, which would give less than three-farthings per day to each adult male in the country.

Mr. Mallock has further shown that if the entire interest of the National Debt, and the whole of the profits of the railways, were to be divided equally among the population, the result would be to give every man in the country about a penny a day. In 1880 the number of persons who held Consols was 236,000, and out of these no less than 216,000, or more than nine-tenths of the whole number, derived from their payments less than £90 a year, while nearly one-half of them derived less than £15 a year. An equal division of the annual income of this country, which is one thousand two hundred million pounds, among thirty-eight millions of people would give £32 per head. The benefits which would accrue from a confiscation and division of the national income are paltry compared with the enormous evils which would result from such a revolutionary proceeding.

The true friend of the working man will encourage him to join the ranks of capitalism. The socialists discourage those qualities which enable him to do so. Mr. John Burns, at the Labour Union Congress at Norwich in 1894, said that “thrift was invented by capitalistic rogues to beguile fools to destruction, and to deprive honest fools of their diet and their proper comfort.” Mr. Bax, a socialist writer, observes that the aim of the socialist is “radically at variance with thrift .....To the socialist,” he continues, “labour is an evil to be minimised to the utmost. The man who works at his trade or avocation more than necessity compels him, or who accumulates more than he can enjoy, is not a hero, but a fool, from the socialists’ standpoint.” Assertions like these denote the high-water mark of socialist folly. In September, 1899, it was announced in the Press that the first act of Sir Christopher Furness, in taking over the Weardale Iron and Coal Company’s business, which he had purchased for £750,000, had been to offer to all officials and workmen £1 preference shares. It was added that the workmen were eagerly taking advantage of the offer. This is the true line of improvement. It is in this way that the welfare of the working classes will be advanced.

As already stated, socialism is really a throw-back. One article of the creed may be taken as an illustration. The socialist declares that no one has any right to lend money at interest. This is one of the oldest doctrines in the world. Aristotle, the Christian Fathers, a long succession of Popes and Councils, all declared that it was criminal to lend money at interest. The doctrine gradually disappeared, and “all the Governments,” says Mr. Lecky, “and
all the great industries of the civilised world depend, and long have depended, on loans made for the sake of profit, on borrowed money and punctually-paid interest.” In these days the old doctrine has been revived, and is once again being fervently preached by the socialists.

But the socialist teachers go further. They maintain that, if a man lives in the house of another man, it is an extortion to ask him to pay a rent. All that the owner is entitled to is that his house should be kept in good repair. One distinguished economist of the party, named Briosnes, has gone yet another "step further. He argues that the owner of the house should not only receive nothing, but should pay the lodger for keeping up the house. It may be left to common sense, as Mr. Lecky points out, to determine how many men would build houses under these conditions for the accommodation of others, and what would be the fate of the houseless poor. [Lecky’s “Democracy and Liberty,” vol. ii., p. 259.]

The doctrine of common property in the soil, or nationalisation of the land, which is held by the socialists, is another return to antiquity. It is, as Mr. Lecky remarks, avowedly based on the remote ages, when a few hunters or shepherds roved in common over an unappropriated land, and on the tribal and communal properties which existed in the barbarous or semi-barbarous stages of national development, and which everywhere disappeared with increasing population, increasing industry, and increasing civilisation.

The minute regulation of life by the State which is desired by socialists is also a return to a condition of things which disappeared long ago. The State once regulated, or tried to regulate, the dress and recreation, the meals and the wages, of our ancestors. Its efforts resulted only in blunders and in failure. From 1563 to 1824 the justices in Quarter Sessions regulated the wages of the agricultural labourer. Nothing has been more disastrous to agriculture than this regulating power. The prejudice against machinery early found vent in an Act against making cloth by machinery, and condemning “divers devilish contrivances.” The Act drove the trade to Holland and to Ireland, and was followed by the suppression of the Irish woollen trade. James’s Seventh Tippling Act begins: “Whereas, notwithstanding all former laws and provisions already made, the inordinate and extreme vice of excessive drinking and drunkenness doth more and more abound,” etc. Even where the State has interfered to assist an industry it has failed in its object. Philip, King of Spain, thought to encourage shipbuilding by grants from the Crown to the shipbuilders. Queen Elizabeth, his contemporary, was urged to follow his example, and refused. Yet Spain declined as a naval power, and England took her place.

Monsieur Le Bon, in his brilliant study of “The Psychology of Socialism,” says: “Socialism, whose dream is to substitute itself for the ancient faiths, proposes but a very low ideal, and to establish it appeals but to sentiments lower still. What, in effect, does it promise more than merely our daily bread, and that at the price of hard labour? With what lever does it seek to raise the soul? With the sentiments of envy and hatred which it creates in the hearts of multitudes? To the crowd, no longer satisfied with political and civic equality, it proposes equality of condition, without dreaming that social inequalities are born of those natural inequalities that man has always been powerless to change.”

The desire of each man to improve his circumstances, to reap the full reward of superior talent, or energy, or thrift, is the very mainspring of the production of the world. Take these motives away, persuade men that by superior work they will obtain no superior reward, cut off all the hopes that stimulate among ordinary men ambition, enterprise, invention, and self-sacrifice, and the whole level of production will rapidly and inevitably sink. If industry is greatly diminished in its amount and greatly lowered in its quality, no possible scheme of redistribution or social combination will prevent material decadence. It is almost impossible to conceive of England as a socialist nation. If this ever does happen, then she may say:—“Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness."

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