XV

THE SECRET OF THE DUCE is possibly the capacity to pick out the element of immediate and major importance in any tangle ;  or, in the case of a man, to go straight to the centre, for the fellow’s major interest.  “Why do you want to put your ideas in order ?”

Jefferson was all over the shop, discursive, interested in everything :  to such an extent that even wrote a long rambling essay on metric.  He was trying to set up a civilization in the wilderness, he measured the Maison Carrée, sent over Houdin to America, and thought it would be better not to sculp Washington in a fancy dress costume.

Mussolini found himself in the cluttered rubbish and cluttered splendour of the dozen or more strata of human effort :  history, the romanesque cluttered over with barocco, every possible sort of refinement, dust-covered, sub-divided, passive, sceptical, lazy, caressed by milleniar sun, Rome, Byzantium, Homeric Greece still in Sicily, belle au bois dormante ;  full of habits, brittle in mind, or say :  half of ’em brittle, and the other half having firecracker mentality, sputter-and-bag enthusiasm, all over in thirteen seconds.

All right, bo’, you come along with a card-deck, set card for each clot of theories, demo-liberal, bolshevik, anti-clerical, etc., and make that junk-shop into a nation, a live nation on its toes like a young bull in the Cordova ring.

I have seen several admirable shows in my time.  I saw groggy old England get up onto her feet from 1914 to ’18.  I don’t like wars, etc. ... but given the state of decadence and comfort and general incompetence in pre-War England, nobody who saw that effort can remain without respect for England-during-that-war.

I am not contradicting myself.  Respect for that honest heave and effort has nothing to do with the state of utter dithering deliquescence into which England slopped in 1919.

I like to see a man do something I can’t.  I like to see Brancusi settle a form in stone, or Picabia show up half a year’s work by Picasso with a few apparently effortless twists of the pen.

All of which is accentuated by my contempt at the sight of some bloater with great position either stalling or avoiding the point or being just too god-damned stupid or too superficially silly to understand something that is put plumb bang in front of him, and which if he weren’t just a lowdown, common, yaller hound dog he would look at and having seen would act on his knowledge.

It is one of my lasting regrets that I didn’t when I had the chance, show up Mr. Balfour.  That’s the curse of having had some sort of a bringing up and of not having escaped it.  It was, I think, the first time I had seen the great Arthur and I was the youngest man in the room, and I was the only man not in a swaller-tail coat ... so I was modest and well behaved ... or at any rate acted that way ... I also looked at the audience and couldn’t see anyone there who was the least likely to understand what I had ready to tell ’em.

XVI

WHO IS worth meeting ?

A decade or so ago when I was settling into Paris I more or less unconsciously drifted on to, you can’t say this question, but I was talking to Brancusi with the undefined aim of ascertaining more or less ... etc. ...

And he said of Léger, we weren’t talking of anyone’s painting, but he said :  “ Il sait vivre.”

And years later he said of a group of unsatisfactory people :  “Ils sont empoisonnés de la gloire.”  Which I suppose you can translate, “poisoned by a desire to get reputations.”

“ C’est toujours le beau monde qui gouverne.”

The people who know how to live are, so far as my personal existence and contacts have been concerned, mainly great artists (writers, any kind of constructors) or else artists of conspicuous honesty who go their road with that sincerity which is supposed to govern all the work of the scientists.

That is to say they are interested in the WORK being done and the work TO DO, and not in personal considerations, personal petty vanities and so on.

Such impersonality seems to me implicit in fascism, in the idea statale.

Given the technical advance, the modern 1933 world of anno XI dell’era fascista, the known facts and equations of economics, the known results of certain actions and restrictions of currency, etc.

I have this morning (February 11th) tried to make a “law” or equation covering the new drive in politics or to state the enlightened aim of the differently labelled INTELLIIGENT drives and drifts of the present.

I.  When enough exists, means should be found to distribute it to the people who need it.

(I would very nearly say :  “and even to those who merely want to use or consume it, with the emphasis on the last pair of verbs.)

II.  It is the business of the nation to see that its own citizens get their share before worrying about the rest of the world.

(This is akin to the Confucian idea that you achieve the good of the world by FIRST achieving good government IN your own country.)

III.  When potential production (possible production) of anything is sufficient to meet everyone’s needs it is the business of the government to see that both production and distribution are achieved.

Note that in America when there was plenty and more than plenty of land, our government handed it out despite Quincy Adams’s protests.

This third idea becomes an “idea statale” when I say “it is the business of the government.”

But note that Mussolini is NOT a fanatical statalist wanting the state to blow the citizen’s nose and monkey with the individual’s diet.  IF, when and whenever the individual or the industry can and will attend to its own business, the fascist state WANTS the industry and the individual to DO it, and it is only in case of sheer idiocy, incapacity or simple greed and dog-in-the-mangerness that the state intervenes to protect the unorganized PEOPLE;  public;  you me and the other fellow.

The rest is political “machinery,” bureaucracy, flummydiddle.  Jefferson, Mussolini, Lenin, all hated or hate it.  Lenin wanted to get rid of it :  “All this is political machinery, want to get rid of it,” as Stef reported Lenin’s opinion in 1918.

Jefferson started to clean up the social flummydiddle, etiquette, precedence, etc.

In a hide-bound Italy, fascism meant at the start DIRECT action, cut the cackle, if a man is a mere s.o.b. don’t argue.

Get it into your head that Italy was, even in 1900, immeasurably ahead of England in so far as land laws and the rights of the man who works on the soil are concerned.  Some of the follies and cruelties of great English owners would not now be permitted in Italy.  Certain kinds of domestic enemy would be shipped to the confino.

You can buy and own pretty villas and ancient architectural triumphs, but you can’t cut down olivetrees just when you like and you can’t drive the “colonno” off his fields.  He can, I think, still be your “colonno” instead of the “colonno” of the former proprietor, but you don’t by any means own him despite the feudal decorations or courtesy.

Secular habit, picturesque, etc., as in the case of “the sailor.”  There is, near here, an antient villa, and a nabob therein, and “the sailor” just came and sat in the kitchen where there was plenty of room, he adopted the villa, and he ultimately adopted the chauffeur’s seat, etc.  That don’t prove anything about anything except certain phases of mentality.  Servants ask twice as much from people with big houses as from people with cottages and small flats.  Primitive sense of equity and justice or Latin common-sense.

XVII
As to the Particular Situation and the Violation of Liberties, Traditional Liberties, “ rights,” etc.

JEFFERSON had no difficulty about keeping MEN in his country, in fact he found it difficult to imagine ANYone leaving America for Europe (Napoleonic and Royal Europe).  When a particular emergency arose he showed no regard for liberties in the declaration of EMBARGO.

Mussolini found himself faced with the inverse situation.  Italians had for decades been going abroad to work, they sent back “money” but that did NOT tidy up Italy, it did not drain swamps, improve crops, restore buildings that had been knocked cock-eyed by Napoleon, by the Austrians, and by nature the gradual destroyer of roofs.

In particular France was sucking in the best blood of Italy.  Germany noticed it, Germany naturally thought France might as well fill up on more or less consanguineous Germans, rather than on Italians who were wanted at home and on natives from the African continent.

Mussolini saw labour going out of Italy to rebuild France and, still worse, to provide soldiers who would, as soon as the Comité des Forges could wangle it, be ready to provide a home-market for Creusot cannon to shoot no matter whom so long as they created consumption of metallurgical products.

Gents who make guns like to sell ’em ;  such is the present state of the world, in the bourgeois demoliberal anti-Marxian anti-fascist anti-Leninist system.

And as the Stampa correspondent has indicated, the selling of guns and powder differs from ALL other industries in that the more you sell the greater the demand for the product.  The more goes to consumer A the greater the demand of the other consumers.  Hence the love, the loving and tender love of banks for munition works.

France by the so-called peace got a lot of nice iron, nicely there in the ground, to be dug up for profit, and nobody in the Schneider family considered it wrong to want to sell iron, as quickly and as extensively as possible.

Hence the Italian embargo on the Italian population which has for ten years been improving the olde home yard.

Nobody loathes passports more than the present writer, but passports for a purpose are a vastly different matter from passports shoved on to the American people with no shadow of justification whatsoever at an enormous cost to the American public and as, indirectly, a means of presenting American millions of dollars to foreign and often unfriendly nations for NO cause save the fundamental nastiness of several disreputable or half-witted presidents one of whom was THE record-breaking destroyer of the best American institutions;  and with no excuse save the half-wittedness of an unthinking and incompetent bureaucracy.

They weren’t meant to keep Americans at home for the good of America, they were just a useless annoyance because a diseased president [Wilson] with a one track mind liked to show his authority (and didn’t care a damn whether his authority was legal or not) and because pus in one part of a government system tends to produce pustulence throughout that system.

Back of Jefferson’s embargo and of Mussolini’s there was a will for the good of their nations.

In neither man of genius was preconception or theory strong enough to blind the leader to the immediate need.

Even the question of the efficiency of the measures doesn’t arise.

Most historians seem to tend to believe that Jefferson’s embargo may have done more good than harm, there is no shadow of a doubt whatsoever that Mussolini’s embargo has done what the leader intended.

No one denies the material and immediate effect :  grano, bonifica, restauri, grain, swamp-drainage, restorations, new buildings, and, I am ready to add off my own bat, AN AWAKENED INTELLIGENCE in the nation and a new LANGUAGE in the debates in the Chamber.

XVIII

ALL right, go to the House of Commons for a display of gas, evasion, incompetence, and then read the Stampa’s report for 8th January or whenever it was, of Italians getting up and saying what they meant with clarity and even with brevity, or at any rate not stalling and beating about the bush.

And even here is the hand or eye or ear of the Duce, the Debunker par excellence, for the deputies and ministers know that there is an EDITORIAL eye and ear—precisely—an editor, who will see through their bunkum and for whom they will go to the scrap-basket just as quickly as an incompetent reporter’s copy will go to the basket in a live editorial office.

As personal testimony to PERSONAL feeling, I feel freer here than I ever did in London or Paris.  I am willing to admit my capacity for illusion, but right or wrong, that is my feeling.  And as an act or declaration of faith, I do NOT BELIEVE that any constructive effort has been ham-strung in this country since the Marcia su Roma.

As to thought and letters:  the Bolsheviki have never been able to live up.  to the declaration that even they want to permit “fellow-passengers,” they have proclaimed that literature is for the state, but they don’t mean it as, let us say, I do.  I believe that any precise use of words is bound in the long run to be useful to the state and the world at large.

The Duce comes out to meet one in his puncturing of the pretences of party careerists.

Speaking to fascist writers:  “A membership ticket in this party does not confer genius on the holder.”  He was speaking in particular of literary and journalistic ability.

A decent concept of a twentieth century world is like the decent concept of a town or a family, you don’t want your neighbour down with cholera;  you don’t want your family full of sickly members all yowling for help.  You don’t want the cells in your muscles all squshy and some so weak that one cell grips over and gets out of hand.

If anyone holds the long-distance record for common-sense, that man is Confucius.  And the concept I have in mind is:  benefit of the world by means of good INTERNAL GOVERNMENT of the country.

A squshy and unstable state, particularly in the Italian peninsula, is not an aid to the health of Europe.

A state strung along the Atlantic sea-board in 1800 with an enormous unoccupied hinterland was a very different kettle of onions.

But the types of mind fitted to deal with either, and with unexpected situations in either, are types which may have a very deep kinship which you may perceive if you can but sort out the likenesses underlying.

The shortsighted squeal, they always squeal except when they are being diddled or hypnotized.

XIX

DURING the past twenty years the fundamental capacities of humanity for supplying itself with everything it wants have changed at a geometrical ratio outsoaring anything previous man had guessed at.

Just as the quantity of fertile available land had soared out of the previous bounds of human imagination when Europe had a new continent thrown into her silly lap, and proceeded to play the god-damned drivelling fool, first with a grab for metal that annihilated the Incas, then with a gamble for “colonies,” i.e., vast tracts that no nation in Europe at that time was organized to manage.

The putrid idiocy of eighteenth-century European governments is something no normal man can imagine until he has waded through a hundred volumes of the history of that period.  The kings and ministers of that day were as idiotic as Otto Kahn or the last Czar of the several Russias, and they saw equally NOT AT ALL into the present.

I know why my friend the urbane and far more than distinguished jurisconsult is worried, sincerely worried and distressed by fascismo.  He has the elegiac mind :  as per his “the mistake of my generation was ...”  And he is worried because in his huge cases he don’t from one day to another know what the law will be, and all his forty or fifty years of patient diligent and exacting acute study are likely to go west at any moment as far as immediate utility is concerned.

Mussolini may at any moment find out that some laboured and ingenious device for securing a fair amount of justice in some anterior period and under earlier states of society NO LONGER works, or is no longer capable of giving as much justice as some new rule made to fit the facts of the year ELEVEN, facts, i.e. that have been facts for a short time only.

This is of necessity distressing to a man at the head of his profession, who has got used to being comfortably at the head of his profession;  but it is a vastly different distress to that of my father-in-law in England when bothered by Mr. Lloyd George.  He was bothered because Lloyd George’s laws were framed in such sloppy and ambiguous language that NO ONE, positively no one, could make out what they intended:  i.e., they really took the legislative power out of the hands of the legislators and left it for wanglers and pettifoggers, to be construed to the gang’s greatest advantage.

There are more ways than one of diddling people, nations, organizations, out of power “by law possessed.”

XX
Jefferson in his Generation

PROBABLY no writer on American history has been more impartial than Woodward, author of Washington Image and Man, and certainly no one has had a greater knack for assessing the specific weight of the early notables, without heat, and with insuperable fairness, the fairness of a man who isn’t out to prove anything, who hasn’t an axe to grind—I don’t mean merely a personal axe, but who is simply observer and not a protagonist or an advocate of some next thing to do or some “right course of action.”

And this is the fine flower and almost the justification of journalism in America.  It is the new ideal of being impartial, and marks the rise of a journalist who isn’t taken sufficiently seriously as an historian, who probably doesn’t take himself for quite the historian that he is.

You will go far without finding any sounder estimates than his of Jefferson and John Adams, or a better summary than his so brief summary of Jefferson’s view.  I wonder if I can compass as good a one before citing the letters.

XXI

JEFFERSON didn’t believe any nation had the right to contract debts that it couldn’t pay off with reasonable effort within nineteen years.

This didn’t come into practical politics in his time.  He wanted to get rid of slavery, this didn’t happen in his time though he took thought to prevent its spreading into the North and West.

He believed in keeping out of European affairs and America was kept out until 1812.

“The cannibals of Europe are eating each other again.”  That’s up-to-date (1932) all right enough.  Read Corbaccio’s edition of the volume on cannontouts, it may indicate the spirit of Europe, or of North Europe as distinct from Mediterranean sanity.

For if Rome was a conquering empire, renaissance Italy evolved the doctrine of the balance of power, first for use inside the peninsula.  Italy produced notable peacemakers who based their glory on peace tho’ it came by the sword, Nic. Este, Cosimo, Lorenzo Medici, even Sforza condottiero, all men standing for order and, when possible, for moderation.

The main line of American conflict for the first half of the last century was the fight between public interest and the interests.  Not a showy theatrical shindy.  And we end to-day with enlightenment of a Jeffersonian fundamental, transposed, expanded, developed.

“ The best place for keeping money is in the pockets of the people.”

That does not mean to say that we are to go back to Indian or Burmese hoarding.  You must take the text and let time transpose it.

We have had the century of the “benefits of concentration of capital” (and the malefits).

We have come to the point where money must be got into people’s pockets if goods are to move and modern life to continue “the good life.”  All of this is dynamic and mobile and the furthest possible remove from static oriental burial of jewels and silver.

The Hindu buries his metal because he has no trust in public order or the durability of a dynasty and because he wants to hide the money for safety.  This course did NOT produce mechanical progress.

But it is very different from the tying up of credit or paper money in banks.

Paper money in the popular pocket would not breed stagnation and it would not stay there for the reasons of oriental hoarding.  The popolano would want to show it was there.  Its distribution would mean greater mobility of goods.

La richezza è lo scambio.

Prosperity comes from exchanging.  Old common-place but one that needs constant re-advertising.  The French bas-de-laine never did any harm, or no harm by comparison with the double-locking and immobilization of credit.

Credit is or was immobilized in India by burial of metal.  It is not the means but the end that matters.

Rephrase Jefferson’s saying :  “The best place for a nation’s reserve of credit is in as many individual pockets as possible.”

I think that will probably hold right through the coming change in the system.

If money is ever conceived as certificate of work done there will be no need of taxes.  Work done for the state will be paid by state certificate, issued direct, without anyone’s needing to cadge around and get it from Bill, Dick and William before paying it to Joe, Mike and Henry.

I have worried considerably over what appears to be the too great ease and simplicity of this proposition.  For every bit of DURABLE goods there ought certainly to be a ticket, so that instead of toting the block of rock or the arm-chair you could, with greater ease, tote the ticket and swap it for whatever you at the moment wanted.

But what about perishable goods, stuff that rots and is eaten, can you have spare tickets lying about with nothing to correspond or be delivered, i.e., depreciation in the value of the tickets ?

Recorded time has dealt with the underlying equation and perishable goods, grain and foodstuffs have been in times of plenty extremely cheap by comparison with permanent goods.

Still if the certificate of work done let us say for the government is only paid out by John to Joe WHEN Joe delivers, i.e., if it only circulates when it moves for value received it could conceivably retain a true value.  The unspent notes in John’s pocket would not of necessity upset the whole working of a new system, or force people to sell apples at street corners.

There is no reason why this reserve in everyman’s pocket should be any more dangerous than a reserve in a bank.  It would be much less likely to freeze.

I suspect that the amount of money paid directly for necessary and desirable public works is about proportionate to that increase of circulating medium which Hume saw as needful for national welfare.

Obviously the minute you had such a system everyone and every gang and combine would run to your congress or your law-chamber howling for jobs, but everyone else would be vastly more alive to the use and meaning of public work, and after the first fever even an elected government might be approved or improved.

At any rate ALL PERMANENT AUGMENTATIONS OF PLANT ought to be paid for in this manner.

(Pardon digression, the author will retract when proof to the contrary it presented.)

XXII
C’est Toujours le Beau Monde qui Gouverne.

ANYONE who has seen the furniture at Schönbrunn ought to understand the flop of the Austrian Empire, and anyone who saw it before the flop ought to have known that the flop was coming.

Frobenius has outstripped other archæologists and explorers

(a) because he does not believe things exist without cause;
(b) as corollary, because he considered that the forms of pottery, etc., had causes.

Franz Josef was one of the most schifoso figures of the period remembered by living people, he hadn’t even the superficial and tricky brilliance of the unspeakable Hohenzollern.  Nasty men have occurred without affecting the course of empire very much, but an age SHOWS in its forms, in its material forms, you can’t have the top of an empire stuck in that congeries of an East Side brothel enriched to the n’th during a growing period of a nation.

When the court furnishings get to the level of Koster and Bial’s music-hall stage parlour, the empire is on the wane.

Pewk, artistically speaking, is distinguishable by the substitution of expensiveness for design in all material objects.  The great age does not care for cost, it usually manifests at a minimum of material expense and a maximum of cerebral outlay.

However, dropping theory, the bolsheviki brought in a greater care for intellectual life and probably a greater respect for criteria than the Romanoff’s supporters had had.

The last time I was in England I went to a party, a Labour Member’s party, the mental life was more lively than that at Liberal parties.

When one beau monde gets too ditheringly silly or too besottedly ugly, a new and different beau monde rises to replace it.

As in a new art movement, I think the vitality shows first in a greater exigence and precision with regard to antiquity, and a break with the conventionally recognized “classic,” or accepted great works of the past, whereof the list has always been vitiated, and in the menu of which there are jumbled together the real works and the sham or the hokum.

The Italian awakening began showing itself in two ways.

I.  The bookshop windows began to change.  In place of the old line, Dante, Petrarch, Tasso and Ariosto, there began to appear slowly translations of Kipling and Dostoievsky and, as the hole in the dyke widened, the torrent of translations good, bad and indifferent, yellow literature, the best Wallace, the worst slop, Wodehouse, woodlouse, etc., but also H. James, Hardy, and a discreet number of books worth reading, though not yet any real criteria nor any successful effort to get the best before the worst.  As far as the public is concerned no such effort is apparent in France, England, or America either.

But no one who ever looks in a bookshop window and who has known such Italian windows for thirty years can fail to have seen the difference, the sign of hunger and curiosity.

II.  The restauri.  From Sicily up to Ascoli, from one end of the boot to the other, the blobby and clumsy stucco is pried loose from the columns; the pure lines of the romanesque are dug out, the old ineradicable Italian skill shows in the anonymous craftsmen.  Three whole columns, six fragments, a couple of capitals are scratched out of a rotten wall, and within a few months the graceful chiostro is there again as it had been in the time of Federigo Secondo.

Someone mentions the Senatore Corrado Ricci and no one knows who else or how many other sensibilities have been employed.

Where other regimes would have haggled and niggled the fascist regime has just gone ahead, without any fireworks whatever.  Apart from specialists employed I don’t suppose there are ten men in Italy who know as much about these restorations as I do, simply from having dawdled about the peninsula looking at what was in front of me.  It is not merely a matter of FILLING IN the old gaps with concrete.  It is a reconquest of an ancient skill, such as I saw the head artisan using in Teramo or in Ascoli Piceno up in the mountains over there by the Adriatic “where nobody goes.”

The term “gerarchia” is perhaps the beginning of a critical sense, vide the four tiles and the dozen or so bits of insuperable pottery, pale blue on pale brownish ground, in the ante-room of the Palazzo Venezia.

XXIII
Resistance

JEFFERSON writing to Adams (or vice versa) noted that before their time hardly anyone had bothered to think about political organization or the organization of government.  Same in our time re economics.  It is a new subject.  Bankers who control it de facto make no claims to be more than artisans, practising habits which have worked.

When there is a shindy they hire touts, either shallow or dishonest, to embroil and confuse discussion.  The little real thought of the past twenty years has been almost subterranean.  When it does force itself into the light one jams against various sorts of inertia, the fighting inertia of those who’ve GOT the swag and are in panic terror of losing it, the indifferent, and the fellows who think half-way through and then stop.

Some can tell the root from the branch, the most common failure is the failure to dissociate necessity from habit.

Thus a correspondent re the book Mercanti di Cannoni :

“ To take a more immediate example, the STAMPA’S article shows that the French Government at the behest of interested manufacturers, is squandering colossal sums on fortifications.  It is not argued, I take it, that these fortifications are intended for offensive purposes, or that they constitute a menace of war against any state.  The most that can be said, so far as these particular armaments are concerned, is that they represent a gigantic waste of the French taxpayer’s money.  That is too bad for the French taxpayer, but seems no reason for alarm in other countries.

“ On the contrary, holding as I do that the success (such as it is) of our present system of production and distribution is based upon waste, I cannot avoid concluding that the more waste the better, and that nothing could possibly be so beneficial to humanity as a whole (within the limits of our existing economic system) as the undertaking by all countries to build a ring of solid steel forts around their frontiers.  It would provide work for the workless and huge profits for everybody concerned, with the consequence that we should have a wave of world prosperity alongside which the boom years of 1928-9 would look like a panic.

“ You may say that the same result might be accomplished by building a great pumping system to pump the water out of the Indian Ocean and carry it by steamers (or perhaps pipe lines) into the Atlantic.  I agree.  In fact this latter plan would have the advantage.  The work would never be finished and therefore the prosperity would be endless.

“ The trouble is that most people would think the latter scheme was foolish.”

I send this to A.R. Orage as encouragement, and as sign of the progress of enlightenment.  I get a further communiqué from the sender, and he falls flop into catalogued fallacy, possibly from haste, confusion of office work, etc.  From a discussion of effects which of necessity follow certain causes he falls into a description of what has been, without apparently perceiving the difference in the nature of the two cases.

So far as political economy is concerned the modern world contains the work of Lenin and Henry Ford, of C.H. Douglas and Mussolini, the somewhat confused results of Veblen and the technocrats, this latter, as I have indicated, is confused because it has been in large part surreptitious.  Done under or near a subsidy it either has not had any moral force and direction, or the individuals who had any have had to conceal it and profess to be concerned WHOLLY with mechanical problems.

Ford professed to be concerned wholly with commercial and manufacturing problems, though he has recently mentioned human rights in a garbled outbreak against technocracy.

I suppose the term means to him merely putting an incompetent professor in control of his (Ford’s) business.

Genius, as I had recently occasion to say apropos Francisci’s work with a ciné-camera, is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and where the man of talent sees two or three, PLUS the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

When the nit-wits complained of Jefferson’s superficiality it merely amounted to their nonperception of the multitude of elements needed to start any decent civilization in the American wilderness: learning, architecture, art that registered contemporary phenomena instead of merely distorting them into received convention, seed of the right sort, transportation, responsibility, resilience in the individual and in the local group.

Washington could see mathematics from the ground end, geometry in its initial sense, measuring of the earth.  Quincy Adams took it as astronomy, furthest possible remove from all human contact or human “pollution,” as I suppose all human quality may appear to a man suffering from puritanitis.

Jefferson was polumetis, many-minded, and as literature wasn’t his main job, this multiplicity is now recorded item by item in his letters, one interest at a time, and the unreflective reader gets simply the sense of leisure without perceiving the essential dynamism of the man who did get things DONE.

Suppose Jefferson had had to be both Jefferson and Pat Henry, or both John Adams and Jas. Otis ?  In the first place he probably couldn’t have, and in the second, my phrase is only an attempt to make the far-distant reader understand at least some part of what Mussolini’s job is and has been.

America had the luck to start with Sam and J. Adams, Franklin, etc.  The liberation and the creation all occurred more or less in unbroken sequence.  Italy had a risorgimento, a shaking from lethargy, a partial unification, then a forty-year sleep, from which the next heave has been the work of one man, pre-eminently, with only here and there a notable, perhaps a very temporary, assistance.

There is an analogy, from 1800 onward America was Jefferson’s work, Madison had been and continued to be very useful, Gallatin was helpful in his way, Van Buren went on in the ’30s.

Theodore Dentatus Roosevelt might have made up twenty per cent. of a fair Mussolini, but I can’t believe anybody was quite ready to go out and die for dear Theodore.

XXIV

A GOOD government is one that operates according to the best that is known and thought.

And the best government is that which translates the best thought most speedily into action.

Such translation is undoubtedly more swift and dramatic when a nation has slipped behind and has merely to catch up with the pacemakers.  Thus the leaps of Russia and Italy in many matters of detail.

Nevertheless Mussolini has a more responsive instrument than any other I can think of, something does appear to get started with “bewildering frequency,” grain, swamps, birds, yes, gentle reader, birds, there are more birds in the olive-yards, “birds friendly to agriculture.”  W.H. Hudson wrote a lot about the subject, the aged Munthe wrote a book about Capri, but the BOSS does something about it.

That is what makes him so simpatico.  He is simpatico as Picabia was simpatico, though Francis had apparently no sense of responsibility (which merely means that his sense of responsibility was far far, oh very far, from normal human perceptions, but at any rate Picabia had no sense of immediate social responsibility).

I am now trying to get a personal point of departure.

I am not talking about Picabia’s last show of paintings or about any exposition of painting but of a personal impression of the whole man whom I knew in 1922 and along then, a man intellectually dangerous, so that it was exhilarating to talk to him, as it would be exhilarating to be in a cage full of leopards.  As he is not initially either a writer or a painter this has often been hard to explain.  He was the first man I ever met who seemed to me to have ANY capacity for dealing with abstract ideas, or, still better, his mind moved instantly from a given phenomenon to the general equation under which one would ultimately have to group it.

You do not wonder where a thing is when you can see it.

All genius worries the dud, I think, by reason of the overplus.  You will not get another Gaudier-Brzeska because such a sculptor can not exist save when the lively general intelligence and the formal perception are combined with the drive to ceaseless animal action.

I think sitting still or reclining, and relax playing tennis.  The sculptor concentrates all his intelligence WHILE in physical action.  The mere stone-cutter, or worse, the modeller, hasn’t any intelligence to concentrate, and so forth.

Spectamur agendo.  We know what the artist does, we are, or at any rate the author is, fairly familiar with a good deal of plastic and verbal manifestation.

Transpose such sense of plasticity or transpose your criteria to ten years of fascismo in Italy.  And to the artifex.  If you are engaged seriously in udgment or measurement.

We still respect the Code Napolèon and the architecture of Monticello, and those of us who know it probably respect the constitution of the University of Virginia, as it was before some of T.J.’s provisions were deleted.

XXV

DURING ten years I have heard attacks on fascismo, violent at first and then with continuing diminuendos, nearly always on what seemed to me irrelevant details, though occasionally I have met with a ranking broadside, as for example the Russian’s “BUT it belongs to them,” meaning that the Russian state belongs to the people.

Only it don’t, it belongs to the bolsheviki, and in any case I don’t see the effect of such ownership.

Secondly, Orage’s admission that Italy was better run or more efficiently run than any other country, but he followed this by a claim that it was just being neatly tied up in a bag for delivery to the international sonzov. Which I simply do not believe.  You can’t prove by Euclid what Mussolini intends to do the year after the year next but you can use some sort of common sense or general intuition.  I see no basis whatsoever for Orage’s prediction.  Everything perceptible to me appears to indicate the diametrical opposite.

In 1920 I saw nothing in Europe save unscrupulous bankers, a few gangs of munitions vendors, and their implements (human).

Such things have happened before.  I didn’t then know so much about it, and the history of the American 1830s is not a popular subject.  Italy was perhaps more openly menaced.  Her peril may have been, probably was, greater than that of the “stronger” countries where the infamy could pull with silk threads.

The first act of the fascio was to save Italy from people too stupid to govern, I mean the Italian communists, the Lenin-less communists.  The second act was to free it from parliamentarians, possibly worse, though probably no more dishonest than various other gangs of parliamentarians, but at any rate from groups too politically immoral to govern.

As far as financial morals are concerned, I should say that from being a country where practically everything and anything was for sale, Mussolini has in ten years transformed it into a country where it would even be dangerous to try to buy out the government.

In other countries they excuse inexplicable perfidies by saying “These men are personally honest.”  I am now quoting an admiral :  “All I know is that all these men are my personal friends and I assure you that they are personally honest.”  The implication being that they play the super-crooks’ game because they are stupid and hoodwinked.

A capacity for being hoodwinked is not in itself a qualification for ruling.

It is, let us admit, often a means of getting office in countries where office is elective.

Jefferson thought the live men would beat out the cat’s-paws.

The fascist hate of demi-liberal governments is based on the empiric observation that in many cases they don’t and have not.

My next analogy is very technical.  The real life in regular verse is an irregular movement underlying.  Jefferson thought the formal features of the American system would work, and they did work till the time of general Grant but the condition of their working was that inside them there should be a de facto government composed of sincere men willing the national good.  When the men of their understanding, and when the nucleus of the national mind hasn’t the moral force to translate knowledge into action I don’t believe it matters a damn what legal forms or what administrative forms there are in a government.  The nation will get the staggers.

And any means are the right means which will remagnetize the will and the knowledge.

THE CIVIL WAR drove everything out of the American mind.  Perhaps the worst bit of damage was that it drove out of mind the first serious ant-slavery candidate, not because he was an anti-slavery candidate, but because he saved the nation and free the American treasury.  Jackson had the glory, let us say he got the glory because he already had a good deal, the aureole of New Orleans, and Van Buren caught the reaction.  His autobiography didn’t get printed until 1918 or 1920.

Whether by reason of villainy I know not.  I suspect it was due more to stupidity and to the laziness and ineptitude of professors.  You can’t expect history professors to be connoisseurs of economic significance, at least they weren’t to be trusted for it from 1860 to 1930.

I have already started to put the bank war into a canto.  I don’t know whether to leave it at that, or to quote sixty pages of “Van’s” autobiography.

“I suppose they’ll blame it on Van,” said General Jackson.

Mr. Van Buren pointed out the discrepancy between the funds at the president’s disposal, and the funds at the bank’s disposal.  He pointed out the discrepancies of Dan’l Webster.  And when he had really finished that job he quit writing.

A lot of economics that mankind (the tiny advance guard of mankind) has learned in the last twenty years with toil, sorrow, and persistence, they might have lapped up from that unprinted manuscript of Van Buren’s.

(Autobiography of Martin Van Buren.  Annual report of the American Historical Association, 1918, Vol. 2, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1920.)

“ Forty millions had been the average amount of the loans of the bank.  In October 1830 they stood at $40,527,532.  Between January 1831 and May 1832 they were increased to $70,428,007;  the highest figure ever reached.  The amount of its outstanding discounts between the periods mentioned was thus increased about 30 millions, saying nothing of the increase which took place between May, the date to which the report of the Bank was extended, and July when the veto was interposed.  This extraordinary and reckless step was taken without even a pretence of a change in the business of the country to justify, much less to require, so great a change in the extent of its credits.”

There is a good deal of such statement in the autobiography, all Chaldiac to the man in the street, but taken in its place, context, relations, very good reading to the modern economist, and marvellously convincing testimony to the clear-headedness of Jefferson’s most notable pupil.

Step by step the story of the recent American crisis can be read in last century’s story, simple transposition serving mostly for parallel.  Read “land” where you now read “industry,” the finance is the same.  Inflation, deflation, boobs buying on the inflate and getting crunched by the deflate.

In one sense American history or the history of American development runs from Jefferson through Van Buren and the takes a holiday ;  or is broken by a vast parenthesis, getting rid of the black chattel slavery, and then plunging fairly into unconsciousness.

We were diddled out of the heritage Jackson and Van Buren left us.  The real power just oozed away from the electorate.  The de facto government became secret, nobody cared a damn about the de jure.  The people grovelled under Wilson and Harding, then came the nit-wit and the fat-face.

Wilson betrayed whatever was left of the original ideals of our government.  The most typical story of the Woodrovian spirit as it permeated from the chief stench through the lesser crannies of administration is the tale of Van Dine, a long Hollander who had drifted into Chicago a bit before 1917, and had applied for American citizenship ;  he got a tax form, describing him as an alien, subject to certain imposts, and he got called up for army service.  He said to the judge :  “I am perfectly willing to serve in the army, but if I am citizen enough to serve in the army I’ve got a right no to be taxed as a foreigner.”

The judge (or jedge) leaned over his desk and whinnied :  “Seay, yeng feller, deon’t yew know thet in THIS KENTRY there ain’t naowbody that’z got enny garr’DAMN rights whotsoever !”

Is it a crisis IN the system, or is the system in crisis ?

How does the Jeffersonian answer the fascist in a.d. 1933, 157 of American independence, 144 of the republic, XI of the era fascista ?

This is not to say I “advocate” fascism in and for America, or that I think fascism is possible in America without Mussolini, any more than I or any enlightened bolshevik thinks communism is possible in America without Lenin.

I think the American system de jure is probably quite good enough, if there were only 500 men with guts and the sense to USE it, or even with the capacity for answering letters, or printing a paper.

XXVI
Power

THE milleniar habit of slavery and the impulse toward enslaving others is very strong in the race.  By the time chattel-slavery was driven out by the American Civil War, it had been discovered that paid labour probably cost less to the employer.

Some men are now struggling to convince the mob that the machine is ready to replace the slave.

The greatest obstacle may well be just simple business. bos, bovis, the bull, likes to order some fellow-human about.

The “will to power” (admired and touted by the generation before my own) was literatureifyed by an ill-balanced hysterical teuto-polak.  Nothing more vulgar, in the worst sense of the word, has ever been sprung on a dallying intelligentsia.

Power is necessary to some acts, but neither Lenin nor Mussolini show themselves primarily as men thirsting for power.

The great man is filled with a very different passion, the will toward order.

Hence the mysteries and the muddles in inferior minds.

The superior passion is incompatible with Dogberry and the local bully.  The second line of inferiority complex (professorial) toddles in with its twaddle about insanity and genius, and “the man must be mad.”

Five or six years ago the Roman barflies and social idiots were waiting for Mussolini to go mad.

The brittle mind, living on prejudice or privilege, as a last refuge plays ostrich.  Something is NOT what it’s mamma or schoolmarm told it, and it simply can’t re-adjust itself.

When Mussolini has expressed any satisfaction it has been with the definite act performed, the artwork in the civic sense, the leading the Romans back to the sea, for example, by the wide new road into Ostia.

So Shu, king of Soku. built roads.  What sort of shouting would the Chinese have raised for the release of the Lake of Abano, an exhilaration that might perfectly well have upset a considerable equanimity ?

As one of the Bloomsbury peepers once remarked, “Freud’s writings may not shed much light on human psychology but they tell one a good deal about the private life of the Viennese.”

They are flower of a deliquescent society going to pot.  The average human head is less in need of having something removed from it, than of having something inserted.

The freudized ex-neurasthenic, oh well, pass it for the neurasthenic, but the general results of Freud are Dostoievskian duds, worrying about their own unimportant innards with the deep attention of Jim drunk occupied with the crumb on his weskit.

I see no advantage in this system over the ancient Roman legion, NO individual worth saving is likely to be wrecked by a reasonable and limited obedience practised to given ends and for limited periods.  So much for commandments to the militia as superior to psychic sessions for the debilitated.

That which makes a man forget his bellyache (physical and psychic) is probably as healthy as concentration of his attention on the analysis of the products or educts of a stomach-pump.

Modern ignorance, fostered and intensified by practically all university systems has succeeded in obliterating or in dimming the old distinction in Rodolpho Agricola’s De Dialectica.

Verbal composition is committed, “ut doceat, ut moveat, ut delectet.”

Verbal composition exists to three ends, to teach, to move and to please.  You do not aid either literary or philosophical discussion by criticising one sort with criteria properly applied to the other.

We know that the German university system was perverted from the search for truth (material truth in natural research) into a vast machine for conducting the mental segment of the nation AWAY from actual problems, getting them embedded and out of the way of the tyrants.

American subsidized universities have become anodyne in the departments that “don’t matter,” i.e. those where the subject has not or need not have any direct incidence on life.

When it comes to economic study the interference of the controllers is less covered.

I am no longer “in touch.”  I know that professors are occasionally “fired.”  I have heard that the ladies’ Vassar once has a curiosity in the form of a heavy endowment “for as long as nothing contrary to protective tariff was taught there.”

The instinct of self-preservation, obviously THE great passion in the bureaucratic booZUM, leads often towards the anodyne.  Such is the nature of bureaucracy.  Once IN, it is hardly possible to be ousted for incompetence.  So long as you aren’t noticed you STAY there, promotion is in any case slow.  Soft paws, quiet steps, look and listen.

This has even bred the careerist in scholarship, the man who carefully studies WHAT KIND of anodyne bunk will lead him upward in the system, or best assure his income.

I have met various specimens, one definitely producing bunk to “get ahead,” another mildly discontented with the dullness of work which was at any rate safe, and couldn’t by any stretch of fancy lead one into an opinion on anything save its own dullness and, by comparison with any intellectual pursuit, its lack of use.  Naturally he felt the need of his income.

Thus ultimately the makers of catalogues, etc., undeniably useful but undeniably giving a very low YIELD in intellectual life, or to the intellectual life of the nation.

In fact the idea of intellectual life IN an American University is usually presented as a joke by people with what is called a sense of humour.

When an experiment is made or advocated it is usually attributed (often correctly) to “cranks.”

A crank in “this pragmatical pig of a world” as Wm. Yeats has ultimately come to designate the Celto-Saxon segments of the planet, is any man having ANY other ambition save that of saving his own skin from the tanners.

An inventor stops being a crank when he has made, i.e. acquired, money, or when he has been exploited by someone who has.

Henry Ford is the best possible type of crank (taken in his fort intérieur), Henry himself was visible in his early days, but once inside the caterpillared tank of success his mental make-up is forgotten.

The fact that it often takes a series of two, three, or four cranks to get a thing done blinds the general reader to the utility of the successive components.

“C’est beau,” said Fernand Léger in the best defence of the French republic I have ever heard.  “C’est beau, it is good to look at because it works without there being anyone of interest or importance, any ‘great man’ necessary to make it function.”

It’s “beau” all right, but dear old Fernand wasn’t looking at the Comité des Forges, which might appear to come nearer to being the real government of France than the gents in the Deputés and the figurehead at the Elysées.  The Comité has got its dictatorship and its one-party system.

All without public responsibility.  Our own country when finally betrayed by Wilson also showed from its secret internal workings, not only the financiers who had some sort of responsibility, private if not public, but the louche figure of State Militia “Colonel” House skulking from here to there with no responsibility whatsodamnever.

Disgust with Wilson, unimpeached, bred a reaction against having “a strong man in the White House” and we suffered the three deficients, and Heaven knows what the present (as H. Mencken defines him) “weak sister” will offer us.

The problem of democracy is whether its alleged system, its de jure system, can still be handled by the men of good will ;  whether real issues as distinct from red herrings CAN be forced into the legislatures (House and Senate), and whether a sufficiently active segment of the public can be still persuaded to combine and compel its elected delegates to act decently in an even moderately intelligent manner.

Damn the bolsheviki as much as you like, the Russian projects have served as stimuli BOTH to Italy and to America.  Our democratic system is, for the first time, on trial against systems professing greater care for national welfare.

It becomes increasingly difficult to show WHY great schemes, Muscle Shoals etc., should be exploited for the benefit of someone in particular instead for the nation as a whole.

It becomes, in fact it has become, utterly impossible to show that the personal resilience of the individual is less, or the scope of individual action, his fields of initiative, is any more limited, under Mussolini than under our pretendedly republican system.

The challenge of Mussolini to America is simply :

Do the driving ideas of Jefferson, Quincy Adams, Van Buren or whoever else there is in the creditable pages of our history, FUNCTION actually in the America of this decade to the extent that they function in Italy under the DUCE ?

The writer’s opinion is that they DON’T, and that nothing but vigorous realignment will make them, and that if, or when, they are made so to function, Mussolini will have acted as stimulus, will have entered into American history, as Lenin has entered into world history.

That don’t, or don’t necessarily, mean an importation of the details of mechanisms and forms more adapted to Italy or to Russia than to the desert of Arizona or to the temperament of farms back of Baaaston.  But it does definitely mean an orientation of will.

The power lust of Wilson was that of a diseased and unbalanced man who before arriving at the White House had had little experience of the world.  The job of being a college president in a fresh-water town, the petty hypocricies necessary to being an example to the young, are about as good preparation for political life as that of being abbot in a monastery.

XXVII
Paideuma

I AM not laying pretence to impartiality, neither do I believe a certain kind of impartiality makes the best record.  I know of no more unpleasant figure in history than the late Franz Jose£ Usually a public detestable has some private offset.  But of this nullity there is not even record of private pleasantness.  And if there’s anything in Frobenius’ mode of thinking, a people who could tolerate such an emperor and an emperor who could put up with such furniture were well ready for the ash-can.

Brancusi is not an Italian, nor have the Italians a Brancusi.  It would be difficult to defend the contemporary pubk. muniments in ANY country.  Germany is wholly avenged on France by the American marble atrocity at ... A bile specialist would be puzzled by the stone slop in the Luxembourg Garden.

I do not think the best men are excluded in Italy, some of the sane principles are already accepted, the idea of steel, aluminium, glass, contemporary material, is accepted.

St. Elia died before the new era, but it is perfectly on the cards that IF he has left any designs suitable for public construction they might any day be used, not only as architect’s plans but as memorial to St. Elia.

Any smart schoolboy can make fun of some detail or other in Marinetti’s campaigns, but the same clever sneer-sprouter would find it much more difficult to match the mass record of Marinetti’s life, even if you limit it to his campaigning for public education in æsthetics and omit the political gestures, which any good writer might envy.  You must judge the whole man by the mass of the man’s results.

As with d’Annunzio, anyone can repeat jokes about hairwash, but until the dilettante writer has held up the combined rascals of Europe, he had best confine his criticism of Gabriele to questions of stylistic embroidery.

I do not believe I am any more impressed by rhetoric than is Mr. Hemingway, I may have a greater capacity for, or sympathy with, general ideas (provided they have a bearing on what I consider good action) but Gabriele as aviator has shown just as much nerve as any of dear Hem’s pet bullbashers.

XXVIII
“ Of Being Ruled ”

THE last state of degradation whether of a democratized or of a non-democratized people is that in which they begin to wail to be dominated.  DISTINGUISH between fascism which is organization, with the organizer at its head, to whom the power has not been GIVEN, but who has organized the power, and the state of America, where the Press howls that we should GIVE power to Roosevelt, i.e., to a weak man, or a man generally supposed to be weak, a man who has shown NO UNDERSTANDING whatsoever, and no knowledge whatsoever of contemporary actuality.  One can’t tell whether this howl proceeds from terrorized banderlog, or from pimps paid so to howl in the interests of the hidden coup d’etat-ists, but this will to give up one’s rights is at the opposite pole from the action of the fascio in 1921-2 when their drive was precisely to maintain order and a state of civilization and NOT to have it overridden by one party or diddled into nonentity by corruption.

The degradation in America is phenomenal in that legally the machinery for local resilience EXISTS, all the cadres, frames for local organization are nicely plotted out, many of them have functioned, but the populace AND the intelligentsia are now too lazy, cowardly or ignorant to make any use of them.  Occasionally South Dakota or some incult western state informs the world that it has its own legislature, but the efforts of this kind are neither coherent nor very enlightened.

Why it should be supposed that a “soviet” would function where extant deliberative bodies do not is somewhat beyond me.  Simply :  the soviet is not the direct line for the U.S.A.  Half the energy required to change a state legislature into a soviet would recharge the extant form and make it function IF there were the prerequisite skill and knowledge.

And in any case you can’t GIVE power.  Give authority to a nincompoop and you merely step into chaos.  Which is presumably what the fishers in troubled waters desire, ever and always desire.

The extent to which you can even DELEGATE power is probably limited by laws as definite as those which govern the strength of current you can send through an electric wire of given thickness and texture.

Democracy is composed one-third of peasant pessimism, one-third of laissez-aller, of utter indifference.

You do not give power to a soft-head like Harding by making him president, any more than you could make Coolidge into an intellect.  “Al,” who as a journalist demonstrates once a week his unfitness for a place even in the cabinet, gave a touching tribute to Coolidge, on the lines of “Vaaal, he vas a goot schmoker.”  Cal wasn’t a demagogue, how noble of him to avoid that pitfall and confute the detractors of democracy.  Cal got on by a very simple predestined process.  He never aroused ANYone’s inferiority complex.  Ditto Harding.

Ditto, presumably, Roosevelt the second.  Nothing is more frequent in committee work and in democratic wangles and even in choosing editors than for a man who is strongish but not strong enough, to boost up some wobbler whom he thinks he can guide.  Wilson was a great disappointment to some of his backers, as Taft to Theodore.

As I learned from my meeting with Griffiths :  A leader who is not supported by legal machinery is more bound by the general will of his party than an elected official who has legal forms to fall back on.

Mussolini has steadily refused to be called anything save “Leader” (Duce) or “Head of the Government,” the term dictator has been applied by foreign envy, as the Tories were called cattlestealers.  It does not represent the Duce’s fundamental conception of his role.

His authority comes, as Eirugina proclaimed authority comes, “from right reason” and from the general fascist conviction that he is more likely to be right than anyone else is.

In the commandments to the militia this phrase is no more than the President being Supreme Chief of the American Armies in war time or any general on the field having full commanding powers.  Or rather, it is more, in the sense that the militia are given a reason for their obedience.

XXIX
Kung

AS to the mysteries of genius, I am reproved for citing Confucius, though the Ta Hio is only thirty-two pages long.  I am told the reader won’t have a copy and that I ought to print it in an appendix, OR tell the reader what it means.  Truly, people desire a great deal for very little.

The doctrine of Confucius is :

That you bring order into your surroundings by bringing it first into yourself; by knowing the motives of your acts.

That you can bring about better world government by amelioration of the internal government of your nation.

That private gain is not prosperity, but that the treasure of a nation is its equity.

That hoarding is not prosperity and that people should employ their resources.

One should respect intelligence, “the luminous principle of reason,” the faculties of others, one should look to a constant renovation.

“ Make it new, make it new as the young grass shoot.”

One should not be content with the second-rate, applying in all of these the first principle, namely the beginning with what is nearest to hand, that is, one’s own motives and intelligence.  You could further assert that Kung taught that organization is not forced on to things or on to a nation from the outside inward, but that the centre holds by attraction.

“ The humane ruler acquires respect by his spend-ing, the inhumane, disrespect, by his taking.”

Shallow critics fail to understand ideas because they look on ideas as a stasis, a statement in a given position, and fail to look where it leads.  The people who fail to take interest in Kung fail, I think, because they never observe WHAT Confucian thinking leads to.

For 2,500 years, whenever there has been order in China or in any part of China, you can look for a Confucian at the root of it.

Confucius on “ La rivoluzione continua.”

King Tching T’ang on Government.  Part of the inscription on the king’s bath-tub cited by Kung in the Ta Hio II. I.

The first ideogram (on the right) shows the fascist axe for the clearing away of rubbish (left half) the tree, organic vegetable renewal.  The second ideograph it the sun sign, day, “renovate, day by day renew.”

The verb is used in phrases:  to put away old habit, the daily increase of plants, improve the state of, restore.

XXX

JEFFERSON has a reputation for having made excessive statements, which might happen to any voluble man if a few of his remarks were perpetually considered apart from their context, and apart from the occasions when they were published and the contrary excess they were designed to correct.

The “free and equal” is limited by the passive verb “born,” it was directed against special privileges of those “first-born” and to those whose legal fathers were Dukes, Earls, etc.

There is not the least shadow of suspicion that T.J. ever supported that men remained equal or were biologically equal, or had a right to equality save in opportunity and before the law.

Like every leader and constructor in human history he tried to bring a certain number of men up to a certain level, by elimination of certain defects.

The so-called intellectual or spiritual leader guns after defects at long range, the political constructor goes for those which are the worst damned immediate nuisances.

Apart from the Declaration of Independence to which T.J. gave the final form, Jefferson’s doctrines might be divided into :

A.  What he thought good for the new American republic.

B.  What he considered sound principles for the state.

As to this second division.

1.  He disbelieved in hereditary privilege, i.e. he thought men should govern by reason of their inherent qualities and not because they were sons of pap.

“O poca digna nobiltà di sangue,” as Dante had once and some time previously, remarked.

2.  He thought that a nation had no right to contract debts that couldn’t be reasonably paid within the lifetime of the parties contracting.

Which is part of his main contention that THE EARTH BELONGS TO THE LIVING.

3.  That everything that can be done by informal and individual effort should be so done and that the state should govern only where and when necessary.

4.  he was the champion of “free speech” but suggested that newspapers be printed in three sections, the first and VERY BRIEF section to be headed “FACTS,” the second to be headed “Probabilities,” and the third part to be headed “Lies.”

Given this limitation I think the Duce might be inclined to agree with him.

5.  He believed in peace, but he believed still more strongly in maintaining peace UNTIL America was strong enough to stand a war without disaster, and when war came in 1812 he expected the American army to win it.  Though the frigates did most of the work.

6.  His fight for the “constitution” was a fight against John Marshall, and against the reactionaries who believed in the British Constitution.  There was no question of his resisting any further DEVELOPMENTS in government based on the experience of 150 years of democracy, 100 years of Marxian arguments and of machinery, or twenty years of industrial engineering.

7.  he did not jeopardize his power by untimely fights for his “higher beliefs” at a time when it would have been impossible to carry them into practical effect.  I can think of only two such “ideals,” one the abolition of slavery, and the other the far more distant ethics of debt.

8.  His expressions re finance are not always less explicit than Van Buren’s.  Vide this passage re Gallatin :

“ I know he derived immense convenience from it (the bank), because they gave the effect of ubiquity to his money wherever deposited.  Money in New Orleans or Maine was at his command and by their agency transformed in an instant into money in London, in Paris, Amsterdam or Canton.  He was, therefore, cordial to the Bank.  I often pressed him to divide the public deposits among all the respectable banks, being indignant myself at the open hostility of that institution to a government on whose treasures they were fattening.”

This fattening was manifestly written neither by a fanatic blinded to the use, nor by a simpleton blind to the abuses, of financing.  He goes on to stigmatize the attacks on Gallatin as intended to “drive from the administration the ablest man except the president.”

Simple and perfectly just statement, showing well-developed sense of the gerarchia (hierarchy) in nature.

9.  Freedom from cliché in economic speculation shows in a letter to Crawford (1816).  Perhaps only a “New” economist can appreciate it to the full :

“... and if the national bills issued be bottomed (as is indispensable) on pledges of specific taxes for their redemption within certain and moderate epochs, and be of proper denominations for circulation, no interest on them would be necessary or just, because they would answer to every one the purposes of the metallic money withdrawn and replaced by them.”

10.  As for government SUPERVISION of finance, I find this in the “Anas” (Vol. I, page 277) (All references to memorial Assn. Edtn. of 1905) re the First Bank of the U.S.:

“ While the government remained at Philadelphia, a selection of members of both houses were constantly kept as Directors, who, on every question interesting to that institution, or to the views of the federal head, voted at the will of that head ;  and, together with the stockholding members, could always make the federal vote that of the majority.”

This was the bank in federal hands, i.e. opposed to Jefferson, but an “engine of” Hamilton during Washington’s administration.  That is to say :  during the first administration there was national control of the national finances.  This ceased when the administration changed WITHOUT there being a corresponding change in the control of the bank.

Thereafter the fights against the First and Second Banks of the U.S. were fights to keep the control of the nation’s finance out of control by a clique and to attain the use of the national resources for the benefit of the whole nation.

Most of the “great questions” (local improvements, etc.) grouped along this main issue :  grafters vs. the men of public spirit, with a surprisingly small percentage of cases where there was a difference of opinion as to what was really for the good of the public.

11.  To Eppes in 1813 he clearly expressed the view that the nation should own its paper money and condemns the abuse of the individual states in handing over this function to private banks.

“Issued bills ... bearing no interest ... never depreciated a single farthing.”

12.  “No one has a natural right to the trade of a money lender, but he who has the money to lend.”

So obvious, so simple, so supposed by the lay reader to represent an actual state of things even now, but so devastating an impediment to banking malpractice as habitual during the whole of all our present lives.

All of which drags us deep into special discussion and probably has no place in a book of this general nature.

But the serious student of economics is recommended to study the series of letters to Eppes.

Again on 11th September, 1813 :

IF THE UNITED STATES were in possession of the circulating medium, AS THEY OUGHT TO BE, they could redeem what they could borrow from that, dollar for dollar, and in ten annual instalments;  whereas, the USURPATION OF THAT FUND by bank paper, obliging them to borrow elsewhere at 7½ per cent., two dollars are required to reimburse one.

he had read Hume and Adam Smith and notes that S. is the chief advocate of paper circulation on the sole condition that it be strictly regulated.

13.  Taken in this order the following paragraph sounds almost like an echo of the Duce (hysteron proteron):

“Here are a set of people, for instance, who have bestowed on us the great blessing of running in our debt about two hundred millions of dollars, without our knowing who they are, where they are, or what property they have to pay this debt when called on ;”

14.  He did not believe that “public debt is a public blessing.”

15.  He is Confucian in a letter to T. Cooper, January 1814, on the vast value of internal commerce and the disproportionate interest taken in foreign.

16.  To J. Adams, July 1815, he speaks of “Napoleon knowing nothing of commerce, political economy or civil government.”

The first two are strictures confirmed by reputable record, though one may rather doubt whether Mr. Jefferson would have left the third had he revised the letter, or rather, he wouldn’t have omitted it, but would have defined his meaning.

XXXI
The Soil

YOU cannot found any permanent system on American special practice between 1776 and 1900.  The peasants of Europe had wanted land, land in America down to my own time was free to anyone who would take the trouble to go where open land was and cultivate it.

Needless to say Europe had not known any such state of affairs, even during the epoch of tribal migrations.

The error presumably was that the ownership was not limited to the time during which the “claim” was actually used.

Q. Adams wanted to reserve the national riches for the nation, for higher developments, scientific research, etc.

As said, this would have delayed the settlement of the continent indefinitely, the other party wanted land QUICK and indulged in no fancies of foresight.  One of the lures of cultivating 160 acres was the chance to sell it later and go somewhere else.

Thus as usual in history the root is overlooked.  Half mankind from myopia don’t see, and when there is a gang of scoundrels, managing demos they learn to erect false dilemmas, camouflage, smoke-screens, political issues “made” simply to divert the electorate and keep them from discovering the real issues.  Thus the utter drivelling imbecility of the XVIII amendment in our distressed fatherland, and the bunkum about national ownership of coal-mines and three-quarters of all liberal and tory proposals in England.

The point is that for over a century the American government indulged in a continual donation of land.  Not a share out or division of the national land or certificates of claim on the land proportionately, but 160 acres or a variant for special kinds* of land, timber, mining, to prospective USERS.

It should be obvious that with this vast resource no great “ECONOMY” or precision was needed in running the country.

Nevertheless human greed and imbecility made a crisis.  Pass over the difficulties of starting the republic 1786 to 1810.  By 1830 the nation existed.  Land was obviously and spectacularly abundant.  Marxian “value” lying potential in LABOUR needed no demonstration.  AND YET they had inflation, panic, and all the theatrical adjuncts of contemporary “post-war” 1920 to 1930 Europe, America and the Occident.

The First Bank having gone anti-national, i.e. having been national as a federalist institution WHEN the federalists were “IN,” remained federalist when the Jeffersonians came into office, and no longer represented the national will in finance.  It was annihilated.  A second bank was rigged up after another war.

It took all Jackson’s military popular prestige and Van Buren’s brain and persistence to get the nation out of its talons.  Van Buren wrote out the story in 1860 and it stayed unprinted till 1920.

The story in SCARE HEADS :

Immigrants started out with paper money which was “good money,” and found it worthless at the end of their journey.

The Bank issued “racers,” i.e. drafts that took several months or weeks to get from one part of the country to another and were replaced with more paper.

There was a “boom,” i.e. the market value of land measured in “money” rose beyond all possibility of yield, exactly as industrial shares rose in market value in U.S.A. 1928, not from worth of yield, product, or anything else save the chance of selling the paper quick to some other sucker at a higher price.

The same excitement, “optimism,” Sat-Eve-Post-ism, slogans of Wall Street, same short-sight re essentials such as impossibility that land would yield without being worked, impossibility of delivering produce at a distance without means of communication — vide England in Africa, post-war encouragement of British suckers to GROW tobacco :  lack of market 1930, as lack of transport 1830.  But the same underlying equations, AND the same banking manœuvres.

Same variety of “statesman” yelling hurrah for high finance, either from muddleheadedness or in hope of immediate personal gain or advantage.

How far the general reader can be expected to analyse the facts I don’t know.  How far it is possible in any way to abbreviate Van Buren’s evidence I don’t know.  He was one of the best court lawyers that the world has known, in case now obscure in a “far” country, in the little city of Albany, etc., the patient but per-lucid style, the orderly grouping of his facts, probably worth a fortune as model and study to any young barrister with serious intentions, but the despair of anyone who wants to “give the broad lines” or further to “simplify” the subject.

Perhaps the reader will take my “word” assuming that the proof can be found in Van’s autobiography.  (Report of the American Historical Association 918 published Government Printing Offices, Washington, 1920.)

The Bank was milking the nation, the bank had at its disposal resources colossally outweighing any material resources controllable by President Jackson.  These resources were used not only financially but politically.  The American treasury was dependent on the Bank, as is the British Treasury now on the Bank of England.

The colossal percentage of real power which is contained IN THE FINANCIAL POWER of the country was in the hands of irresponsible persons, largely in Biddle’s, caring not one jot nor one tittle about the public weal.  Possibly, in fact probably, excited by the idea of profits for himself and his shareholders.  But void utterly of the great imagination, or the great moral ambition, which leads men to desire a true relation between the fact and the financial representation of the fact, i.e. as a first step toward economic justice, which latter is no more impossible or inconceivable than the just functioning of machines in a power-house.

Take note that we are a hundred years further on.  We have had a century’s experience in the precisions of machinery.  A lot of people in Van’s day still believed in the divine right of kings, they still believed that the Prince of Wales or Würtemberg was “better” than Mr. Tyler or Signor Marconi.  They were used to having Dukes and Earls enjoying one set of laws while John, Bob and henry had to get along with a different set.  England was still hanging for theft of a sheep during the first part of Van’s lifetime.  No peers suffered the penalty.  What I mean is that the objection to disproportionate legal privilege was no more ingrained then, than objection to disproportionate financial privilege is ingrained in our time.

Nevertheless the people did vote out the Bank.  “Van” as president had to bear the whole weight of the deflation, Tyler was man enough not to give way.

The treasury was made free, and remained so till the slithering Wilson erected a “board.”  Naturally the banking power at once set out to find other ways of de facto government.

And their ways are marked on the chart of recurrent “panics” with all the fancy mathematics to prove and predict ’em.

But C.H. Douglas’ suggestion of democratic control of credit or the suggestion that members of both Houses should at least sit in, or be present at, meetings of the Federal Control Board cannot be regarded as revolutionary, or lacking a precedent.  They would be a return to the de facto status of the First Bank of U.S. in the time of President Washington.

Such suggestions are an annoyance only on the theory that members and senators on that board might ultimately represent the welfare of the people composing the nation.

* Limits from 640 desert to a bit over five acres mining.

XXXII
Party

I KNOW we have a “two-party system” and Russia and Italy have a one-party system, but Jefferson governed for twenty-four years in a de facto one-party condition.  Quincy Adams did NOT represent return to federalism and the one party (Jeffersonian) continued through the twelve years of Jackson — Van Buren.

I offer the hypothesis that :  When a single mind is sufficiently ahead of the mass a one-party system is bound to occur as actuality whatever the details of form in administration.

Secondly, when a corrupt oligarchy of any nature controls a country, they will very probably set up in theory a two-party system, controlling both of these parties, one of which will be “solid and conservative” and the other as silly as possible.  Your will hear of the “swing of the pendulum,” and of going out of office in times of difficulty in order to let the other side get the “blame” or the “unpopularity.”

One might speculate as to how far any great constructive activity CAN occur save under a de facto one-party system.

In times of great de facto change in material conditions, how likely or necessarily is a de facto one-party state to occur ? As I write this (February 1933) the fascist government has taken a lead over others in Europe and America, recommending that where factories need less work they reduce the number of hours per day either for all or for special sets of men, rather than reduce the number of men employed.

AND that instead of overtime for men already on the pay-roll, they take on yet more employees.

This will not content the Douglasites nor do I believe that Douglas’ credit proposals can permanently be refused or refuted, but given the possibilities of intelligence against prejudice in the year XI of the fascist era, what other government has got any further, or shows any corresponding interest in or care for the workers ?

Ah, yes, Rhoosia !  Mais voui.

In Conclusion

THE fascist revolution was FOR the preservation of certain liberties and FOR the maintenance of a certain level of culture, certain standards of living, it was NOT a refusal to come down to a level of riches or poverty, but a refusal to surrender certain immaterial prerogatives, a refusal to surrender a great slice of the cultural heritage.

The “cultural heritage” as fountain of value in Douglas’ economics is in process of superseding labour as fountain of values, which it WAS in the time of Marx, or at any rate was in overwhelming proportion.

It is possible that all other revolutions have occurred only after, that is, very considerably AFTER a change in material conditions, and that the rivoluzione continua of Mussolini is the first revolution occurring simultaneously with the change in material bases of life.

As for a spread of fascism, if it could mean a transportation of the interesting element of the decade, it would not need parades, nor hysterical Hitlerian yawping.  The would-be fascists would have to make a dispassionate analysis of fascism on the hoof, the rivoluzione continua as it has been for over a decade, its main trend, its meaning ;  and they would profit by such study in considering what elements can be used in either England or America, the general sanity and not the local accidentals, not the advisabilities of particular time and place but the permanent elements of sane and responsible government.

Towards which I assert again my own firm belief that the Duce will stand not with despots and the lovers of power but with the lovers of

PostScript or Valediction, on going to press over two years after writing.  These things being so, is it to be supposed the Mussolini has regenerated Italy, merely for the sake of reinfecting her with the black death of the capitalist monetary system ?