On Planning the Earth by Geoffrey Dobbs

A book which should be read by everyone interested in the physical and moral background of large-scale Land Planning, Hydro-Electric Schemes and other major reconstructions of the Earth’s surface.

KRP Publications Limited, 7, Victoria Street, Liverpool, 2 1951

FOREWORD

Many intelligent people feel that "Planning" is something which is self-evidently "scientific" and solid. They employ the principle in their daily life, it is helpful, and they believe it to be the antithesis of haphazard, incompetence. Of course in connection with their own affairs, they are often right. But the Planning in regard to which Dr. Dobbs writes involves many factors which are quite unfamiliar to those outside a small circle of experts. All plans are the static incarnations of ideas. In nearly every case they block other plans. In small matters this may not be very important but in Government Plans it may be decisive.

Many large Plans are made without consideration or knowledge of effects, such as soil erosion, which may take years to ensue. The physical world is a congeries of balances; not a small water-course locates itself without a reason. And these physical balances have social and political effects, as any student of recent history can observe for himself.
For these and other far-reaching reasons, it is necessary to recognise that size introduces an unfamiliar quality into the idea of the Plan; and in his analysis of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Dr. Dobbs deals with something of which it is merely an example.

November, 1950. C. H. DOUGLAS.

It was during the War that the Tennessee Valley Authority began to be held up (e.g. in Parliament, by Mr. Ellis Smith, May 11, 1944) as an example to be followed by this country in its regional Planning. In the same year also a remarkable spate of 'literature' appeared on our book-stalls, publicising and praising the Authority and its works; notably the Penguin Special, “T.V.A. - Democracy on the March” by David B. Lilienthal, then Chairman of the Authority, which contained 208 pages of undiluted advocacy with eight pages of photographs, for ninepence.

So far as the writer is aware, up to the time of the writing of this introductory paragraph no word of radical criticism of or opposition to the T.V.A. or its policy has been published in Great Britain, outside the weekly paper which printed these articles from September 1944 onwards. Meanwhile the major manipulation of natural resources in the interests of centralised power on the T.V.A. model is being attempted all over the World, and not least in these islands, against the instinctive but uninformed opposition of those who love their native land. Each new Scheme is fought as if it were an isolated incident, and the defence is outflanked. It is the writer's hope that the reprinting of these articles, inadequate as they are, and dealing as they must with events which are rapidly receding into the past, may help to establish that defence in greater depth.

Part 1: 1944

I

No serious student of current events can afford to ignore the fact that the general direction and outline of war-time and post-war Planning in Great Britain was published, between the Wars, by that remarkable organisation calling itself P.E.P. (Political and Economic Planning) which was also responsible for the informative statement (in Planning October 4, 1938): "We have started from the position that only in war or under threat of war, will a British Government embark on large-scale Planning". Accordingly, it is not surprising to find, that Planning No. 76 published as long ago as June 1936, was devoted to the Tennessee Valley Authority. The account is useful, for it claims to have been "carefully checked with the aid of those interested on both sides of the Atlantic". Clearly those interested on this side were associated with P.E.P. and on the other side with President Roosevelt, on whose proposal the authority was created.

"It is to be hoped," says the broadsheet, that the experience gained will not be lost in Whitehall, nor in Delhi and other capitals within and outside the Empire." Since the matter goes down to the terms of our existence on the surface of this planet, it is important that the fundamentals, other than the local details, should be correctly appreciated.

Briefly, the conditions in the Tennessee Valley area in 1933 are depicted as follows :-

the region is four-fifths the size of England, with ample rainfall, with every variety of country, soil and mineral wealth, sparsely populated (the Valley itself holds only, 2,000,000 people). The soil is eroding rapidly, washing down into the rivers, which in turn suffer seasonal floods and droughts, and the whole area is poverty-stricken and depressed, losing its young men to the towns, and becoming a burden on the more prosperous parts of the country. Since this was the picture also presented by other areas all over the world, and since it is incontestable that the physical, destruction of the soil was brought about by mismanagement, including over-felling of timber, over-grazing of grasslands, and over-cropping of arable land without adequate return, there are but two general assumptions as to its cause, upon which anyone setting out to improve matters can proceed.

The first rests upon the reasonable belief that large numbers of people living on the land all over the world would not simultaneously behave in this suicidal way unless they had been subjected to some very powerful interfering force tending to induce them so to act. Any attempt at rectification would therefore have to start with the identifying of this force, which at the time in question was not very far to seek, and with counteracting it. Agricultural communities all over the world were complaining of debt and of the operation of a money system which made the progressive growth of debt to the issuers inevitable. The first appearance of a Social Credit Government in North America a few months before the issue of Planning (No. 76), can scarcely have escaped the notice of "those interested on both sides of the Atlantic," although the questions thus raised in claimant form, and then undergoing urgent discussion everywhere, are not noticed in their broadsheet, which nevertheless claims to be a "fairly balanced statement" and finds room on its front page for the following sentences:

Operating in a part of the United States which has been made a byword for backwardness through the notorious "monkey trial" at Dayton, Tennessee, and the more recent repeated trials of the Scottsboro negroes, the Authority has evidently had an uphill job, and its achievements are all the more remarkable when viewed against this setting. They show what a group of men with trained minds and a social outlook can do when given adequate resources and freed from some of the more onerous of current restrictions on development in the interests of the community.

This picture of a noble elite struggling with the inherited depravity of human nature which has not yet been cured by 'progress' clearly indicates that the Tennessee Valley Authority and its sponsors are working upon the second assumption, namely that the trouble is due to the free operation of 'private enterprise', and hence that it must be the nature of human beings in general, unless curbed by the socially minded elite, to destroy the soil and their own livelihood with it. This assumption has only to be stated to be disproved. On Christian grounds it is heretical and leads logically to Satanism. Biologically, it is ridiculous, and makes the survival of the human race inexplicable. Historically it is inaccurate, and ignores the fact that the man-made deserts of the world have all been created by the great empires, in which the mass of mankind has been centrally controlled by an oligarchy. Politically, it is the essential basic assumption of totalitarianism.

Just what the farmers of Tennessee, or indeed the rest of us, could do with adequate resources and freedom from restrictions is not enquired into. To allow them such opportunities would clearly be unthinkable. The greed, selfishness and obstinate stupidity of all who live upon the land, as compared with the enlightened selflessness of the better paid administrative grades is, of course, axiomatic, and "has been made a byword" by someone or other. I have not, however, seen it suggested that it is the gluttony of sparse rural populations which has denuded the earth. Nor does their presumed greed for money adequately explain their poverty, or the fact that their primary wants "are satisfied quite frequently without money, at all".

"Grainger County, which is purely rural,… may be cited as an example of the rest. In 1932 the State and Federal Governments sent tax money into the County 91,000 dollars in excess of the revenue collected there… To the U.S.A. administration such counties are a debit... "

The cure for this shocking state of financial parasitism was to create the Tennessee Valley Authority, and provide it, up to July 1, 1936, with 110,000,000 dollars. The Plan, we understand, was a success.

Readers will be staggered to hear that there was more money about in Tennessee, which proves, of course, the necessity for Planning. Further-more, even in June 1935, The Authority employed over 16,000 persons, and, believe it or not, Unemployment was actually lower! We do not, however, hear about anyone being a debit to the administration.

Clearly then, as for war, so for other forms of Planning, when the money is needed it is forthcoming. Since the Authority is cited by our own Planners as an example to be followed, it is important for us to note how they started in Tennessee. It is significant that they began with the control of water.

Water, being a liquid, is an easily centralised essential of life; and yet one of the first conditions on which we live upon this earth is that it should be to a large extent decentralised. Rain is decentralised water, charged with oxygen. To the extent that it is retained in the soil where it falls, plant and animal and human life becomes possible. Where plant growth is established the rain enters the soil gently, the soil, being broken up by roots into a crumbly texture, and containing a good deal of absorbent organic matter, retains both air and water, and any surplus of water supplies the underground reservoirs where porous rock is present, and oozes out steadily in springs, which maintain a relatively even flow all the year round, as do the rivers into which they flow.

With the destruction of plant growth by the clear-felling of forests, over-grazing, over-cropping, or the destruction of soil structure by the use of unbalanced fertilisers, or other forms of mismanagement imposed upon the modern farmer by centralised forces, the conditions for life cease. The rain runs off the surface, carrying the soil particles with it. The underground water level sinks. The flow of springs becomes irregular. Floods and droughts characterise the river system. Soil which has taken centuries to grow is swept away in a few years, silting up the river beds (thus causing floods) and eventually finding its way into the sea. Deprived of its binding organic matter, the soil on the plains crumbles into dust and is blown away on the winds.

Thus we have to realise that floods, such as those on the Mississippi and the Yellow River, droughts, dust storms, dust bowls and deserts, such as those of North China, Libya and Arabia, are largely man-made, albeit hitherto probably for the most pan, unconsciously so, and not 'acts of God' as commonly supposed. The unconscious stage, however, is now over. Without centralised control over human beings such massive interference with nature on a large scale is impossible, but the vast sanction involved in the control of these natural forces, particularly water, has not escaped the notice of our Planners.

It has been noted that the rain falls upon the just and the unjust, but such an arrangement is not regarded as fair by our Planners, who would prefer that the rain should be gathered into one place, and. then 'delegated' under strict control through sluices to the people in strict proportion to the 'justice' of their claim, as determined by an impartial Committee. In case this should be thought far fetched, the following quotation from “The Rape of the Earth: a World Survey of Soil Erosion by G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte, p. 289, will illustrate my point:

"The Russian plan is magnificent in conception, … It consists in bringing the principal rivers and water resources of the Soviet Union into one interlocking system under complete human control… Flood and drought will be disciplinary measures which Man, and not Nature, will exercise on those who do not toe the line."

According to Elliot Smith’s “Human History”, the first centralised State arose on the banks of the Nile on a basis of water control. It is symbolised for us by the vast slave-built pyramid tombs of its rulers. An attempt, it seems, is being made to return to that system under the ironical name of progress. It is not enough to believe that our Planners, and the American Planners, have not yet reached this stage, since they are obviously travelling the same path as the Soviets, and we shall be fools indeed if we allow them to gain control of the first necessity of life.

II

Although the aims of the Tennessee Valley Authority, as described in the preamble to the Act which constituted it in 1933, are many and various, the navigation system "forms the logical and constitutional basis of all other activities of the Authority;" flood control and navigation alone being inter-State matters. The powers given to the Authority, under section 22 of the Act are given directly to the President of the U.S.A., and apply not only to the Tennessee basin but to such adjoining territory "as may be related to or materially affected by the developments consequent to this Act". The spread of control from water to almost everything else makes an instructive study of the totalitarian nature of Planning.

The first important Federal interference with the area took place during the first War, when a dam and power plant for the production of nitrates for munitions and fertilisers was constructed at Muscle Shoals. After the War the plant stood idle. In 1928 and 1930 Congress declarations in favour of Government operation were blocked by the Presidential veto. Nevertheless, for ten years before 1933 War Department engineers were busy carrying out a survey of natural resources and "basic engineering and economic data" in the area. It would be interesting to know through what channels they received orders which clearly coincided with the policy of the President's successor, which resulted in the building up of large power resources just in time for the next war.

The first duty of the Tennessee Valley Authority was the rehabilitation of Muscle Shoals and its co-ordination with the wider plan. The next step was the building of other vast dams and the creation of immense reservoirs, the eventual aim being that "When the system is completed very little water will normally reach the sea without passing through turbines…" and hence coming under the control of whoever, at any particular time, controlled the sluice gates. The Norris Reservoir, for instance, is stated to have a shore line of 775 miles. Interference with the earth's surface to this scale brings with it, besides centralised control of water and electric power, many 'problems' which can be dealt with only by extending the interference still further. There is the employment of thousands of work people, the development of towns and camps to house them, the resettlement of the people displaced from the obliterated land, the diversion and rebuilding of roads (over 100 miles in the case of Norris reservoir alone), and the problem of malaria control arising from the creation of huge sheets of water.

To prevent the silting up of reservoirs, the Authority is empowered to purchase such land as it thinks necessary around them. It 'co-operates' also with the farmers, encouraging terracing associations, "in which the manufacture of terracing machinery co-operate with the T.V.A… The farmers themselves pay the cost of the terracing programme including the necessary equipment". It also co-operates with the State Agricultural Colleges in moving some thousands of farmers out of the eroded areas. "Anyone knowing the Southern hill farmer," writes P.E.P., "with his Anglo-Saxon and Scottish traditions, will realise that this was not the least of the engineering problems encountered".

The prevention of soil erosion by the use of fertilisers is one of the aims of the Authority. The fertilisers in question are, of course, of the unbalanced type largely blamed for the impoverishment of soils all over the world. The soil, like the Public in a Planned State, must take what it is convenient to produce, in this case the chemical by-products of 'national defence,' and of phosphate-bearing lands near Muscle Shoals. 'Research' is being busily carried on into the best way to use these, and the cheapest way to transport them, and the development of new industries and various dodges for "taking up surplus labour". There are "some interesting experiments in housing" in the new town Norris, built by the Authority, also in "highway construction amenities and land planning". Indeed the whole business is most 'interesting' for the Planners! First, where the labour may live, then how the labour may live, and what it may labour at, and what sort of hutch it may live in, and what sort of road it may walk on, and what sort of bath, and sink and lavatory it may use, and how it may treat the unfortunate soil most cheaply, and how it may amuse itself, and finally how and what it may think. "The whole T.V.A. enterprise has been visualised from the outset not just as a great public works scheme, but as an immense and significant programme of education".

The number of books, articles, pamphlets, brochures, radio talks, etc., all over the world, boosting the Authority, appears to be legion. There seems to be a certain similarity about their style, and about the sort of people who approve of them and spread them about. A good example is a book by Dr. Julian Huxley of P.E.P., the B.BC. and the Zoological Gardens (and, later, U.N.E.S.C.O.). It has lots of shiny photographs of planned dwellings and interiors, and electrical gadgets, and it does not make use of capital letters, so you will realise what it is like. The broad impression which it drives home is that of the utter uniformity of planning everywhere. There is nothing in it which looks like Tennessee, rather than anywhere else. Nothing which has a recognisable character such as that of a Cotswold, or a Norwegian, or a Dutch village; and yet I had always understood that Tennessee was one of those parts of the U.S.A. which had a definite character of its own. It is a horrible thought that there is nothing about the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority which could not be copied anywhere; and it was intended from the first to be copied everywhere. It fact, one of the directors has stated that "every step taken, every project set up, every result, is weighed from the point of view of its possible application to other parts of the Country" and, it is made clear by P.E.P., to other countries, particularly ours.

Probably the best 'selling point' of the Authority so far has been the generation and distribution of relatively cheap electric power, which has been possible through the use of a privileged financial position to force policy upon privately owned companies, and local distributing agencies. This the Authority does by charging municipalities, etc., "only slightly less than wholesale prices through the country generally", but, as the price usually charged to the consumer is only one-sixth to one-tenth of the cost of generating, it insists upon a very much reduced retail rate, which greatly stimulates consumption. The local concern makes a loss, which, however, is soon made up.

This is the price-cutting stage which is essential to the establishment of every monopoly. While it lasts it brings obvious benefits, but also more and more complete dependence upon the monopoly in the details of living. "The social results of increased electrification are illimitable," and include "a revolution in conditions of life and work". Running water, electric light, bathrooms, plumbing systems and radios become necessities of life where they were formerly unknowns and electricity brings additional income to the farmer, enabling him to branch out into small-scale, semi-industrial operations "employing more labour, and raising the standard of life of the whole area".

What is nowhere even limed at is that this increased prosperity could have been built upon a broad and secure foundation of decentralised water power, instead of being balanced very cleverly upon the point of a single Monopoly owing its allegiance outside the area, which is about as safe as having your child suckled by a tigress. In this way every advance is fraught with greater danger, and every benefit is used as a bribe for the acceptance of further control.

Even the control of domestic details has not been forgotten. A separate body, the Electric Home and Farm Authority, was set up, at first with the same directors as the Tennessee Valley Authority, with an initial capital of a million dollars and a credit from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of ten million dollars. Its aim is to supply electric appliances on easy credit terms, and to standardise them by means of a badge "for use upon those types which meet its requirements in design and in value for money".

In this connection it should be noted that the Authority advertises its belief in "a greater decentralisation of industry, scientifically planned and organised". The word should, of course, be delegation of centralised powers, a process without which no monopoly can operate, but which at the outset sufficiently simulates real decentralisation to secure its acceptance by a majority.

It should not be supposed that the Authority has been allowed to swallow the whole of its allotted prey without some opposition from among the smaller enterprises which had formerly made their happy hunting ground in the area. The Power Companies in particular, very naturally attacked it, and the Authority received the heaviest available supporting fire, including a statement by President Roosevelt himself which began "Crafty managers" and ended with "rife with corruption and bribery". The Alabama Power Company succeeded so far as to get a favourable verdict in a District Court, but when the appeal was taken to the Supreme Court the Authority won by eight votes to one.

We note the statement that "The large funds known to be behind the T.V.A. … give it, however, an immensely strong bargaining position".

Great care has been taken to represent the Authority as non-political, impartial, and untouched by corruption. The Board has to consist of three "persons who profess a belief in the feasibility and wisdom of the Act" i.e., they must be politically 'New Dealers'. Examples given of its 'non-political' behaviour are equal pay and opportunities for negroes - "a conspicuous victory over racial prejudice in one of its best-known strongholds," - and the encouragement of trades unionism, both actions against which the strongest political feeling exists in that part of America.

Finally we note the unlimited prospects for the expansion of this plan infested area -

"When more comprehensive plans come to be made, the T.V.A. will have to face the problem that, while the valley is an appropriate area for flood control and hydro-electric generation and so forth, its boundaries are meaningless for electricity supply, for transport, for industrial development and other purposes. This problem of the overlapping of optimum areas for different purposes is again a universal one. At present the T.V.A. system of having a defined territory as a nucleus, with power to go outside it where necessary, maybe the most practical solution. Encouraged by the T.V.A.’s achievements, other regions are putting up schemes on similar lines".

III

The strong resemblance between the American New Dealers and the British Planners was pointed out in the U.S.A. Congress by Congressman McFadden (May 3, 1934) who reported Mr. Sieff, of P.E.P. as having said, "let us go slowly for a while until we can see how our plan works out in America". The New Deal as a whole, was not a success, but the Tennessee Valley Authority seems to have been selected for publicity as the most successful part of it. In this country, the suggestion of Mr. Ellis Smith in Parliament that we should set up a number of regional "T.V.A.'s" in depressed areas, was no doubt, a trial shot on behalf of PEP, which did not come off very well, but was intended to air the subject.

The reception accorded by the ordinary British citizen to the attempt at regional control of the 'special' areas before the war, and to the war-time Regional Commissioners, even during the acute emergency of 1940, gave a sufficient indication that the idea of industrial and social planning by local dictatorships will not readily be accepted here. However, as the late Lord Stamp told the British Association in 1937, the development of social control must be 'experimental' at first, and must be carried out with the appropriate educational and psychological adjustments.

The Tennessee Valley Authority started straight away with the control of a river system, and of electric power, from which followed town planning, land planning, social and domestic planning by the Authority. In the British Isles, owing probably, to a greater instinctive opposition from the people, the course of Planning has been slower and more devious, but nevertheless has included the same features, piecemeal, and in a different order, water control coming comparatively late in the day. With the aid of two German wars and a Bankers' Slump the plans of the P.E.P. Group have now made such headway that they are beginning to go beyond the purely legalistic stage, in which the chief weapons are psychological-monetary, or bureaucratic restrictions, and control of propaganda and education and to seize hold of the material sanctions implicit in the control of soil, water and sources of energy.

Towards this end we have evidence of great effort: the long-term land taxation programme aiming at the destruction of security in land tenure, and leading up to the more recent Land Planning Acts and proposals; the pre-war restrictive Marketing Boards, and the war-time agricultural controls; the growing grip on food of the Chain Stores and Co-operatives, reaching its climax in the Ministry of Food; the White Paper on water, the Scottish Hydro-electric Scheme, the Electricity Grid, the Nationalisation of Coal, and the Petroleum Pool.

Since an emergency is the invariable excuse for a dictatorship, the creation of an emergency is a necessary preliminary to the establishment of a dictatorship in any form. In Tennessee the normal manipulation of the Debt System seems to have been sufficient to bring about, not merely poverty and confusion, but even the destruction of the soil. In our climatically more fortunate country the physical effects have so far been less obviously disastrous; but if we go on the reasonable assumption that a few, at least, of the Planners know what they are doing, it is true enough to say that no effort in the way of dictated chemical-plus-tractor farming, infuriating restrictions, time-wasting forms and regulations, and the deliberate penalising of improvements by taxation, has been spared to bring about a like result.

As an example of deliberately chaotic planning so fantastic as to be barely credible, the Town and Country Planning Act of 1932 takes a lot of beating. This Act, which initiated Land Planning by laying down 'zones' to be determined by the Planning Committees of the local authorities, according to the use to which the land was to be put, provided no category at all for agricultural use! This presumably intentional 'accident' was clumsily made up for in 1938 by an amendment which permitted the allocation of land to agriculture as a kind of industry. The position is now so confusing that it has naturally stimulated a 'demand' for a more comprehensible and unified plan.

This 'demand' has been further nurtured by the Town and Country Planning Act of 1944, which deals with the rebuilding of the conveniently devastated towns of Great Britain, and is alleged to be equally confusing. The outcry about the inadequacy of this has already been considerable, and may be expected to prepare the ground for the comprehensive Land Planning Proposals of the Government with which Dr. Dudley Stamp (Adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture and brother of the later Lord Stamp) seems to have been closely associated.

In 1944 Dr. Stamp explained his views in a lecture to students of the Geographical Society of a London College, amusingly enough under the title of "Soil Fertility". The only reference to this subject matter which the lecturer made was the statement that the intrinsic fertility of soil did not matter, as it could always be "put in"; what mattered was the physical 'workability' of the soil.

For the rest, the lecture was entirely devoted to the Land Classification Scheme of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning. There were to be three major and ten minor categories, based upon "geographical principles" and - as Dr. Stamp pointed out in a significant 'aside' - there was to be no escape from them. Thus Class I land (40 per cent, of the country's surface) was to be reserved for agriculture and the public kept completely off it; and Class II (6) somewhat hilly, poorish land, was ideal for housing as it offered scope and interesting problems to the Town Planner. Good land must not be wasted on gardens, but you might be allowed an allotment on it. You might be allowed to live on Grade 6 land, grow roses on 7 and picnic on Grades 8, 9 and 10 - and no wriggling round the regulations!

(Since then, the Plan has matured, in 1947, so far as the infliction of monstrous penalties on those guilty of improving or developing their land or property; thus enforcing a stultification of the normal human will to improve which is not only evil, but, from the point of view of Society, suicidal).

The Scottish Hydro-electric Scheme 1 passed in 1943 bears, on the face of it, the greatest resemblance to that of the Tennessee Valley Authority. It contains provision for the characteristic ingredients - amongst others, the destruction of a number of valleys, the compulsory dispossession and movement of the people who have farmed them for generations, the artificial accumulation, in several places, of a large bulk of water behind a dam, with destructive powers well demonstrated in Germany, as a result of the efforts of our 'dam-busting ' airmen. In one respect, indeed, it goes further even than the Tennessee Valley Authority in so far as the power which is to be generated is not (except sometimes) even alleged to be intended mainly for the benefit of the local rural population. If any large proportion of this new power output which is to be linked to the Grid is intended to reach the individual consumer it can only be in the large towns. The devastating effects of a minor break-down in a centralised electricity service upon life in a modern city are now familiar to most of us. 'The trend' of propaganda and advertisement is all in favour of electricity rather than gas, which is not capable of such extreme centralisation. The 'modern' house, and especially the pre-fabricated Government hutch, is essentially 'all-electric', which thus gives a maximum sanction to an electrical monopoly.

Electricity, however, as a means of control over the individual, can touch only the amenities and appurtenances of life. Water, being a necessity of life itself, its control is correspondingly more serious. The effect on the under-ground water level of the development, during the last half-century, of the progressively growing water monopolies of the great urban areas is already sufficiently serious, as pointed out by the Earl of Portsmouth in the Debate on Rural Water Supply (House of Lords, April 26, 1944). The drainage subsidy of the Ministry of Agriculture is also hastening the progressive drying up of surface springs, ponds and wells, (as pointed out by C H. Gardner in The Time; January 4, 1944) thus helping to create the state of emergency essential to the next step in the control of water.

1 The works were personally inspected by Mr. David Lilienthal on a very private visit in 1950. (See The Social Crediter, October 28, 1950).

We are now definitely threatened with the establishment of a system of regional water monopolies covering the whole country which will have the power to divert surface or under-ground water 'where the need is greatest' in the estimation of the controllers, and will enable them to achieve the Soviet aim of 'disciplining' those 'who will not toe the line'. This is one of the ultimate physical sanctions against that security and independence of the individual which the reviving knowledge of the nature of soil fertility is extremely likely to restore, if allowed to operate freely (the other being the centralised control of food).

It is not that a material sanction is necessarily the most deadly, but inertia being a property of matter, if we allow our physical environment to be moulded on a massive scale so as to serve the ends of central control, we are likely to find that the chains so forged will take, not generations, but ages, to break. We shall be back where civilisation started with Egypt and Babylon and Imperial Rome. Nothing but the destruction of our environment will set us free.

It is not, even, that such massive material machinery as dams, aqueducts, power houses, etc., are indestructible. On the contrary, they have always been more easily destroyed than built, and are now vulnerable to instant attack by air-craft, which necessitates a permanent system of defence, which in turn, by itself imposes upon the people, and upon industry, a considerable measure of permanent 'war emergency' control. The fact seems to be that such mechanisms impose habits upon the people, which are far more indestructible than stone or steel or concrete; and they are all habits of dependence-upon an irrigation system, upon aqueducts, upon a piped water supply or sanitation system, upon electric current for heat, light and cooking. Until recently these material amenities have been under relatively local control, although things like radio, newspapers, cinemas, have been more and more remotely centralised. Now the process has spread from the psychological to the material. The incarnation of a mental attitude is taking place, but though the matter reinforces and petrifies the mind, it is the mind which is lasting, the matter which is temporary. It is a safe conjecture that the dams which our airmen destroyed in Germany with such appalling effects upon the people in the neighbourhood, will be built up again at the earliest opportunity.

The need for the defence of these large power plants has been mentioned, but they have also a closer and more essential link with war. The enormous power output of the modern industrial state can serve no other purpose if it is to be fully employed.

Correspondence in the Scottish Press in August, 1944 raised the important question of what can be the purpose of the vast increase in electric power planned under the Scottish Hydro-electric Scheme. Seeing that British Industry is already provided with more than eight times what it needed for the 1914-18 War, and four times what it contrived to use in 1930, the suggestion that we have not enough power, even for the most extravagant peacetime consumption, could do with some examination.

In this connection, a further quotation from the last paragraph of the PEP Broadsheet on the Tennessee Valley Authority is extremely relevant:

"Many other points would call for comment if space permitted – for example, the part played by army engineers in pioneering with survey work and the fact that the War Department actually drew up the plans for the Norris Dam and directed the work at Wheeler Lock and elsewhere. Nearly two hundred years ago military engineers were road- building in the Scottish Highlands - why should they not be used now in Great Britain?"

Once more we have the same pattern, the preparing of the emergency as a preliminary to the further extension of control. The emergency which suits our Planners best, as we have good reason to realise at the present time is War. War is implicit in centralised power. It is not clear how many more wars, slumps, and other emergencies are to be arranged for us in the course of further centralisation, but one thing is reasonably certain; the establishment of a World Empire, upon a foundation of vast spiritual and material forces, is the manifest end towards which 'Planning' developments in America, Russia and Great Britain, as well as the Axis countries, are all converging.

IV

Despite the immense efforts openly being made to bring it about, the establishment of a World Empire is commonly represented as 'inevitable' and due to the 'trend' of evolution, or the operation of mechanical other impersonal forces. This, of course, is no more than the propagandist use of suggestion calculated to destroy the will to act.

The attainment of this goal is regarded as so far from inevitable by well-informed persons deeply committed to its pursuit, that among themselves they often frankly reveal their despair of reaching it in the face of the incorrigible natural instincts of ordinary people. Thus they also admit that they are engaged in a battle in which their wills are pitted against the will of the majority of mankind.

The acute danger arises from the widespread ignorance of the power already obtained by these plan-imposers to create, through their control of monetary and governmental mechanisms, a state of affairs compared to which a surrender to their will seems preferable, and to consolidate the ground so gained for their policy by a massive reconstruction of our material environment. In every case the alternative presented has been a false one. Preparation for war was not the only way out of the Slump, and a New World Order was not the only possible outcome of a war against Hitler's New Order in Europe.

It might be supposed that in the face of the War danger, no other emergency could be of comparative gravity. But for all the death, misery and destruction which they bring in their train, the great wars do not, as advertised in advance, destroy the human race, or even the material basis of our livelihood, which, so far as technical resources go, is usually on balance greatly increased by wars. They seem to be carefully controlled emergencies, the chief function of which is to enforce the surrender of rights and liberties by the use of fear on a large scale.

The world-wide emergency brought about by the impoverishment and destruction of the soil is of a different nature, and menaces the very means of our existence on the planet. At the very least we are threatened with a return to that state of scarcity which the economists, who have a vested interest in it, were forced grudgingly to admit we had escaped from in the Poverty-in-Plenty days of the 1930's. As usual we are being told that the surrender of further freedom of action to centralised control is the only cure, and the situation is so grave that the correct measures must be taken, whatever the cost, even if it should include a return to serfdom - a probability clearly envisaged, at least for the African native, by Jacks and Whyte in their book The Rape of the Earth.

The affair is being represented as another War Crisis: Mankind is waging and losing a desperate battle against Nature, and is in dire need of an efficient General Staff if disaster is to be avoided. This picture is, of course, entirely false, except in so far as we have been forced into the position of waging war on Nature, and particularly on the soil, by the operations of this same would-be General Staff. We are faced with poverty and starvation only to, the extent that we persist in this course.

The destruction of the soil has not been brought about mainly by the innate errors of free individuals, who naturally tend to co-operate with their environment, but by bad farming enforced by the dictates of the remote holders of agricultural debt, and more recently, by Government Departments. The worst effects have been caused by extensive farming with low yields, e.g., yields of the order of 12 bushels of wheat to the acre have destroyed the prairies of North America, whereas 32 bushels is a fair average for this country, and is quite compatible with the maintenance of a high level of fertility. It is worth noting in passing, that "the average term of farm tenancy in the United States is under two years." (Jacks and Whyte: The Rape of the Earth, p. 232).

It is now being said and realised that a large part of the 'glut' of the pre-war period was due to the exploitation of soil capital, but those who go on to conclude that there was, and can be, no plenty from the soil except at the cost of its fertility, lose sight of the fact that the 'glut' was produced, not by good farming with high yields, but by bad farming with low yields, and also, that much of the product was not consumed, but destroyed and wasted. The squandering of the world's capital resources on destruction, whether of coal, petroleum or soil, is the hallmark of that unnatural power which alone can coerce men into such suicidal behaviour.

Debt, insecurity of tenure, extensive farming, low yields, and the destruction of soil capital all go together, bringing in their train the reduction of the land worker to the status of a serf. The examples are not only to be found in all the new countries of the world in which soil erosion is now a dominant factor, but very strikingly in the history of the decline of Imperial Rome, in which the concentration of the money power was accompanied by the replacement of small owner-farming by the latifundia, large slave-worked estates, and the creation of the Libyan desert by extensive over-cropping to provide bread doles for the city proletariat.

On the other band, a free flow of credit, security of tenure, high yields, intensive farming with an adequate return to the soil and the maintenance or even increase of soil fertility also go together. The, examples are Lombardy in the tenth, eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Netherlands, in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and England in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It can be no accident that all these countries are small and densely populated, and that at the height of its agricultural prosperity each in turn was the financial centre of the world. It is not to the credit of the modern financial system that in its earlier stages only, one country at a time was enabled to till its soil properly, and in its later stages, none, but the fact provides some evidence that before the accumulation of irredeemable debt had counter-balanced it, easy access to money had something to do with the maintenance of soil fertility.

The destruction of English agriculture by the Debt System during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is indeed amply portrayed by William Cobbett, who, despite his astonishing foresight, can scarcely have foreseen the lengths to which the process would be carried in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not only in England but throughout the world, reaching its culmination in the dust bowls of North America and the giant tractor-farms of the U.S.S.R.

Much as our land has suffered, and is suffering under the attacks of city creditors, monopolies and Government Departments, we are not so far down the slope of infertility as these countries. The 'future', so widely advertised as being the exclusive property of the 'new' countries whose seething populations are rapidly transforming them into deserts, actually lies with those people who have learnt, and retained, the arts of intensive, and conservative, agriculture, and have succeeded in incorporating in them, without damage to their primary purpose of maintaining soil fertility, those modern discoveries in engineering and biology which have been found to be useful.

Far from corresponding to the prevailing picture of a worn-out old country, supported by her young, vigorous offspring, the Dominions, and unable to keep pace with her two huge and virile neighbours, the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., Great Britain compares favourably with the others in the retention of a fair proportion of her pristine strength in the soil. In the whole world there is not another piece of land to compare in climate, soil, and intrinsic fertility with North Western Europe, the cradle, and the home of modern rotational agriculture. In the huge but semi-arid 'new' countries there are still, especially in the U.S.S.R., large reserves of soil fertility to be tapped; but after that nothing but the thriftiest conservation agriculture can keep back the desert.

In, addition, it would seem that both these, vast countries are ripe for an imperialistic phase, and the clash between them which is confidently expected by our socialists as, well as by Wall Street, is not only likely to weaken them further, but will prevent the adoption of the small scale, intensive, individual farming 'methods' which alone can build up the land. It is not denied, of course, that 'Planning' methods, vast engineering works, dictated conservation farming, etc., a sort of imperialism of the land, may delay the process of erosion for a period provided there is no change of policy in the controllers - but at best it is a defensive fight, all the measures are negative, only the individual who is secure in his tenure of the land can find the interest and the will and the energy to keep up, let alone build up, its fertility. You cannot enforce good farming by laws, restrictions and penalties. Such an idea can arise only from a childish misconception of the complexity of the links between men, animals, plants, micro-organisms, and the soil. It is idiotic to suppose that you can bring about balanced biological relationships by laws yet it is this idiotic idea which is being 'put over' by our planners and scientists.

Our soil, in the British Isles, is now in very great danger. Its fertility, maintained, and even built up, over centuries, and buffered in recent years to some extent by the large imports of food from abroad, must by now have suffered serious inroads. The demands on it during two Great Wars have been great, and will be likely to remain permanently greater than before this War, as the eroded countries may soon not have the surpluses to export. Several decades of 'manuring' with industrial products have now manifestly begun to produce their effects upon health and quality in crops and stock. Agricultural scientists, however, seem to have become peculiarly sensitive, if not irritable, at any suggestion that this is true. Particularly in front of witnesses their usual reaction is a nervous titter and a resort to standard witticisms about 'the muck-and-magic school', 'the compostolic creed', witch doctors, and so on, not entirely relevant to the matter under discussion. The astounding assumption they appear to make is that these things can be done on a vast scale, with no effect other than the immediate results desired. The law of action and reaction, it seems, has been disproved, so far as agriculture is concerned, by the Rothamsted experiments. Meanwhile the Ministry of Agriculture has, during (and since) the War, forced the application of heavy dressings of chemical fertilizers throughout the country.

At the same time, though it is still not considered 'respectable' for a scientist or agricultural specialist to criticise chemical farming, and any who venture to do so immediately 'lose caste' as cranks, there are signs that the Planners - as evidenced, for instance, by the space devoted to the subject in the New Statesman - have their eye on the possibility that the criticisms may be true after all. When the disastrous effects of the present policy have become too blatant to be denied any longer, it will be quite according to plan for them to raise a loud shout for even greater centralised control to save the soil. It is also not surprising that when so many people have been influenced by H. G. Wells, Wellsian fantasies have a way of coming true, and the chance of restricting 'Grade A' (properly grown) food to selected classes, leaving the usual denatured rubbish to the rest of us, is surely too good to be missed. It is said to have been noticed already in some places that the chief clamourers for compulsory pasteurisation of milk are also the first to get on the special list for natural milk.

If we allow our soil to be destroyed we shall, with our dense population, inevitably become a vassal nation; but, on the other hand, if there is any hope, anywhere, for the soil, and for the people who live on it, it is in North Western Europe, the cradle of good farming, and of that development towards democracy which may some day reach its goal. In these Islands we have recently suffered some heavy defeats in the long-term war for the freedom and security of the individual. We have had our Dunkirk; the assault on the central bastion, the land itself, the real Battle of Britain, has now begun.

1 Sir W. G. Ogg, the Director of Rothamsted, is so hyper-sensitive that he does not like ammonium sulphate and superphosphate to be called 'chemical,' or sprays, capable of killing men as well as pests if used carelessly, to be called 'poison sprays' (see Presidential Address to Section M, Both Association, at Dundee, 1947). He says there is no controversy; but indeed there is, though it goes deeper than organic versus chemical manuring; it concerns the nature of a valid Science, and the existence of a Natural Order.

Part 2: 1949

V

Since 1944 the course of events has reinforced the case against the Planners with a brutality and speed which has gone beyond all expectation. The true purpose of the tremendous development of hydro-electric power in the Tennessee Valley has emerged; the complete fraud and falsity of the arguments and propaganda which were used to secure the acceptance of the Scheme have been further revealed; and the multiplication of attempts to impose a similar shackling of the landscape, and the people who dwell in it, to similar purposes, in every part of the World, has made even clearer the centralised nature and the world-wide extent of the Plan.

In the shock of the explosion of the first two 'atomic bombs' few people seem to have noticed that these instruments of policy were to a large extent the products of the Tennessee Valley Authority Power Scheme,1 although the fact received ample publicity that the first and greatest "atom bomb" plant was established at Oak Ridge in Tennessee. A simple faith that this was a matter of convenience rather than a long-term policy must surely give way before the second fact that the Chairman of the T.V.A., Mr. David Lilienthal, despite the most violent opposition in the Senate and elsewhere (which has later displaced him) succeeded his mentor, the financier and Presidential adviser, Mr. Bernard Baruch, as Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.

1 The following, is quoted from The Manchester Guardian for October 26, '1949:-

£107,000,000 MORE FOR ATOM BOMB MAKING

Oak Ridge (Tennessee), October 25.

The United States Atomic Energy Commission today confirmed plans for a £107,000,000 expansion of its atomic bomb- making facilities.

Of the total, £89,000,000 would be used directly for bombs, and £11,800,000 would go to the Tennessee Valley Authority to supply power for future atomic plant requirements here.---Reuter.

The other members appointed to this Commission were as follows (names and descriptions taken from Science Illustrated, April 1947):

Lewis Strauss--formerly a Wall Street Banker,

Sumner T. Pike [later Acting-Chairman]--also a banker… and a member of the Securities Exchange Commission,

William Waymack--a veteran of the Federal Reserve System,

Robert Bacher---his father was an investment banker.

The idea of a long-term strategy on the part of a powerful group of men aiming at World Control is no longer one which can be lightly dismissed as fantastic, at least when it is applied to the late rulers of Germany or the present rulers of Russia; and it is becoming difficult to understand the mentality of those who still insist that this particular group of men, all associated with banking and finance, acquired such a position by chance. It is possible now in retrospect to see the key position in the Plan occupied by the financial depression of the nineteen-thirties, and especially by the policy of the banks in bringing about agricultural depression, with its unavoidable accompaniment of destructive exploitation of the soil, in relation to the 'cure' offered by the financing with astronomical sums of T.V.A. and other monopolistic agencies all over the World.

When, against this background, the T.V.A., ostensibly intended for flood control, navigation, soil conservation, and other good works, emerges as the power basis for the World's first atomic weapons, and its Chairman succeeds to the chairmanship of a Committee of bankers' nominees appointed to control this immense new material and psychological force, while at the same time a tremendous publicity campaign is conducted to convince people that atomic power means World Government, the idea that there is no continuity or intention behind these events becomes untenable.

Concerning the T.V.A., some further facts, which appear to have received no publicity whatever outside restricted circles in the United States of America, have come to light, particularly in connection with the opposition to the Missouri Valley Authority Bill and other attempts to establish imitations of the T.V.A. Since these schemes, however various in their adaptation to different regions, are all characterised by the same lack of integrity and lack of correspondence between their real and their alleged aims, a further glance at the fraud implicit in the prototype may prove useful.

The preamble to the T.V.A. Act (1933) lists flood control as one of the main purposes of the Authority. There is no mention of hydro-electric power, but the general public may well imagine that cheap power can easily be obtained from the water held up by a flood control dam, or at least that the same darn will serve both purposes. In fact the two purposes are incompatible, since flood control requires an empty reservoir at all times except when retaining flood waters and power requires a full reservoir at all times to provide a steady head of water. A flood coming on top of such a full reservoir is, of course, doubly disastrous.

Dr. Arthur Morgan, the first Chairman of the T.V.A., who was an eminent engineer, had previously built some flood control dams, on each of which was placed the following notice:

2 The Dams of the Miami Conservancy District Are for Flood Prevention Purposes. Their Use for Power Development or for Storage Would Be a Menace to the Cities Below."

Quoted from “Uncle Sam's Billion Dollar Baby” (A Taxpayer looks at the T.V..A.) by Frederick L. Collins; Putnam's, $2.50; 1945.

It is not surprising, to learn that Dr. Morgan later quarrelled with Mr. Lilienthal, criticised the over-emphasis on power development of the T.V.A., even accused the T.V.A. legal staff in the Tennessee Electric Power Company suit of asking the Authority's engineers to "give testimony of a misleading character," and finally was dismissed by President Roosevelt, and succeeded by Lilienthal as Chairman of the Authority.

What the T.V.A. in fact did was to build 24 power dams of fantastic size in relation to the river, and to rely on weather reports, calculations of moving flood levels in the various tributaries, and the judgement of sluice-gate operators, who have to balance estimates of flood danger against the profitable power supply, to ensure the emptying of reservoirs in time to accommodate the flood waters. According to Congressman A. J. May3 of Kentucky speaking before a subcommittee of the Senate in opposition to the Missouri Valley Authority Bill on April 27, 1945, "The space allowed for, storage in the reservoirs appears to be about one-third of the space that was originally available before the power dams were built". In addition, 75 per cent of the annual flood damage as found by the Army Engineers (who made a comprehensive report in 1930) occurs in the Emory River Basin, a tributary which in the plans of the T.V.A. is not to be protected by dams (from Hearings before the Join Committee to investigate T.V.A., page 3962). Annual (pre-T.V.A.) flood damage in the Tennessee Basin4 averaged $1,784,000 (House Doe. 328, 71st Congress, 2nd Session, p. 734). Against this the annual expense of the T.V.A. for flood control is estimated at about $5,000,000, and annual crop loss from the permanent flooding caused by four dams only out of the 24 was estimated in Court Proceedings (Tennessee Electric Power Co. vs. T.V.A.) at $3,000,000.

All this, however, pales into insignificance before the main fact of the situation which is that the T.V.A. has, at the cost of over $1,000,000,000, brought about a greater flood disaster in the Tennessee Basin than nature alone could conceivably have produced under the worst possible circumstances.

3 Data with quotations from statement by Congressman May of Kentucky on April 27, 1945 before a Subcommittee of the Commerce Committee of the United States Senate, considering the MVA Bill S. 555, taken from a Brief prepared by B. W. Rising, reproduced and distributed by the Water Conservation Conference Continuing Committee (1117 National Press Bldg., Washington, D.C.) which represents the water interest of 31 States.

4 Data and references from Basic Economic Factors in the T.V.A. Enterprise System by H. S. Bennon; 1944.

The total area permanently flooded by the T.V.A. reservoirs amounts to 716,000 acres-5 (given as 698,000 by B. W. Rising3) and above those about another 150,000 acres, never before in danger, have been brought within the reach of temporary inundation. Against that, the worst flood so far on record temporarily covered 550,000 acres in the same area, but it must be remembered that most of this was available for the growing of crops, and that some of it was improved by occasional inundation. The hypothetical worst flood possible as estimated to come once in 500 years, but never experienced yet in historical times, was reckoned by the Army engineers to be capable of covering 666,000 acres.3 This, be it remembered, was known in 1930, well before the T.V.A., in the name of flood control and agricultural development, deliberately drowned these 700,000 or so acres of valley lands (necessarily the richest in a hilly region) and dispossessed 13,433 families (over 56,000 people) from their homes, scattering and uprooting whole communities in the process (figures from Congressman May's statement3).

Attention has been diverted from this colossal outrage and loss by a continuous blast of propaganda inviting admiration for the Great Lakes of the South, with their coastline longer even that that of the U.S.A., their bathing beaches, lakeside resorts, summer cottages, game fish, boating, pleasure steamers, and so forth, even going to the length of exploiting the 'romance' of blue waters and ships' bottoms rolling over drowned farms and villages.

Now all this is absolutely symptomatic of the philosophy which is driving the World to destruction. The cure for every evil is to drown it in an attractively presented variant of itself. The cure for temporary floods is permanent lakes, the cure for poverty is more taxation and compulsory insurance (i.e. taking more money away and giving only some of it back), the cure for Monopoly is nationalisation (i.e. super-monopoly), the cure for national wars and tyrannies is super-national wars and tyrannies, and the cure for those is the World State, with its chronic tyranny and civil war; and for that there seems no cure unless it is death and chaos and a return to the Dark Ages It is high time that the instinct of self-preservation began to rise superior to the dreadful fear of being called 'unprogressive' or 'against the trend.'

5 Data from The Use of Dams for Flood Control by H. S. Bennion; 1945.

Minor matters which are worth mentioning because they illustrate further the sort of false claims which will be made for imitation schemes, include great increases in general prosperity, in farm incomes and production, in farm electrification, and in soil conservation, and immense savings to suppers of goods through the use of the navigation channel provided. To deal with this last first, the claim of savings to shippers of $3,500,000 for each of the years 1941-43 'S about twice the cost of transporting the same material by rail.3 The figure therefore is pure nonsense, and merely illustrates the attitude of mind: "What the hell does it matter, by the time they get around to it we’ll have moved on to something else!" As for prosperity, of course there is an increase in employment in the T.V.A.'s own concerns, but when the five T.V.A. States are compared with the nine other Southern States as regards per capita income, farm income, and number of business establishments, on the basis of the statistics of Government bureaux, the T.V.A. States do not show up favourably, although they naturally share in the general inflation of income figures, and a 64 per cent expansion of government payrolls. When it comes to farm electrification Tennessee makes definitely a poor showing in the ten years 1933-1943 in the percentage of farms electrified - only 18.6 per cent, as against 32.2 for North Carolina, 31.4 for Georgia, 26.0 for Virginia.6 This needs remembering, since the promise of electrification is always used to secure acceptance of power schemes in rural districts, and, so far, it seems that without exception the promises have not been fulfilled.

Finally there remains soil conservation, and those who realise the vital importance of this are often inclined to think that this may justify the whole project whatever its faults.

Thanks are due to Gen. Wade H. Hayes of Edmundson's Electricity Corporation for sending the material referred to in footnotes 2 to 6 to the author after publication of the earlier article, in the series.

6 From How Good is the T.V.A.? by H. S. Bennion; 1945.

Here it does seem that the T.V.A. has carried out some of the teachings of the Soil Conservation Service on the hill-sides and uplands which lie above its inundated valleys; but why, if outside advice and funds were needed the Conservation Service should not have provided these itself is not obvious; and no amount of conservation of the poorer uplands can ever recover the fertile soils of the valleys. Congressman May3 quotes a report of the Tennessee Farm Bureau in September 1941, when the acreage flooded was only 561,000 and the annual value of the food crops formerly produced on that land was estimated at $13,415,300; it must now, with the larger area flooded, and the inflation of prices, be something like twice that figure. Meanwhile Mr. Lilienthal7 gives the cost of the entire land restoration programme for the year 1943, including demonstration farm work outside the Valley Area, in 21 States of the Union, as $3,344,000. It is impossible to say what the value of this work is in terms of soil fertility, but it is clear that, on balance, the most damaging of all the T.V.A.'s activities has been its soil destruction.

There is also another fact which scarcely anyone seems to realise: water cannot spend the same time in a reservoir and in the soil, taking its part in the cycle of nature. Even though most of the water stored in a reservoir comes from natural run-off and seepage, the permanent reduction in the water-holding (in the sense of available to plant roots) capacity of the catchment area means that, in aggregate, loss through run-off and evaporation is permanently increased. And this is quite independent of the effects of conservation practices on the slopes above the reservoir, which constitute a different operation, which could have been carried out in any case if the money had been made available. The rain falling on a reservoir is as much lost to the soil as if the whole area of it had been covered with a macadam surface. Seasonal storage for irrigation is another matter-but that does not apply to hydro-electric schemes, or city water supplies, which are the chief offenders.

7 T.V.A.-Democracy on the March (p. 47); Penguin Books; 1944.

It is as simple as A + B, and not unrelated to it, since it is a matter of rates of flow. The making of a reservoir is merely one instance of an increase in the 'B' (overhead loss) component in the rate of flow of rainwater, with a reduction in the 'A' (available as income to living organisms) component. The farmer, in his perpetual effort to meet his ever-growing 'B' costs, his bank overdraft, his mortgage charges, his tractor, his fertiliser, his fuel bill, and so on, is forced more and more to rely on cash crops and stock, which means selling the organic matter of his soil; and since the public, by and large, can never pay the true price, and less so every year, he must sell more than the true proportion which can be taken out of the soil and returned to it, and in selling his organic matter he is selling the structure and the water-holding capacity of his soil. Furthermore, the more 'progressive' and 'scientific 'the type of farming (e.g. the all-electric farm) the greater the 'B' costs and the greater the disparity to make up.

High prices in special markets, and artificially fixed prices with subsidies out of taxation to hide them from the public, do not affect the general thesis, but merely transfer the discrepancy elsewhere. The chronic unbalance of a purely non-material credit system is unavoidably materialised in the medium (water) which is most appropriate to it. It is no accident that the only alternative to pure mathematics (and that involves the calculus) as an explanation of the working of the money-and-credit system, is a diagrammatic working model, illustrating the flow of credit by the flow of liquid, or that the terms 'liquid' and 'self-liquidating' (not to mention 'non-self-liquidating') should have been found necessary in describing the behaviour of money.

VI

The idea still persists in some quarters that the Tennessee Valley Authority, owing its existence as it did to President Roosevelt and his High Financial and Economic advisers, represents a successful compromise between central Planning and private enterprise. It is nothing of the sort; it is quite definitely and openly Stage I of the national Socialist Party of America's Plan for the socialisation of industry, beginning with a Public Superpower System, as published by Carl D. Thompson in 1923, and elaborated by H. S. Raushenbush, who published the terms 'Authority' and 'yardstick', in the sense now adopted in all T.V.A. literature, as early as 1927. Attempts to introduce this power authority directly having been blocked by Congress, advantage was taken of navigation and flood control as constitutional pegs on which to hang the power plan. The Socialist self-congratulation when this plan succeeded was quite open, and a comparison of the 1923 Plan for getting control of industry with the seven- T.V.A. plan for 1937 published in Public Ownership for that year places the matter beyond doubt. It has been thought wise to split up the seven-T.V.A. Bill into separate M.V.A., C.V.A., A.V.A. Bills, etc., but that is merely a matter of expediency.

Those who still imagine that the High Financial backing for the T.V.A. is incompatible with its Socialist origin, must think again, for the Financier-Socialist is the dominant figure in the modem world. Outside of America the people who approve of the T.V.A. are exactly those whom one would expect: for instance, on August 1, 1945 Professor Harold Laski (then Chairman of the Labour Party) announced in a broadcast to America that the programme of the then newly-elected Socialist Government of Great Britain "would follow the broad outline of the Tennessee Valley Authority Scheme. After that, I think, there is no room for the contention that the T.V.A. type of Planning is opposed to, or provides an alternative to, Socialism. It is what we have been getting.

Certainly we, in Great Britain, have been taught, since the war, what a central Power Authority can do to a people. In the days of the local Electricity Company a breakdown in supply was so rare as to be a major sensation, and the idea of a deliberate cutting off of current to consumers an impertinence which was not entertained by any respectable person. Bills and complaints were dealt with locally, and the Company was definitely the servant of the consumer. Now all agreements with the Regional Electricity Boards have a clause permitting them to make arbitrary cuts in current whenever they choose, which is invariably when the consumer needs it most. We have been commanded by the Minister of Fuel and Power when, and for what private purposes, we may use the appliances in our own homes; the use even of current from one's own wind vane to light a shop sign has been forbidden; the publication of periodicals, even of hand-duplicated editions, has been forbidden by the same Minister (though it is good to remember that The Social Crediter was one of the tiny handful of periodicals which ignored this completely illegal ban); supply has suddenly failed over huge areas owing to the 'tripping out' of power lines (whatever that may mean) and almost every storm cuts the overhead lines somewhere; all appliances in use in a locality have suddenly burnt out at white heat owing to a transformer defect (June 1949); bills come in three months late and all queries and complaints have to be dealt with by correspondence with an office 50 miles away, and the rates charged are arbitrarily and retrospectively varied, without notice to the individual consumer, so that he finds he has been charged some 50 per cent, more when consumption was heavy and at a lower rate when it is light. There is no redress against this; charges, as or coal, rail fares, all nationalised products, start to soar directly the State Monopoly takes over after a propaganda campaign promising cheapness and economy. That is the Power Monopoly at work.

In December 1945 the Council of Agriculture for Wales urged the setting up of a 'T.V.A.' for Wales, Professor A. W. Ashby, who moved the resolutions, stressing particularly the importance of cheap electricity for farming. The farmers of Scotland and Devonshire have by now been told openly that they cannot expect current from the Grid, unless they are willing, and can afford, to make a capital contribution, as the cost of transformers forbids the tapping of the Grid for anything less than a big centre of population, so that power lines continue to stride over farms and cottages lit with oil lamps; but it is a useful bait until it is found out. Then, in 1949, following the much wider Scottish Scheme, comes the hydro-electric Scheme for North Wales. The description which follows is quoted from a letter from Sir Norman Birkett in The Times, June 11, 1949:

"The scheme comprises almost the entire system of the North Wales mountain massif. It is proposed to take the waters of all the mountain ranges, either from the natural llyns or through new reservoirs, and to lead it by tunnels, by overhead pipes, and by open watercourses to power stations in the valleys. The effect will be to make the mountain llyns tame and artificial; to dry up the mountain sides and their streams and waterfalls; to introduce the harsh outline of dams, watercourses, and pipelines into a country whose beauty is in simplicity and wildness; and to scatter the mountains with the mass of spoil excavated from 50 to 60 miles of rock tunnelling. In the valleys the harm will be as great. There are 18 power stations proposed, many of these in places which have as great fame as they have beauty -"

It should be added that the annual power product of the whole scheme is estimated at the equivalent of 500,000 (later also given as 350,000 by the Minister of Fuel) tons of coal1--much less than a day's work in the mines, about a sixth of the product of the new steam power station at Staythorpe, about a tenth of miners' concessionary coal. £35,000,000 is to be spent on the Scheme, and most of the power will be transported to Merseyside and other industrial regions in England. Presumably the coal saved could be sent to the Argentine, and if Senor Peron is in a good mood, and the U.S.A. does not interfere, we might perhaps get a little meat for it. It is notorious that the British meat ration is little more than a feeble joke. Meanwhile there are in Wales 1,000,000 acres of hill land which, according to Professor Ellison could be improved to take 250,000 store cattle. About £6 millions is, however, considered ample as a subsidy for hill and marginal land for the whole of Great Britain. Anyone who suggested £35 millions for agricultural improvement in one district would not be be given a hearing; yet if that sum is available for power, why not for food? We need meat more than we need current. And we need the peace and serenity of a grand and unsuburbanised countryside more than either, in these crowded islands; but Mr. Hugh Dalton, who has seen Tennessee, says (Hansard, April 1, 1949) that artificial lakes with concrete retaining walls would have "an improved effect on the landscape" of Wales.

1 A strong probability of over-production and consequent redundancy in Britain's coalmining industry within the next few years'! (Manchester Guardian, September 6, 1949), which has, of course, been occupying the experts' minds for some time-i.e. while coal- saving arguments for the hydro-electric schemes were being used -has now suddenly emerged into the newspaper headlines, after a discussion on the subject at the British Association.

2 Moreover, fine coal with a high ash content millions of tons of which were at present discarded annually, would be perfectly suitable for chemical treatment. "-Dr. I. G. C. Dryden at the British Association, as reported in the Manchester Guardian, September 6, 1949.

3 Plans for a national water Monopoly are included in the programmes of all major, political parties. The Fabian Society, after an enquiry among its branches, finds that water supply is placed second in priority for nationalisation (after chemicals). Schemes for such major diversions as the pumping of Severn head waters into the London supply area are being openly canvassed. A spokesman of the Liberal Party, after an attack on nationalisation, including land nationalisation, declared that water was the only thing that the Liberal Party would nationalise. He is probably right that, from the point of view of central control, no more is necessary.

The argument is being used that coal is a multiple-purpose product (you can get chemicals2 from it) and therefore too valuable to use for power alone when water is available. But this is pure insanity. Whatever the uses of coal they are not in the same class as those of water, which is the first necessity of life, and an essential party of the structure of the land.3 Certainly most mountain regions provide sufficient hydroelectric power for the locality in a form which can be tapped with negligible diversion or interference with the water system, but to steal fresh water out of its channels for the single purpose of power production, drying out some, and flooding other, parts of the soil system, is about as sane as diverting a man's arteries through a radiator to warm the room. When fresh water is chosen and these plans to shackle it permanently pushed through in the face of the limitless resources of the tides, the wind and the sun, not to mention the alleged coming of atomic power in ten years, the policy behind it declares itself.

At the time of writing the outcome of this particular struggle for the North Wales Highlands is not obvious, but an attack shows all the usual features: first the holding up of T.V.A. as an example, then the flourishing of a huge capital sum, and of the employment it will give, to dazzle the local inhabitants, then the playing off of the country-loving townsman against the town-loving countryman, then the stigmatising as 'cranks' and 'extremists' of all who oppose the thing as a whole and. will not study the Plan carefully and start arguing about its details (e.g. whether to put power-lines underground, or paint the power stations green); for once the opposition has been got into that position it has, of course, lost the battle, and some petty concessions may be made.

The power stations and other engineering works appear to have been deliberately sited at all the famous beauty spots of North Wales. This, naturally, arouses violent protests from all who represent the country-going townspeople, and that in turn the resentment of the local country people who feel that the prospect of hard cash in their pockets is being sacrificed to 'mere' prettiness. At the present time a good deal of local opinion is falling over itself in its eagerness to sell its birthright for a share in the £35,000,000. There is still some unemployment in the valleys, the product of earlier booms in industrial development. No one seems to think that this Scheme will bring only another such boom, and that after a few years of navvying for the load population, (the skilled labour all coming from elsewhere) the tide will recede leaving a depressed area in its wake; or that the same money spent in improving the land would provide a permanent livelihood in its upkeep.

It is absolutely typical that this Plan for a major mauling of the landscape by a public agency should be applied to an area scheduled as a National Park, in which private persons will be restricted from making any alterations, such as erecting a sign or a hen coop, which might be thought to be out of keeping with the scenery, and that a Scheme for sprawling power plant over an agricultural area should follow immediately the imposition of vicious fines (called development charges) on individuals who make any improvement involving a change in the use of agricultural land. It's just one more case of 'drowning the floods', the cynical hypocrisy of the arguments in favour of preserving the countryside put forward to secure acceptance of the Town and Country Planning Acts and the National Parks Act is thereby revealed.

From 'the point of view of the industrial districts which are to receive the current, quite apart from the waste involved in transportation, it means that their homes and industries can be controlled from a source outside the influence of local feeling and action. This method, control by an international power monopoly through a transmission Grid supplied from outside the zones in question, was in fact suggested for the control of the German people shortly after be War by Harold G. Moulton (President of the Brookings institution) and Louis Marlio, in their book The Control of Germany and Japan and was shown to have many advantages over the more blatant military and police methods.

The ultimate, and not at all remote, conclusion of the matter, if the intentions of the Planners are carried out, is quite openly stated by Julian Huxley (later the first Secretary-General of U.N.E.S.CO.) in The Architectural Review, as long ago as June, 1943, and quoted, with evident appeal, by Lilienthal, in his book; T.V.A.-Democracy on the March (Penguin Edn., 1944; p. 174): "… Studies," writes Huxley, "are being made of how a set-up of general T.V.A. type could be adapted to serve as an international instead of a national agency (thus among other things under- and 'transcending nationalist sovereignties', as the T.V.A. undercuts and 'transcends States' rights and boundaries)…"

That seems sufficiently clear!

VII

A time comes, though it seems a long time in coming, when people shed their illusions and seek for reality, how-ever unwelcome or unfamiliar it may be, as offering the only hope of a way out of their predicament. The 'reality' to which most people have been conforming is a 'reality' invented and imposed first of all by the creators and controllers of financial credit (the 'reality' for instance, of the great Depression of the 1930's or the dollar 'crisis') and secondly and increasingly by the Planners and Regulators and Dictators of the modem State. But when this pseudo-reality diverges so widely from the real nature of things as to jeopardise the survival of the race, then a revolution - a turning back to reality - becomes vitally necessary. Indeed, not merely a turning back, but a binding back (re-ligion). In this sense a revolution in social affairs corresponds to, and arises from, the conversion of the individual - in both cases a turning round - not merely 'back' but right round so as to face in the opposite direction, for the pseudo organism of the modern political world is rapidly assuming the form of an inversion of a real, sane, and Christian Society, since between these two positions no equilibrium appears possible.

This inversion permeates the whole of politics, just as politics is now permeating the whole of life, and it is the clue to an understanding of the situation, and of the nature of spiritual forces which are in conflict. The tragedy is that these words, religion and conversion, are commonly interpreted in so restricted a sense that they are supposed to apply only to the 'private' lives of the people, i.e., to that field of free action which is left to us after the politicians have taken the rest away; either that, or they are inverted to mean binding back again to the pseudo-reality of current social thinking. As for the word 'revolution', it is commonly used by Communists, Collectivists, and One-Worlders, to mean the inevitable culmination of social and economic forces, which is about as revolutionary as, after getting onto a train to Manchester and staying on it, to arrive at Manchester. 'Progress', again, now means drifting with the tide (or the 'trend'); "you cannot stand in the way of progress" nowadays it is not something which has to be 'made'. 'Re- action' which is a sign of life, is now taken to mean a sign of death; and 'The People' and 'The Common Good' are the antitheses of the people and the common good.

Much of this inversion of meanings is no doubt the unconscious result of the prevailing methods of thought, which are so obviously driving us to destruction, but a good deal of it is the product of deliberate propaganda. The hallmark of it is always the same, a lack of integrity, an inverted relationship between what is said and what is done, between the alleged or implied aims, and the real ones. Nearly always, also, there is the old trick of the Accuser, the attributing of his own evil intentions to his opponents. All this, backed by every resource of cleverness and publicity which money can buy, has been successful in creating a mental atmosphere in which the essential revolution is difficult to accomplish, and in misleading it and causing it to revert to the prevailing fatal direction. Nevertheless, it is making progress!

As a key example--a sort of text-book in the art of misleading the public with centralist propaganda in the guise of decentralisation, Mr. Lilienthal's book, T.V.A.-Democracy on the March (Penguin Books, 1944) is worthy of attention. (All quotations which follow are from this book, unless otherwise stated).

If we are to believe only what Mr. Lilienthal writes, and not what he is, and the policy be is and has been carrying out, he out-does the present writer in most of his enthusiasms. He starts by seeking to dispel the fog of words by seeing the reality behind the words. He ardently believes in true democracy, in experts being held accountable for results, in The People's Dividend (heading of Chapter 5) in care for the soil and the water system, in the avoidance of any sort of coercion or tyranny or bureaucracy or 'managerialism' or materialism, and above all he believes in decentralisation to the limit, down to the grass-roots. His book is littered with the word 'policy' (it occurs ten times on page 141); he shows familiarity with the concept of the economic vote ("Customers, so the idea runs, hold a kind of daily plebiscite"-p. 102); he seeks to use the machine to promote the freedom of the individual, and the things of the spirit; he quotes Quadragesimo Anno to this effect (p. 188); he denies the inherent wickedness of man, and believes in the redemption of faith through works (p. 190).

Now this is a combination of ideas peculiar to one body of thought, Social Credit, which Mr. Lilienthal of course does not mention, but it is interesting and encouraging to see that he finds it expedient to adopt this disguise, in view of the almost complete lack of publicity which Social Credit has received since 1939. For it is a disguise, though only to those who are unfamiliar with this set of ideas. The suggestion that Mr. Lilienthal is some sort of an unacknowledged social crediter is too obviously the reverse of the truth to be entertained; and even if the facts did not belie it, the book itself carries evidence of its lack of integrity.

In fact, it starts on the cover with the title: Democracy on the March-with its suggestion of a brassy fanfare and of The Masses on the Move, its superficial appeal and fundamental dishonesty. As if we did not know that before the people - you and I and the others - can 'march' we must surrender our freedom, and 'Democracy' becomes a mere figment! There is much truth in the witticism that a more honest title would be "Democracy on the Run." There is, however, a certain 'integrity' in its literal sense both about the title and the whole book, provided each key word is taken in its perverted, and to most people, occult, sense. Thus T.V.A.-Democracy on the March carries very much the same meaning as the 'British' Planners meant when they said that only in war or under threat of war would their plans become acceptable. That is very true; and we have seen that from start to finish, from Muscle Shoals to the 'Atom' Bomb, war and preparation for war have had plenty to do with the T.V.A.

To counteract the militant effect of the title we have inside the cover, the phrase 'grass-roots democracy'. Despite the natural enquiry which it raises just how 'grass-roots democracy' can 'march', it is a clever phrase, and Mr. Lilienthal repeats the adjective 'grass-roots' with almost incredible frequency. It carries a very powerful suggestion. Especially to people intelligent enough to know the importance of grass roots to the soil structure, of real, decentralised, honest-to-God, down-to-earth democracy, based upon detailed, local, love and care for the land; and if we are to believe him, there never was anything, anywhere, quite so decentralised, democratic, down to the individual, and grass-rooty as Tennessee, once the T.V.A. had descended upon it and decentralised and democratised it.

Taking the grass roots literally, one naturally thinks of them when one reads all about the land restoration, conservation, afforestation and so on; one does not so naturally think of them when one reads about the Great Lakes of the South with their 9,000 mile coastline and their blue waters bedecked with steamers, yachts, bathing belles and game fish, rolling where the grass once rooted. But let us get these things in proportion. Up to 1944 the total investment in 'river development' is given (p. 46) as $700,000,000-that is, largely in drowning grass roots. ''During the [same] ten year period the net expense of T.V.A.'s land, restoration and all other development work [thy italics] has been $39,800,000; in addition $8,383,000 has been spent on fertiliser plants.. . "(p. 48). Let us be generous and say 5 per cent of the sum spent on drowning grass roots has been spent on restoring them. These quotations, by the way, are taken from Chapter 5-The People's Dividend!

1 "For electric power is the life blood of modern warfare. Take aluminium for example. This valley's power has produced a major part of the aluminium for American aircraft - at one critical stage of the war more than half –and aluminium is mostly the product of electric power: as much electricity goes into one big bomber as the average household could consume in four hundred years". (pp. 26-27).

But of course, his grass-roots are 'mostly intended in a metaphorical sense, as we see in Chapter 9-Democracy at the Grass Roots; For the People and By the People,- which starts with a quotation from Walt Whitman, about the greatness of the individual. Here we learn that "the satisfaction of elementary physical needs is not enough. A man wants to feel important… that he is a needed and useful part of something far bigger [my italics] than he is." (p. 71). This 'something', it is clear, is not, as you might think, God, or the Kingdom of Heaven, or even the mere Universe, but the Tennessee Valley Authority itself.

"This hankering to be an individual [Mr. Lilienthal's italics] is probably greater to-day than ever before." And so Mr. Lilienthal, with his T.V.A. and his billion dollars does not hesitate to confer individuality upon the Southern hill farmer. This, we read, is to be done by using democratic methods, by generously allowing, it would seem for the first time, "widespread and intimate participation of the people in the development of their valley," thus giving "a renewed sense that the individual counts." Indeed (p. 73):

The necessities of management make it mandatory. Efficiency, In the barest operational sense, requires it. There is nothing in my experience more heartening than this: that devices of management which give a lift to the human spirit turn out so often to be the most 'efficient' methods. Viewed in any perspective there is no other way… It is the people or nothing.

Later on, however, we read: "This job must be done, this task of changing our physical environment through science and the machine" (p. 189) and again (p. 191): "The physical job will be done. If not democratically, it will be done in an anti-democratic way." So it is dear, that 'democracy' has nothing to do with deciding what shall, be done, but only how it shall be done. (We seem to have met this before).

On page 182 we are given the alternatives: "remote control and extreme centralisation" or "decentralised administration of central policies". This latter is the New Democracy of the T.V.A. and its imitators.

Mr. Lilienthal rebutts with horror the 'cynical' thesis of Professor Burnham, who singles out the T.V.A. as an obvious example of the Managerial Revolution. One gathers if such a thing occurs it will be Professor Burnham's fault for suggesting such wickedness. It should be clear that the methods of T.V.A. provide the effective antidote (presumably these include the devices which give a lift to the human spirit, and make a man feel important). On the other hand Mr. Lilienthal deeply deplores the growing contempt of "politics" which he attributes to "defeatists about democracy" and reactionary forces generally. He will not have a word against "the role of politics in the fixing of basic policies." "... if the institution of politics becomes discredited, the enemies of democracy have won an important Victory." (p. 164). Presumably by "the institution of politics" he can only mean the prevailing system of manipulating the anonymous majority vote, which is thus seen to be essential to what he means by ‘democracy.’

Democracy, then, (brand Lilienthal) consists in the "DECENTRALISED ADMINISTRATION OF CENTRAL POLICIES" which in turn are decided upon by "the institution of politics," i.e. by those who succeed in securing majority figures at an election. Let us pursue this idea a little further.

Let us suppose (if the idea is not too far fetched) that the central policy, supported by an over 90 per cent vote of The People, involves the expropriation (for the Common Good, as defined by the Government) of all Jews, and the imprisonment and gassing of some of them. 'Democracy' will then consist in getting everybody to participate with a will, to feel Big and important, and use their brains and initiative in carrying it out. But perhaps my example is tactless. Let us suppose then that the central policy, supported by a 99.9 per cent, vote of The People, with brass bands, banners, cheers, songs and slogans, involves the expropriation' of some other category of persons, say all farmers or peasants living in a certain area (according to the progress of the Plan for farm collectivisation) who employ labour or have more than one cow or five chickens. Then of course Democracy (on the March) will consist in getting people to develop their individuality and initiative in carrying this out with zest and gusto. But doubtless this is unthinkable! So let us suppose, (if the imagination does not boggle) that the central policy involves, among other things, a Plan for the dispossession and eviction from their homes and lands of, say, 56,000 people who live in certain valleys needed for flooding (for the Common Goods of course, and in case they might get flooded out, and to save the soil, and just incidentally, to get power for bombers and atomic bombs). Then of course Democracy (at the Grass Roots) consists in adopting the 'devices of management' which will 'bring the people in and make them co-operate cheerfully.' And that, as it happens, is precisely what Mr. Lilienthal says it is.

As for the accountability for results, which, is represented as one of the chief 'democratic' features of the autonomous (and totalitarian) Corporation, it is of a type with which we are now bitterly familiar in Great Britain, where redress for an injustice (e.g. overcharging on one's electricity bill) can be obtained, only by organising a majority in Parliament, instead of, as formerly, by ringing up the local Company. The power companies which the T.V.A. is putting out of business with its unlimited tax funds are full of complaints that its accountancy is of an unprecedented, and privileged, type. To begin with it has complete freedom from federal taxation, and as regards local taxation is in the he" position of being able to assess its own payments "far short of the original claims of the local tax bodies," and above all it can 'allocate' whatever sums it thinks fit to various purposes such as flood control, navigation, education, and so forth. Its general 'accountability' consists in the submitting of lengthy reports and accounts to Congress, and being made the subject of debate, and investigation by Congressional Committees. One Committee sat for a year, and published a report of 7,500 printed pages, which few people can possibly have read-but let that pass. When it comes to legal liability we have already noted the P.E.P. remark that "The large funds known to be behind the T.V.A. . . . give it, however, an immensely strong bargaining position"; There are also the 'real' results, such as the fact that in the drought year of 1942 the power companies had to come to the aid of T.V.A. with power from their steam plant; and there are the 'results' in the matter of flooding and dispossession, and atom' bombs and so forth which have been sufficiently noticed, and the poor results in respect of farm income and farm electrification, as compared with the other Southern States; but there is no accountability for this sort of result. What Lilienthal substitutes for genuine judgment by results, as criticised by responsible individuals, normally through the economic vote, is merely the success or otherwise of his Public Relations Department in inducing people to like what they are given.

It would seem that the people have had very little choice in the matter; what with the 3,500 different books, pamphlets and articles, the special mobile library service, often supplying the only reading, the broadcasts, the schools, the adult education, and the special valley-wide, and nation-wide programmes to stimulate demand for whatever the T.V.A. has to sell; and above all the hope of jobs and a share in the seemingly inexhaustible flow of money. This is indeed management: management and control not so much at the grass roots as at the very roots of human will and intelligence.

Since it was the main fulcrum of the T.V.A.’s land programme, the methods used to create a demand for phosphatic fertilizer provide a critical example. It is well known that phosphate deficiency, in relation to the crops which have to be grown on agricultural soils, is so widespread as to be almost universal, and that this is notoriously acute and limiting on pasture lands which have to bear a heavy drain of phosphates in Animal form. It is also apparent that this problem is too great to be solved, except locally and temporarily, by digging up the relatively few deposits of phosphate which are known to exist, and spreading them over the earth’s surface.

The phosphate, and other minerals, are lost in two ways; as human food, and by leaching into the subsoil. They could be restored, together, by such, methods as suitable treatment of city sewage to provide an organic manure, by the introduction of deep-rooted forest into the agricultural rotation, and perhaps under suitable conditions by subsoiling. Such methods offer some hope of restoring the lost equilibrium; the supplying of one deficient mineral on a big scale in pure concentrated soluble form gives quick and spectacular results, and a virtual certainty of further disequilibrium.

The position in Tennessee, before the T.V.A., is described from the viewpoint of 'the fertilizer industry' in these terms (p. 98): "In the past we have tried to get them to buy 'high-analysis! (i.e. concentrated) fertilizer, but they don't want it; what they want is the mixed [my emphasis] and low-analysis fertilizer. And what the customer wants we must supply." Not so however, the T.V.A., which concluded that "farmers could be persuaded to use concentrates." To do this it had to inaugurate its valley-wide and nation-wide educational programme, and to demonstrate by supplying superphosphate free to 'demonstration farms' the quick returns which can be obtained in this way. In return the farmer had to submit a new management plan for his farm, in writing, and to allow it to be used as a schoolroom' for his neighbours. As a result the sales of concentrated phosphate reached astonishing heights, which is regarded as a great achievement in unified Planning of resources; although on p. 98 we read that "the raw material is exhaustible, and when exhausted is irreplaceable."

Now you cannot 'demonstrate' anything but quick returns, lightning results, 'magic' cures; you cannot 'demonstrate' the results of long experience, or of real wisdom, because a demonstration is necessarily a set piece narrowly limited in time. Some quick returns are, a valid indication of long-term results, but not many; and every wise father tries to educate his son not to judge by them, but to look further, and deeper. So here we have the process of education in reverse; the farmer who prefers the more balanced and slower-acting fertilizer being conditioned to accept the quick-acting 'concentrate' which is cheaper to transport, and conveniently uses electric power to produce. This is the process of learning by object lessons to which Mr. Lilienthal refers, in a less appropriate context, on page 179. We are not surprised at his familiarity with it.

Meanwhile, whatever may happen in another ten years' time, it is true that the soil needs, and responds to, phosphate, and in this, and in other ways relating to soil conservation, the people have been permitted, under T.V.A., to do a certain amount towards arresting the decay of their uplands, which they were prevented from doing before by one thing only, the manipulation of finance. This point is more or less conceded by Lilienthal. He writes (pp,73-74):

They knew, almost all of them, what they wanted. They knew that what was needed was to increase the productivity of their land, to heal the gullies, to keep water on the land, and prevent the soil from washing away…

The farm experts... had known most of the technical answers to the separate problems of soils, of fertilizer, of terracing, and had known them for a good many years. They were competent in their special fields, and devoted to their work. Nevertheless farm income in the valley as in the whole Southeast continued at a low ebb; in some counties the average cash income for a farm was less than 150 dollars a year. Soil losses were appalling.

It even claimed p. 62) that these 'new' methods of farming had shown displaced people "how a better living could be made from the uplands than older methods had provided on the river-bottom farms from which they had moved".

The extraordinary thing is that this should be adduced in favour of what the T.V.A. has done; it shows the immense influence of false emphasis, repeated until it has a hypnotic effect, and ordinary common sense is swamped. If this can done to the uplands, with a small proportion of the funds found for T.V.A., what then could have been done for the valleys? It is so typical that under Planning the more fertile valley lands should be given to the fishes, and the uplands to the men displaced from them, and that we should then be invited to applaud "a thriving industry that in 1943 produced six million pounds of edible fish, " (p. 23). "It all goes to show" as some wit remarked, hat God could do if He had money!"

VIII

In the end, as it was in the beginning, it comes to be a matter of credit, that is, confidence, or, to use a shorter word, faith; the credit that was not given to the people of the Tennessee Valley, but was given to the Tennessee Valley, Authority; and the faith that did not, and did, underlie that credit. Only the very dimmest-witted comrades, the sort, that actually think in terms of slogans put into their mouths by cleverer people, imagine that they believe in the materialist interpretation of history –t hat is, that the initiative in human affairs lies with the inorganic forces - and if they did with more than the surface of their rather shallow minds believe any such thing, they would at once stop trying to influence the course of events by shouting slogans, which are, after all, spiritual and non-material things.

Mr. Lilienthal's book, at any rate, is bursting with confidence; confidence in the Big Job of the Century, and in the people - all the people - from the Chairman downwards, who are carrying it out. People who visit Tennessee tend to come away sharing the same sort of confidence, and slightly dazed by the immense gleaming dams, the vast lakes, the wooded slopes, the new throbbing industries, the great 'Atomic City' (with the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Bikini in the background); in short, immensely impressed by the great demonstration of Power. But whose Power? Not the people's Power (democracy). They can participate in producing it, but they have no control over it; that is the prerogative of their Managers, and among them, not the least, of Mr. Lilienthal in his later guise, and of his Bankers' Committee. For what he means by 'decentralisation' is that the central policy, the policy of himself and his fellow-Planners, shall be carried right down, by psychological and propagandist measures and 'devices of management', until it is firmly embedded in every heart and mind; only then will it be safe from the challenge of unpredictable initiative. That in fact, is centralisation carried to its logical and absolute limit.

There are two sorts of faith, and two sorts of confidence: the sort which is based on reality; and the sort which is merely a 'device of management' intended to inspire a like confidence of the confidence man, the 'smart' salesman, and the 'successful' politician. This latter sort forms a cover for a contempt for its victims, and a pessimism as deep as Hell.

But what are we to make of the specific denials, at the end of the book, of any belief in the inherent wickedness of ordinary people, or the superiority of the managerial elite? The 'managerial' attitude declares itself from every page, verbal statements to the contrary notwithstanding; the belief in the inherent wickedness, or at least suicidal lunacy, of Man (other than Planners) is implicit in the imposition, by whatever means, of a centralised Plan, which is claimed to have a moral purpose (pp. 17, 189); for otherwise, why not give the billion dollars to the people of the Valley and leave them to do the planning each in his own proper sphere and property? Because that would never do! Any Planner, any socialist, any liberal, any conservative, any Progressive-minded person, almost any person of 'education' nowadays will tell you that that would mean chaos, anarchy, laissez-faire, selfish interests would run riot, the law of the jungle would prevail and result in misery, devastation, destruction and catastrophe. The clichés mount up, but they all mean the same thing, that all natural, private, individual, or even 'sectional' or 'parochial' interests and policies are 'selfish' and, in their aggregate results, fatal to the human race. At the time of writing, Sir Alexander Gray has been telling the Economics Section of the British Association at Newcastle that "If the new world into which we are moving is to work it will demand… in particular the suppression of self".…. "And it is not I but Lenin who says so." And such statements from prominent people could be repeated a thousand-fold.

Now it is nonsense to pretend that an attitude which demands the suppression of self (quite a different thing from 'losing' the self, i.e. forgetting it in its use) can deny the inherent wickedness of the self, that is, if the concepts of 'good' and 'bad' are allowed to have any real relation to results. For if the belief were only in the corruption of a self inherently good though tainted with original sin, the course of action demanded would not be directed against the self, already sufficiently hard pressed, but against its Adversary, and the sources of its corruption, which, in the modern world are becoming more and more obviously powerful and centralised. To pursue this far would take me beyond the scope of the subject; but it is interesting to remind ourselves that the very word 'selfish' was, according to Archbishop Trench1 new minted by the Puritan writers of the seventeenth century. Up to that time Christians had got along on the injunction to love, their neighbours as themselves. This becomes a little awkward to carry out when the self is 'suppressed', but I suppose that when the self has reached the stage of being a statistical unit - or, an entry in various card indices, without 'private' or 'vested' interests of its own, the injunction may be fulfilled by showing an equally impersonal willingness to sacrifice oneself or one's neighbour to The Common Good.

1 English Past and Present, Lecture II, Everyman Edition, 1936; p. 68. In a long footnote we read: "A passage from Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams, Part II, p. 144, marks the first rise of the word, and the quarter from whence it arose: 'When they [the Presbyterians] saw that he was not selfish (it is a word of their own new mint), etc.' In Whitlock's Zootomia (1654) there is another indication of it as a novelty, p. 364: 'If constancy may be tainted with this selfishness (to use our new wordings of old and general actings).'-It is he who in his striking essay, The Grand Schismatic, or Suist Anatomised, puts forward his own words, 'suist,' and 'suicism,' in lieu of those which have ultimately been adopted".

We cannot help wondering how the course of history might have been affected if the Planners of the seventeenth century had not been allowed to provide their successors with this weapon of perversion in the word 'selfish,' and if Whitlock's far juster alternatives, with their suggestion acquired since from the still later word 'suicide,' of losing one's life through loving or saving it, had instead dominated the thinking on the subject.

On the other hand it is quite clear that this assumed wickedness of the self cannot apply to the Planners, or else their Plans might be condemned as 'selfish' and the whole idea of central Planning would fall to the ground. The idea that the managerial elite is of superior morality, as well as intelligence, to the selfish common man is undeniably implicit in the whole mentality of central Planning, for to deny it would lead the Planners to the position of openly imposing their own 'selfish' plans upon the world, a stage which is acknowledged only, when power has become so habitually centralised that the opinions of the multitude become a matter of indifference to the rulers.

At present we have the obvious fact that, as always, 'any young man with an eye to the main chance' (i.e. a suist, or 'selfish' person) will be well advised to throw himself wholeheartedly on the side on which power, money and influence are to be obtained; and that side, it can scarcely be denied, is the side of the Planners and the Managers. On that side he can wield the word 'selfish' against all who oppose him and his ideas, and if he does so with sufficient zeal and ability he may obtain a position of relative wealth, comfort and privilege in the community. Only in the unlikely event of his turning against central Planning, and giving up his chances of promotion, if nothing more, to pursue some deeper satisfaction, such as adherence to the truth may give, will he himself be accused of pursuing his 'selfish' aims to the detriment of The Common Good. It is just one more case of inversion.

Another is implicit in the use of the word 'Planning' itself. If by 'planning' we mean the application of the mind to transforming the will into action - a process fundamental to the development of the human character, and to be found in simple form even in animals - then 'Planning,' in the modern sense, is the usurpation of this function by a few people by the use of power, and more especially, and most dangerously, the use of psychological power on minds in the mass, thus interfering with the development of character at its core. 'Planning' therefore necessarily involves a disbelief in, planning, and a reduction to a minimum of the application of the human will and intelligence to the world in which we live.

That it is able to masquerade as the opposite of this is due to the substitution of a widely diffused 'pseudo-will', in fact the will of a few centrally placed persons, and the application of a widely diffused intelligence to it, for, the genuine integrated action of mind and will in the individual. (Attempts to confuse this with the legitimate action of mind on mind and the diffusion of ideas by their own power, and without the use of extraneous force, must be resisted) The result, however, is not merely an immense reduction in the amount of human will in operation (a sort of de-humanising of humanity) but a similar and devastating reduction in the amount and quality of intelligence. It is a matter of common experience that the agent of central policy is not in possession of his full powers, either of will or intelligence; indeed they are reduced in operation to a pitiful fraction of what he possesses as an individual, and often further diluted by diffusion within a collectivity, such as a committee. Consequently he will find himself acting in a way which is mentally deficient, and often sub-human, scarcely up to the standard of foresight and intelligence exhibited by the higher mammals, let alone the morality, which is the produce of integrated will and intelligence acting cumulatively over a long period.

Awareness of this leads to grave disturbance and discontent of mind in the persons concerned, a fact of which the Planners are well aware, and which they attempt to overcome by stimulating the pseudo-will to an inflated enthusiasm - so characteristic of totalitarian regimes in their early stages - which for a time effectively seals off the intelligence from the part affected, and enables the individual to co-operate, with an appearance of innocent approval, in the most vicious and insane behaviour: e.g. taxing, dispossessing, evicting, restricting and frustrating the will and action of other people through the application of compulsion, or threats of compulsion, in every possible way. But the division of mind is only driven deeper to the unconscious level, where it can produce a neurosis tending towards schizophrenia. The hope that this division of mind can be eliminated by the complete absorption of the individual will permanently and for the majority of mankind, into the central policy of a few men, thus restoring peace and an end to the necessity for compulsion, except against a minute 'anti-social' minority, is insane and wicked hope, impossible of fulfilment, but capable of the attainment of sufficient verisimilitude to lure onwards into ever-increasing conflict and misery. However far we have gone, the only possible escape lies in the opposite direction, in the liberation and re-establishment of the policy and powers of the total individual.

If the hand of Jefferson had not changed the 'inalienable right to life, liberty and property' of the Declaration of Independence to the abstract and occult phrase ,'life, liberty and pursuit of happiness'; if the forces of law and order in the United States had stood behind the total, inalienable right of one individual to his home (and whatever happiness he had found in it) in a central, critical part of the valley bottom, the whole T.V.A. Plan would have been impossible of fulfilment. Indeed if any right had been inalienable – the right of a religious community to worship in its chapel, the right of a single person to visit his father's grave2 or the right of a local newspaper to publish in its own locality, or the right of any tradesman or craftsman to retain his customers and goodwill - if any right at all had been enforced, the Plan would have fallen through. The idea that nothing could then have been done to improve the lot of Tennessee is fantastic nonsense; everything could have been done that needed doing, and in a way amenable to the wishes of the people who lived there. The only thing which would have been frustrated would have been the development of central power. But we know also that if that had happened the Valley would have been left to its fate; the money would not have been forthcoming. But that is quite another story!

2 Lilienthal, p. 62, cites it as an example of good management that the T.V.A. took the trouble to shift thousands of graves "which meant so much, though after the lapse of many years they were often quite empty", i.e. the new grave was not a grave, but a 'management device'.

Mr. Lilienthal, and Planners generally, are very much aware of the fatal nature to their purpose of the existence: of any inalienable rights (and there are no other rights and are for ever concerned to attack such vestiges of law and constitution as may preserve them. The usual device of confusion of opposites is not wanting, thus Mr. Lilienthal, p 146:

"The policies of lawmaking in the immediate past have been largely regulatory and negative: 'This shall not be done.' The atmosphere of the legislature has therefore been heavy with this regulatory spirit, expressed in carefully limited responsibility, lack of trust, and forever setting one man to watch and checkmate another."

"The tradition and climate of the skill of management, however, are remote from all such negation. Management is affirmative and initiatory: 'This is to be done.' It is in the process of defining, with skill and sense, what is to be done, and with it the fixing of responsibility for results … that you have the essence of the best modern management."

All perfectly true, and upside down in its implications; for under cover of an attack on bureaucracy, with which everyone will agree, is another on the proper function of the law which has been usurped and inverted by the bureaucrat, for which last, if we need it, we have the evidence of the late Lord Chief Justice Hewart in his book The New Despotism. It is undeniably the function of the law to set limits upon the encroachment on the freedom of individuals by others, and more especially by rulers and their agents, the bureaucrats. That is, in the case of infringement of certain fundamental rights, to say: "This shall not be done," and to ensure that there is a balance of powers in the Constitution, without which there can be no appeal against the Government, and no sanction against its agents, and all 'rights' will become concessions, alienable at will by the central Power.

Now bureaucracy is constantly infringing the law by its prohibitions on the action of individuals, and none the less though it usually (but by no means always) obtains the statutory support of the legislature in so doing. Its action at first is 'negative' because at first it is tied to the tradition of the law, and each prohibition is justified as a defence of freedom, but as the chief infringers of freedom, namely the Government and its agents, are usually left outside the prohibition the thing becomes more and more of a farce Since, in fact, what the bureaucrats are doing is introducing management under cover of the law, two things which are completely incompatible, the usual chaos and frustration occurs, and there are the usual two ways out of it; either to substitute 'positive' direction for the law, or to re-establish the law, and keep it and the legislature, away from management altogether, whether in direct or delegated form. But if the first course is adopted, it must be realised that that is the end of all rights for the individual. For in the last ... resort, management must be enforced. Normally, freedom is preserved, not by the right to resist management, but by right and the power to contract out. But when the Government is manager there is no contracting out (except at the heavy cost of abandoning one's homeland for another which may well be worse, and, if the management comes from a World Agency, - of abandoning this world).

It is a challenge that everyone must meet in his own mind. Are there any respects in which the rights of the individual are sacred, and take precedence over the claims of the State, the Common Good, or any other collective entity? Anyone who honestly believes that there are, cannot, at the same time, support the use of compulsion to enforce Social Planning for the Common Good. The two things are absolutely incompatible. Yet many well-meaning people, who still think that they believe in the Christian tradition in this respect, betray themselves by accepting, and even passing on, the debased currency in language and thought on this subject which is now being issued. How often have we heard something like this? "This Great Scheme for the common good will, we feel sure, be carried out by the voluntary co-operation of the vast majority of the People; but of course, we cannot allow it to be wrecked by a few recalcitrant objectors, and in the last resort compulsion must and will be used." Then, when only a few people have the courage to stand out against it, they are told everyone else came in voluntarily; why are they so unreasonable? Notice the complete inversion of the word voluntary to mean action taken under threat of compulsion. How many Christian people will accept this as 'reasonable,' without noticing that they are being detached from their beliefs by gradual stages? "After all," they say, "compulsion is used only 'in the last resort'; very often it has not to be used at all". But this last is untrue; it is used all the time, for compulsion is the use of fear. It is 'the last resort' which underlies everything and determines where the faith lies; and in 'the last resort' the faith of these people is the faith of the Communist. This reveals itself even more clearly when they ask, in a bewildered way, how OW scheme can be carried out, any Society can be run, if compulsion may not be used to prevent it from being ruined by a few isolated non co-operators. That shows where their faith lies. The very idea of a free society based upon Christian principles has become unreal to them; it does not occur to them that any scheme which can be brought toppling down by a few objectors, even by one single objector, is Unsound, because it is totalitarian; it must engulf everything or perish.

That 'love,' i.e. free, willing association, forms the only possible basis for efficient human co-operation--incomparably more efficient than fear of compulsion--is a fact which after nearly two millennia of Christian thought was beginning to be taken for granted. Even now, even in a matter into which Compulsion enters as much as it does into warfare, there is little doubt among military experts about the relative efficiency of a voluntarily enlisted as against a conscript army; yet, for the first time in our history we in Great Britain rely for our defence upon general conscription during peace time, i.e. when it comes to practice the faith is in compulsion. It is the same in every sort of Planning. The Planners themselves, by always seeking the maximum of voluntary co- operation, acknowledge its greater efficiency, but in 'the last resort' it is fear which they rely upon, and most Christians nowadays appear to agree with them. That is to say, they believe that fear, and not love, is the last resort, the ultimate reality of the Universe. Injunctions such as "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you" are not to be interpreted as statements of social fact. In Planning they can be ignored as compared with 'real facts' such as the climate, the contours and steepness of the hills, the number of the population and so on. The work of two thousand years of Christendom is being undone.

IX

The main origin of that immense failure of faith in mankind, and in the whole order of nature, which characterises the modern world is to be found in the monstrous object lesson or demonstration which has apparently 'proved' to the whole civilised world that laissez-faire, i.e., the will and instincts of the majority of people in a Christian country left free to operate within the law, results in chaos, misery and disequilibrium, leading to all the troubles which the world is now suffering, including destruction of the soil.

This could not have gained any degree of acceptance were it not for an open conspiracy to ignore or suppress or .. place in a wrong relation the known and relevant facts which make it untenable; namely that at all recent times financial considerations and anxieties have dominated the minds of most individuals and to a large extent controlled their actions in the economic field; and that banks create, the means of payment out of nothing, and as a debt repayable to themselves, thus having in their hands an ideally centralised, anonymous, and all -pervasive instrument of Planning of literally mathematical precision.

In the face of these facts the current political arguments for and against Planning are devoid of reality, and even of common intellectual honesty. The whole case against the chaos and frustration now being brought about by central Planning (i.e., by the abortion of normal individual planning) collapses at the first jeering reference to the even more bitter state of frustration and misery which preceded it, so long as the implication is accepted, as it is, that this was attributable to 'private enterprise', laissez faire, or the lack of central Planning. The facts are perfectly well known; the Depression was a money Depression, not a real wealth depression, the poverty was money-poverty, the frustration was money-frustration, and the ordinary individual had no more control over it, or, influence upon it, or responsibility for it than he has now over the ever-current dollar 'Crisis.'

It is not very difficult to pursue these facts a little further, to follow up their consequences, and to come to a definite conclusion as to where the main responsibility lies; all that is required is normal intelligence, and some degree of mental integrity. To fail to do this, to ignore these very relevant facts, or to close the mind to the consequences, renders the anti-Planning position untenable, and leads inevitably to some form, of Socialism, such as that adopted quite openly by the Conservatives ("We are all Socialists now!"). In doing so they have, of course, sacrificed their integrity and destroyed themselves as a moral force of any strength.

On the other hand the bolder proponents of central Planning, the Communists (and the Nazis in their time) have gained considerable prestige and following by openly breaking the conspiracy of silence and by making constant and extensive use of a sufficient selection of the truth of the matter to serve their purpose of discrediting rival claimants to power, while suppressing anything which might tend to attach the same, or greater, discredit to their own Group. The confusion of mind wrought by these people is due just as much to the discredit they throw upon the truth they find it convenient to tell as it is to the lies which they mix with it. With so many Power Groups all striving to carry out broadly the same policy and all seeking to distract attention from their own aims by pointing a finger of scorn at their rivals, it is not surprising that their essential unity should be lost sight of; yet it is a fact that the policy of centralisation of power carries within itself the seeds of endless conflict, budding off warring sections everlastingly like the branches of an evolutionary tree. Since a balance of equal and separated powers is ruled out, and there is room for only one Group, and ultimately for only one man, at the top, constant conflict is inevitable.

With the example of Communism before our eyes, splitting off Trotskyists and Titoists in bitter enmity with the main body, yet with no fundamental disagreement about the main policy, it is now easier to understand than it used to be that the major Power Groups which have recently been tearing the world with their struggle, and those which are continuing to do so, have all a family relationship. There is such a relationship between the conceptions of the Herrenvolk, the Chosen People, and the Conquering Class; between the Welfare State of Germany, Russia, Britain, and New Deal America; between the T.V.A. with its water control, its Great Dams, its power for aeroplanes and 'atom' bombs, and its counterpart in Russia, in part carried out with the aid of T.V.A. experts and advisers, with its 'magnificent' plan for "bringing the principal rivers and water resources of the Soviet Union into one inter-locking system under human control ... " 1 and, incidently, its now acknowledged power of also producing atomic destruction.

1 G.V. Jacks and R. O. White, The Rape of the Earth p. 289.

2 The Commemoration Oration, King's College, London, Dec. 11, 1945.

3 The Recorder (London), September 15, 1945.

4 Daily Telegraph, October 29, 1945.

No better example of the working of the policy of central Planning, aiming at World Government, common to all the Power Groups, could be taken than that of the production of the first 'atomic' bombs. The 'scientific' work was done by a sort of international 'freemasonry' of 'atomic scientists' engaged in 'compartmentalised' research, the object of which was known only to a few at the 'top.' Among these, Italians, Germans, and Jews were given honourable mention by Dr. Julian Huxley.2 Here are the names of some of the British scientists engaged on atomic research during the late War: 3 Drs. Frisch and Rotblat, Professor Peierls, Dr. Fuchs, Drs. Bretscher, Halban and Kowarslki; Mr. Churchill being kept informed on latest developments by Lord Cherwell (Professor Lindemann). Imperial Chemical Industries, and The Mond Nickel Co. Ltd., carried out much of the essential preparational work. The original discovery of the chain reactions was made by Prof. Otto Hahn in Berlin, but, according to Professor Einstein4 "It was Lise Meitner who provided the correct interpretation, and escaped from Germany to place the information in the hands of Niels Bohr," (who took it to the U.S.A. during his visit from January to May 1939). Einstein himself writes "my part in it was quite indirect." After the defeat of Germany the German 'atomic' scientists appear to have been divided between the Eastern and Western Powers, a considerable proportion of them falling into Russian hands. Considering that the Germans were reputed not to be very far behind when they were defeated, it is not surprising that the Russians are now able to alarm the Americans with heavy atomic explosions, or that Oak Ridge, Tennessee, now has its counterpart in the new Ural City of Atomgrad.

It is not inappropriate to call these people 'a sort of international freemasonry' because, in a sense, their work constitutes the very essence and end-term of the methods of freemasonry, the purpose of the whole thing being wrapped in secrecy, though understood to be of immense and beneficial importance, the secrets of each grade being unknown to all below it, and the actual outcome known up to the last moment only to a very few of the highest initiates. Equally, the Communist Party with its 'cell' system and its centrally controlled network of agents spying upon each other in secrecy, might be taken as the example, all the more because, for the most part, 'atom scientists seem to be 'left-wingers' almost to a man. The significant thing about the writer's former colleague, Dr. Alan Nunn May, who judged it right secretly to communicate the technical information at his disposal to the Russians, is that he seemed to be a very normal and typical example of the type of scientist engaged in his war-time occupation, differing only in his greater pleasantness and competence, and the restraint with which he expressed his not unusually socialistic opinions. The amount of sympathy which was expressed when he was sentenced was very considerable.

Considering that at the top of the tree we have had Mr. Lilienthal and his Commission of New-Dealer-Financiers, under constant attack for their appointing of communists and fellow-travellers to technical posts under them, and, on the other side of the world, the only other 'atomic' team to have obtained 'success' is known to be in the U.S.S.R., it is fairly clear that if, as seems probable, a large part of the human race is to be blasted out of life by 'atomic' explosions, it will be as the result largely of the work of 'progressive' left-wing scientists, systematically and centrally Planned, organised and compartmentalised; and whether or not this much-advertised fate is actually in store for us, it is now a fact that the entire world is being systematically terrorised by the threat of it.

The appearance, not long after the massacre at Hiroshima, of an American Committee of Atomic Scientists (fol1owed by an Atomic Scientists Association in London, with similar views) which proceeded to threaten the world with an atomic bomb 1000 times more powerful than those so far used, and to demand a central World Government, (to ensure that the threat should be unchallenged) did nothing to rid these gentlemen of their responsibility; but it is an undoubted fact that the consequences of their secret labours were a profound shock to the majority of them. It is not here that we need look for the ultimate and malignant evil which is undoubtedly at work in the world to produce such results. Laying aside the wholesale and loutishly indiscriminate nature of the destruction caused by an atomic explosion; the peculiarly obscene possibilities as regards interference with and mauling of the human generative cells go far beyond the extremity of evil purpose or intention among the vast majority of mankind; yet these effects of radiation have been well known to occur for many years. Even if the facts are not as foul as they are painted, it is quite clear that someone is determined that we shall all believe that they are.

Apparently now even the atomic bomb is not at the bottom of the bottomless pit; items such as the following (from the Manchester Guardian, Sept. 10, 1949) are beginning to appear in the Press:

Dr. Brock Chisholm, the director general of the World Health Organisation, said here to-day that the atomic bomb had been made obsolete by a biological product, seven ounces of which was enough to kill I everyone in the world.

In an address to members of the World Union of Peace Organisations, a non-Governmental body affiliated to the United Nations, Dr. Chisholm said "The atomic bomb is obsolete. Relatively speaking it is child's play compared to biological weapons..."

Dr. Chisholm compared mankind's position with that of the brontosaurus, a prehistoric monster which became extinct because it could no longer adapt itself to its environment. He said:

"Man is now in the same position. He may or may not survive. It depends on whether he can change his behaviour pattern to exist under this new set of conditions."

"Only a few more years of present behaviour patterns will destroy the human race ..."

He said that there was a biological product in existence which, if spread extensively, killed on contact or if inhaled. "It can kill all living beings within six hours-and leave the area safe for troops to occupy within the 12 hours it takes to oxydise and disappear". Reuter.

Again, it matters comparatively little whether this is at present a physical fact, or merely somebody's wish- fulfilment, still on the way to becoming reality; the mental poison will work, whether or not the physical one does. What is quite certain is that it is not your wish, or my wish, or the wish of any of our neighbours. We are not likely to cook up this sort of thing in our back gardens; it has to be planned. And that means the imposition of the central will of a few people. No one can plan without a conscious purpose behind it, but where the Planning is directed towards this sort of thing the purpose is malignant beyond the point of sanity. We are all sinners, but chiefly in our acquiescence to such Planning and willingness to be controlled in masses for such purposes; we do not, we could not, consciously plan evils of such enormity as are being done in the world; but somebody Plans them, and will use us, as many of the atomic scientists were used, as blind tools to carry them out, that is, if we allow ourselves to be so used.

It is not primarily the 'behaviour pattern' of the planned which is threatening the survival of mankind, but the 'behaviour pattern' of the Planners, whose power has corrupted them almost beyond the understanding of ordinary people. But in so far as there is some truth in Dr. Chisholm's statement, that 'mankind' must change its behaviour to survive, the change must be in precisely the opposite direction to that urged by internationalists;-.e. away from central Planning and World Government, and towards the planning of our own lives, and the taking of responsibility for what we do.

Few of us are afraid of our neighbours so long as they are acting on their own responsibility; but when they become the agents of a central policy not their own, then indeed the prospect becomes terrifying; and to suggest that mankind must adapt its behaviour to the central policy of those who Planned the development of such instruments as the atomic bomb and that referred to by Dr. Chisholm is to suggest that the permanent supremacy of malignant evil is the sole condition for the survival of the human race.

All one can say in reply is that this view of the world is Satanic; that it is the reverse of the truth; but that if it were true the disappearance of the human race would be preferable.

In fact, since the evil nature of the sort of Planning mentioned above is undeniable, the erroneous view, is being assiduously spread that there are two sorts of centralised and

coercive Planning: the disastrous and wicked sort, and the beneficent sort (as exemplified by the T.V.A., and the Food and Agriculture Organisation) which will make fruitful the earth and bring peace and prosperity to mankind. The argument goes that once a centralised World Government has eliminated the possibility of war by establishing a monopoly of weapons and punishments so powerful and horrible that no one will dare to challenge them, then at last we shall have an era of freedom from Want and Fear and of beneficent Planning of the total unified resources of the Earth.

But as this study has attempted to show, in such a 'total' Planning agency as the T.V.A. the Planning of the land and its resources is inextricably mixed with Planning for war and destruction; it is, as its authors boast, a unified whole. There is only one sort of centralised Planning, and that aims always and everywhere and by whatever means - atom bombs, biological poisons, water-control, electricity control, land control- at the same thing, the permanent Overlordship of the Planners over the wills, the behaviour, and the lives of the planned.

The scale of the thing alone gives it away. Only a megalomaniac could entertain the idea that he could adequately plan the unified use of the resources of an area the size of Great Britain, or 'co-ordinate' the food or agriculture of the entire World, and the same applies equally, strongly to a Committee which imagines it could do these things. The delegation of details to subordinates has no bearing on the arrogance of this assumption. As it happens the powers of the human mind are severely limited by the location in one place at a time of the human body, and the efficient direction of an enterprise involving, say, 500 people is a sufficient test for most men of exceptional ability. Beyond that the director necessarily ceases to deal with men and with things, but deals instead with papers and with hypothetical units. The nature-of what he is doing changes entirely.

The same applies to the scale of the use of natural resources. All the things which are good on a small scale, in which they can strike a balance with their environment, are bad when the scale is such that they can only cripple and dominate it. This is perfectly well known to ordinary people; it is only the unbalanced who are able to ignore it, but of such are Planners and dictators made.

Note: November, 1950

Since this chapter was written events have heavily underlined it. The quotations are from the Manchester Guardian.

Dr. Fuchs, of the Harwell Atomic Research Establishment in Great Britain, and others in the U.S.A., have followed Dr. May in communicating 'atomic' information to Soviet agents. Dr. Pontecorvo, also of Harwell, has 'disappeared', presumably to the U.S.S.R. The Attorney-General, in prosecuting Dr. Fuchs, read an alleged statement by him which included the following (from the report of the trial, March 2,1950):

"I used my Marxian philosophy to establish in my mind two separate compartments, one in which I allowed myself to have friendships and personal relationships... I could be therefore, and was, quite happy with other people without fear of disclosing myself, because I knew the other compartment would step in if I approached the danger point.

Looking back now, the best way of expressing it seems to be to record it as 'controlled schizophrenia.'"

Before sentence Dr. Fuchs made a 'confession', so similar to those extracted at Soviet 'trials' as to provide Moscow with an obvious propaganda weapon.

Mr. Wallace and Dr. Einstein; (from an article by Alistair Cooke, January 27, 1950):

To the aspersion that the military masters of the atomic bomb project did not trust him with much knowledge about it, Mr. Wallace replied that he was in it at the very beginning. Dr. Vannevar Bush came to his office in June, 1940, told him about the project (which Dr. Einstein was urging on President Roosevelt) and said the President 'wanted my judgment as to whether to go all out' on it. For a year, Wallace said, the policy committee secretly entrusted with the atomic bomb project met in his office. Thereafter, and once the project was approved as policy, it passed over into the hands of scientists and military security officers". This followed a major scandal in the U.S.A. in December, 1949 in which the late Harry Hopkins, Henry Wallace, and General Groves (war-time head of the atomic bomb project) were accused, of sanctioning the delivery to the Russians of atomic materials and information. This was vigorously denied. However (December 8, 1949):

"General Groves said the Russians got some atomic material during the war, but he did not know how many shipments 'because we don't know how many leaked through".

A certain Major Jordan, a war-time 'expediter' of lend-lease materials to Russia, was reported in the same Article, by Alistair Cooke, as follows:

"His juiciest recollection, however, is of the baggage on Russian planes he inspected at Great Falls. This, he swears, contained blue-prints of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the headquarters then developing the atomic bomb ...."

Very 'juicy,' Mr. Cooke! The next step is called: THE HYDROGEN BOMB

Concerning this we read (January 27, 1950) that:

The United States Atomic Energy Commission was inclined to shelve it as a rather shameless emergency, project. But it was so inclined only until we were sure that the Russians had the atomic bomb."

Is that why somebody saw that the Russians had it? In the same article:

The decision [whether to make the H-Bomb] lies with the President, but it will be made on the recommendation of a committee of four men he has asked to guide him: the Secretary of State, Mr. Acheson; the Secretary of Defence, Mr. Johnson; the Chief of Staff, General Bradley; and Mr. David Lilienthal, who has stayed on as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission to settle this and only this question."

Next day the New Statesman referred to Messrs. Truman, Acheson, and Lilienthal as "a very powerful combination of liberal minds." Anyway, they made a majority.

On February 1, the headline greeted us: WORK TO BEGIN ON HYDROGEN BOMB. Below this:

"Mr. Bernard Baruch, the elder statesman who drew up the United States plan for international control of atomic energy, praised 'a wise decision necessary for the peace of the world.' General Groves, who directed the development of the original atomic bomb, said he could see no other course for the United States to follow. "People died from small bombs in the first world war and from bigger bombs in the second world war. I cannot see how we can stop now although, God knows, I wish we could".

Since that time the public's stunned credulity has been subjected to a wild onslaught of 'scientific' assertions. The H. Bomb is, is not, is, a thousand times, or hundreds of times, anyway "at least three times as powerful" as the Hiroshima bomb. It will, will not, explode at all, kill millions, devastate hundreds of square miles, poison the atmosphere, or destroy the planet. We have also had plenty of film pictures of the new 'six times as powerful' atom bombs exploded at Eniwetok (September, 1950) and about the relevant time a great stream of darkness over North America, and a blue Sun and a blue Moon in Great Britain; both attributed to high dust clouds, the by-products of megalomania.

There are few who will not want to echo the General's cry, casting their responsibility upon Fate. Yet, of course, we can stop it when we are prepared to face the truth and to act accordingly; to identify the men responsible, and to cease to follow them, or their policy. Wherever we are going, it is the 'progressives' who are in the van, the 'reactionaries' who are following, all too willingly, in the rear.

These contemporary quotations are inserted here, so that, when some of the things which have been set in train in these critical years begin to happen to us, and more people begin to realise that the truth is more important than political prejudices or labels, some of them at least will be able to judge, or to remember, where the responsibility lies; for the truth only can save.

Part 3

X

The jungle of individualism' is a curious choice of phrase with which people try to discredit a Society not centrally Planned. Usually it is used to denote a state of recurrent financial crises and chronic insecurity, bearing all the signs of central Planning, such as that which occurred between the Wars; but let that pass. What seems to escape notice in this 'scientific' age, when 'ecology' is all the rage, is that the jungle is a balanced community. From the point of view of the living things which dwell in it the jungle is the only place where they can live and develop their proper character. Normally, of course, the word 'jungle' suggests the primaeval forest in which human beings have little or no part; but let mankind be added to it and allowed to play its part in the community, and in the course of time we get a gradual transformation of the 'jungle' such as that which, in a thousand years or so, transformed the north temperate broad-leaved forest into the English country-side.

That is the true 'jungle of individualism'- the product of countless millions of acts of planning of varying scope by responsible individuals, each man planning his own and having to abide by (and live with) the consequences. It is noticeable that Planners, if they have the opportunity, usually prefer to live in it, but how it came into existence must be a complete mystery to them. For though they may live in it, they certainly are not of it; the term 'jungle', as applied to the free actions of their fellow-men, clearly reveals that. The implication is that, just as mankind has the right to cut and clear, to dominate and Plan the lowlier organisms of the jungle, so the Planner has the right similarly to treat the lowlier masses of humanity. And he hasn't! nor is the 'right' absolute in either case.

Indeed, the treatment meted out to animals and to human beings by their managers is becoming too similar to pleasant. No sooner has artificial insemination been tried on cattle than it is extended to human beings. To quote Sir John Russell in his Presidential Address to the British Association at Newcastle (August 31, 1949):

It is estimated that by suitable dilutions the number of cows inseminated per bull could rise to 10,000 or even 15,000 per year.

We may yet live to see bulls, other than a small select [my italics] aristocracy, become unwanted anachronisms.

On the other hand, of the human male we read 1:

… a fecund. Donor … could, with ideal conditions, produce 400 children weekly, (that is, about 20,000 annually).

1 British Medical 7ournal, January 13, 1945, in an article based upon practical experience by Mary Barton, MB., B.S., Kenneth Walker, F.R.C.S., and B. P. Wiesner, D.Sc.

It seems desirable to limit the number of children any one donor should be allowed to have, lest the risk of marriage between sibs not known to each other should assume dangerous proportions. For this reason we have set an arbitrary limit of 100 children for each donor - not yet attained by any one donor.

From the same article we learn also that the donors are selected by the clinic, but "The prospective parents should never be aware of the identity of the donor." Also that: "to most balanced men the task of donation is unpleasant", and that there is danger of the introduction of infection, and of abnormal sperms, into the womb. In fairness to the medical profession, it should be mentioned that this article was followed by a lengthy correspondence in the British Medical Journal in which a good many doctors condemned the whole business as disgusting and immoral; but there was a surprisingly large 'progressive' faction which defended it on 'social' and 'scientific' grounds. One writer ventured to use the adjective 'diabolical', and perhaps he was nearer the mark than he knew. What may interest medical men and women engaged in this pursuit is that they are carrying out the precise function attributed by an earlier age to the demons known as incubi and succubi2. That, no doubt, will give them a great deal of amusement! but no consideration of faith, of reason, or even of his own declared knowledge, is likely to deter a Planner from the fascinating path of Planning, quite literally in this case, other people's lives.

It is hard for normal sane people to realise that these things, which a generation ago were regarded as mere flights of satire, are actually happening in the world; or that there is no limit, except that set by the awful retribution of nature, to the lengths to which those obsessed by the craving for centralised power will attempt to go. If these men and women acknowledge no power superior to themselves, if they think, as they do, that mankind is the Boss of the Universe, and that they are the Bosses of mankind, if the word 'sacred' is to them, as it is, superstitious nonsense, then it is useless to expect them to treat anything as sacred, inviolable, inalienable, or to set any limit upon the power of the World Monopoly for which they strive. It is the most fatal delusion to imagine that the thing will somehow moderate itself. Such moderation as is now exerted is entirely to be attributed to the division and separation of powers which yet survive in the world. The strengthening of this division and separation against the forces of Monopoly, is the first duty of all who desire peace or the survival of human dignity; and that means, broadly speaking, the courageous defence of every traditional, non-aggressive power against which public opinion is being organised, as well as the separation more recently developed powers (e.g. the Trades Unions) from the State, and of the State from the Super state.

2 The following is taken from the Malleus Maleficarum, the great Catholic attack on sorcery published about 1490, and quoted from Charles Williams's book on Witchcraft (Faber & Faber, 1941):

"… and however much, in a horrid parody of the holy substitutions of love, they may convey seed from one living being to another-here the succubus to receive, there the incubus to deliver-yet one thing they cannot do: they cannot themselves beget. They have no formative energy, either in the heavens above or in the earth and the hells beneath. The child born of the transferred seed is the child of the man whose seed has been transferred. The child of a wizard and a witch it may be; (it is not and cannot be the child of the Devil".

It is evident that a.i.d. is not quite so modern as it is thought to be.

But above all it means the defence of the land, the ultimate basis of all separation of powers - the land in decentralised, separate, responsible ownership. It means a steady, unflinching, struggle against collectivisation, and especially its first stage, Committee control; the defence of every field, every farm, wood, valley, hillside, mountain range, region, against remote control by monopolies, with their irresponsible Planning, and against the industrialisation of the land, just when industry is losing its spirit and its incentive. Not merely a dumb, blind, purely instinctive, even if sound reaction always in retreat against the conscious, informed, organised, determined action of the Planners, who know what they want, and will stop at nothing to get it, even though it is evil; but a resistance equally conscious, better informed, more determined and courageous, because it knows what it is doing, and that it is essential to save the world.

The great strength of the Kingdom of Heaven is that it is not a totalitarian State; it works when and where and to the extent that it is tried; it cannot be 'ruined by a few recalcitrant objectors', they simply and automatically contract themselves out, thus strengthening the remainder. The place to start saving the physical world from the evil things which are destroying it is to start saving the place you live - the hillside above you, or the stream at the bottom of your garden. The way for the Welsh, at the present time, to start saving the world, is for them to save the Welsh Highlands; but unless there is some grasp of the great issues at stake it is easy to lose heart and determination.

The momentum towards centralisation is so great that there are sure to be many more retreats and disappointments before the corner is turned. But that is no reason for letting things go. It will never stop of itself, except, indeed, through the prolonged effect of wholesale disaster and catastrophe; but to rely upon that is suicidal.

So long as there was room for honest doubt, the Planners were rightly given the benefit of it, and resistance was necessarily sporadic, and limited to special cases, supposed to be blemishes in an otherwise wholesome policy for the good of mankind. But there is no longer room for honest doubt. The evils which beset and threaten us are not mere blemishes, they are, part of a consistent policy; and those who consciously support that policy must either call evil good, or deny that it exists, which amounts to saying that good and evil are one. For those who cannot do either of these things the path is clear; confusion and bewilderment are left behind. It is not that the whole world is mad, but that certain men are bad; not merely weak and liable to fall into error like the rest of humanity, but corrupted by power in their purpose and philosophy. It may well be said that they have been offered all the kingdoms of the earth, and have not jibbed at the price. The road to hell is not paved with good intentions, but with 'good' intentions, which are just the opposite.

This can be at first a frightening and unwelcome conclusion, but it is infinitely preferable to the conclusion that appalling evils can arise from good policies, or the hypocritical pretence of all bullies and tyrants that it is those who resist their will and their aggression who are responsible for the evil results which follow. To share in these is to destroy one's own integrity. The prospect of opposing such a concentration of evil power is somewhat intimidating, particularly when it is realised that it holds control of finance, upon which depends, in large measure, our access to bread and butter and the other things we need. But fortunately there are, at least in the Western Hemisphere, counterbalancing powers which so far have protected us. Our survival depends upon their survival, and their survival depends upon us. The British Empire and Commonwealth is, politically, the largest of them.

All this being admitted, it is also true that a great deal of the immense structure of power which looks so intimidating is no more than a vast balloon of propaganda and mass hypnosis concealing the essential weakness and internal conflict which besets all monopolies. That is perhaps why they feel no confidence in themselves until they have moulded matter to their purpose in a big way - big dams, lakes, factories, skyscrapers, roads, bombs, bangs - bigness is essential, but it is never big enough. No size can ever give stability to a mass balanced upon a single point; and that is a realistic picture of a monopoly.

The struggle has been described as between all the brains and abilities which can be bought against all those which cannot be bought; but that does not mean that the real alternative to monopoly is merely another group of men plotting for power. The strength of the forces on our side is of quite a different nature to that of the Planners. Its strength lies in its dispersal; to centralise it is to betray it. Anyone who has tried to keep the weeds down in a garden knows what a power the Planners have pitted themselves against; - but it is possible for men, by conscious and determined and unremitting effort to master temporarily the growth of unconscious and lowly plants. It is even possible for conscious and determined men to treat their fellow-men if they were lower organisms and to impose their will upon so long as they remain unconscious of what is' being done. But let consciousness awake - let them find themselves dealing with a consciousness and intelligence and determination as great as their own, and they cannot succeed indefinitely. It is hard enough to keep plants down, but to keep men down who know what they are about is, in the end, impossible.

There is a specific and effective reply to every plan and plot and trick which aims at centralisation of power. The key to it, the one word which Planners cannot abide when used in its correct relation, is responsibility.

XI

The one advantage which an open dictatorship has over a so-called 'democracy,' whether of the Eastern or Western model, lies in the clear acceptance of responsibility by the rulers. At least the power and the responsibility are not divided. Mr. Lilienthal makes the same point about the T.V.A.; it is essential, if the job of developing a large area such as the Tennessee Valley is to be done properly, that responsibility should not be divided, but should rest squarely upon one unified Authority - which means ultimately upon one man, its Director. That is, of course, true of any job or undertaking; what is wrong is not the principle of responsibility, but the size and nature of the job.

Divided responsibility means chaos and muddle, but what is always forgotten, or else carefully not mentioned, is that unified responsibility at a 'high' level means either divided responsibility or else the total surrender of responsibility at all 'lower' levels. If, as in slavery, or war, it is openly admitted that to serve his rulers the individual must surrender his own will and purpose, if necessary his own life, and simply obey orders, the system may, at any, rate, function efficiently from the point of view of the Managers; but that is not the point of view which is conventionally supposed to prevail in a 'democracy.' And if it be admitted for a moment that there are any fields in which the individual ought to have, or indeed must have, responsibility for his actions, and, at the same time, some - centralised Authority claims power over those same fields, immediately we have divided responsibility 'at the grass roots' as Mr. Lilienthal would put it; which means that the very foundations of life and of society are disrupted.

For, when it comes to it, we all know that, at a pinch, we can do without the 'Big Jobs of the Century,' but we cannot do without the little jobs of the ages, nor allow undue interference with the men who do them, without returning to chaos and misery. Humanity could have got along quite well without the Great Pyramids of Egypt and the Colosseum at Rome, and the Great Lakes of Tennessee, and the Great Skyscrapers of New York, and Giant Raffles in the Red Square, and Immense Liners, and Monster Aircraft, and Autobahns, and the International Chemical Cartel, and U.N.O., and the World Bank, and the Atom Bomb; without all these Great Things which need so much organising by important People. But if a man cannot plough or sow, keep a few hens or pigs, bake or brew, do a bit of carpentering or building, on his own undivided responsibility, then indeed the situation is becoming desperate.

And of all the jobs which require that undivided trio of knowledge, power and responsibility to be decentralised, in individual, local hands, the care and cultivation of the land is the most essential. The very word 'local' is tied up with the nature of the land - of course every piece of land is local, and every locality is a particular piece of land.

If we agree with Mr. Lilienthal that modern management requires undivided authority and responsibility, in whose hands shall we place the unified and undivided responsibility for the development of the resources of farmer Jones's Five- Acre field? If the answer is not 'in farmer Jones's' there is no answer, except that the responsibility must be divided between him and other people who, whatever they may or may not know about Agriculture in the abstract, cannot have either the knowledge or the experience of that particular field that he has, nor do they stand, to gain or lose as he does by the results of its management.

It is commonly supposed that centrally placed officials in Whitehall or the World Food and Agriculture Organisation, having a superior knowledge of the needs and wants of the people, are therefore in a 'better position to Plan the production which is necessary to satisfy those needs, and hence, through a suitable delegation of powers to people with local knowledge, such as the members of the County Agriculture Committee, to Plan the production of each productive unit, such as Jones's farm, if necessary over-riding or modifying his own plans from time to time as may seem necessary in, view of the General Requirements.

This is but an important special case of the general Planning argument, which has now gained such general acceptance through sheer repetition that rational thought is seldom applied to it. It possesses that superficial convincingness and fundamental complete falsity from premises to conclusion which characterises so much induced mass-ideation to-day. Its persistent exposure is essential to a return to health in society.

To begin with, the nature and productive capacity of Jones's Five-Acre field are not affected by the 'demands' of Society or of officials upon it. It cannot change from beef to. milk, from stock to wheat and back again in a year or two just because the Government wants it to. Of course, in response to threats of fines and dispossession, and so forth the attempt can be made, but this is where the. Planning literally has to come, down to earth, often with the most ludicrous, or tragic, results. It is unquestionable that person nearest to this particular piece of earth is farmer Jones, and he alone is in a position to realise its actual nature, and the limitations which it sets upon human planning in relation to it. Certainly his desirable that he should also take account of the inducement offered by the requirements of other people for the potential products of Five-Acre field, as they may be expressed by the efficient mechanism of the economic vote, but the survival of the soil, and hence of, humanity, may be said to depend upon a correct relationship between the 'demands' of the people' and of the land. Above all the 'demand' for any' particular use of the land which may conflict with its nature must never be backed by a force which will over-ride the farmer's judgment of what is due to the land. He may be a good or a bad farmer, but natural bad farmers soon eliminate themselves so that they are always a minority, and the harm they do is limited by the size of the area under their control. A Planner on the other hand, can ruin the World, if he can get it as his Planning Area. One might have thought that the ruinous effects on the land of absentee landlordism and of financial pressure would have resulted in the determined rejection of every argument for the even more remote landlordism of the Planner using the even more powerful force of direct legal compulsion.

When we turn to the idea that the central Planner can form a more accurate estimate of the needs and wants of other people than they can themselves common sense has completely departed. As an alternative to the provision of the necessary means of payment and of effectively expressing their requirements, the immense undertaking of unified central Planning of the total resources of large areas and ultimately of the World, in order to supply the estimated needs of the inhabitants, particularly when taken in conjunction with the similar Planning of populations in order to accommodate the number of people to the resources Planned, passes the bounds of sanity and enters the domain of pure megalomania.

In fact the central Planner knows the needs and the wants of one person only – himself - or of one family - his own - that is, if he is not too pre-occupied with other people’s affairs even to make a sound judgment of his own. The 'data' which he uses to justify his Planning, on the basis of social surveys and so forth, exist in the form of ideal mathematical units, having at the most favourable estimate a childishly crude, and at the same time tenuous and hypothetical relationship with anything in the real world. There are a few narrowly functional purposes for which it is permissible to regard people as mathematical units, e.g. in designing a lift or vehicle to carry them, and even that, only on its purely engineering side; and equally as in Social Planning, the people themselves constitute the unit quantities which are being used, they can be so regarded only in some narrowly functional aspect. Thus, a commandant of a concentration camp may need to know how many 'people' it will take to fill a pit of given size, a Builder of the Pyramids may have had to know how many people can drag a rock of given size up a ramp of given height, and a modern population expert may have good reason to find out how many people should be bred in order to fulfil some function desired of his paymasters e.g. to provide an age-class of such and such a size for military purposes, or to fill the schools to reasonable capacity, or on a more local basis, to provide workers for a factory producing tin-tacks for export.

It is commonly forgotten that statistics was, from the first, as the word implies, a technique developed to serve the purposes of State Planning. Before there could be statistics, there were 'statists'1 (i.e. State Planning Experts).

One of the earlier references to Statistics occurs in the preface to A Political Survey of the Present State of Europe by E. A; W. Zimmermann, issued in 1787:2

"It is about forty years ago," says Zimmermann, "that that branch of political knowledge, which has for its object the actual and relative power of the several modern states, the power arising from their natural advantages, the industry and civilisation of their inhabitants, and the wisdom of their governments, has been formed, chiefly by German writers, into a separate science… By the more convenient form it has now receive… this science, distinguished by the new-coined name of statistics, is become a favourite study in Germany".

The emphasis on the words 'power' and 'wisdom' is mine. 'About forty years' before Zimmermann would bring us to the early years of the reign of Frederick II of Prussia, called 'The Great', who ascended the throne in 1740 and died in 1786, so that his reign just about covers the period of the rise of Statistics in Germany to the position of an accepted science. Since Frederick may be regarded as the first and the father of all modern Planners this is not surprising. The basis of his Planning was no doubt the sort of Planning known as logistics, the science of moving, lodging supplying troops in war (or, one might add, in, threat of war) at which he was so undoubtedly proficient; but that is the ultimate basis from which all Planning springs, and to it returns when ever the supply of non-military crises and emergencies as justification threatens to fail. To trace the connection between Frederick and Voltaire, Freemasonry, Encyclopaedism, the French Revolution, and modern Prussianism and National Socialism would be to turn aside too far; but in the light of the later use of statistics n Planning, the fact that it was first developed in Germany during Frederick's reign must be regarded as significant…

1 See Cymbeline (1610 or 1611) Act II, Scene IV:

I do believe,-

Statist though I am none, nor like to be,-.

That this will prove a war;…

See also Hamlet (1602) Act V, Scene II:

I once did hold it, as our statists do,

A baseness to write fair, and laboured much

How to forget that learning;...

The progressive Educational Statist does not seem to have progressed far since Shakespeare's day!

 

2 Cited from An Introduction to the Theory of Statistics by G. Udny Yule, 9th Edition, 1929, p1.

At first it was not even necessary that statistical data should be in numerical form, but this soon became essential, and later the technique was borrowed by other sciences not directly concerned with Social Planning, particularly the biological sciences, so that, its origin having been forgotten, statistics is now widely regarded as the very essence of 'pure' science, the technique whereby the bias due to human will and purpose may be eliminated by the use of the pure lm- partiality of numbers. But a method cannot escape from its origins, nor from its ends, since means and ends are inseparable; and in every case in which the word 'statistics' is legitimately used it will be found that the essence of the method is the treatment of a population of individuals as if they were functional units, i.e. each individual is conceived of as a unit possessing a function which it maybe desired to use in some way. The symbols representing these abstract individual-fragments are then manipulated, and the resulting conclusions applied to the real, total, individuals... Statistics is thus seen to be a mechanism essential to totalitarianism in Planning, but incompatible with the treatment of individuals or even things, as whole persons or, things having a total nature of their own, and, in the case of human beings, a will and purpose involved in that nature, as, real as the Planner's or the Statistician's.

There is an attempt to pretend that a Statistician is merely doing the same thing (on a larger scale) as a hostess who counts her guests before dinner; just as, in another field, Atomic War is supposed to be merely an enlargement of a fight between two small boys in the school playground; but in both cases the relationship, such as it is, between the small and the large thing is inverse. It is not the pugnacious small boy who makes the War Planner, and when the hostess counts Mr. Brown among her guests she is in no danger of forgetting his qualities as a whole individual, or reducing him to the status of a functional unit (unless, indeed she is the sort of female Planner whose sole aim in inviting Mr. Brown was to fill a place at table or to get rid of some unwanted food). But when a 'statist' includes Mr. Brown in some 'data' compiled on the basis of filled-in forms, a unit he is to the Planner, and can be no other, by the nature of things. Yet it is the whole and individual Mr. Brown who has to carry out the Plans and conform with the regulations, not the unit functional Brown.

It should be noted in passing that Finance constitutes a very critical sort of statistics in relation to the control of human purpose, since the units of which it consists are actually accepted as a means of expression of the will of the individual in all economic affairs; yet, being completely abstract, they impose no natural limitations whatever! of the manipulations of the financial Planner. The results upon the behaviour and integrity of character of almost everyone are appalling.

Of Course, Finance ought not to be statistical at all, i.e. it ought not to be capable of being used as a means of Government; it ought to be a useful mathematical accompaniment of human affairs as automatic as the flow of water through the soil - not a means of power pent up and controllable behind a dam. Neither a central banker nor the Chancellor of the Exchequer ought to have more power to manipulate policies and people's lives by means of the money mechanism than an accountant or a bank clerk. It is fantastic that professional integrity should be expected of the small banker but not of the big one; that the Chancellor of the Exchequer should be permitted to manipulate our finances, denying beforehand what he is about to do, while the local firm of accountants would be ruined if it were detected in any such treatment of its clients' accounts. There is not the slightest hope of recovery or security while the purchasing power of every pound we earn or possess is subject to the arbitrary fiat of a few centrally placed persons.

Just how long the economists and financial writers will continue to use phrases like 'economic blizzards' and so forth, implying that the consequences of financial manipulation are a part of the world of nature, is a secret known only to them; but in view of recent events it merely exposes them to ridicule, and with them the whole argument that it was free enterprise which failed during the financial depression. Yet it is merely a special example of the theory that statistics constitute an impartial view of reality, and that in turn is a part of the attempt to substitute the pseudo World of the Planners for the real World in which, in the last resort, we find that we exist.

XII

In contrast to the control of human purpose by finance - i.e. the manipulating of statistics representing a measure of human choice, an expression of purpose, in such a way as to limit that choice - we have the statistics of probability, or chance, which excludes consideration of choice, purpose, or design altogether. The application of this to human behaviour or events which have in fact been influenced or brought about by purpose, design, or Planning (e.g. by the manipulation of finance) provides the Planners with an immense psychological power in the suggestion of the inevitability of their Plans, and the attribution of the course of events to a multiplicity of unspecified causes beyond human control, thus enabling the Planners to evade all responsibility.

At the present time practically the whole of the so-called 'Social Sciences' and a good deal of biological 'science' is based upon this psychological trick, which hypnotises the 'educated' even more than the uneducated. The exclusion of purpose or design from the premises is, of course, occult to most people (not the least to those who spend their time Planning elaborately 'randomised' experiments!) but the blind faith of the average scientist in the reality of the quite recently invented, mathematical concept of probability is one of the most powerful of modern superstitions. As a senior Government Research Officer said recently to the writer in the course of a discussion on this subject: "If we do not know the probability, we know nothing". The absence of all knowledge before, say, Karl Pearson (or should it' be Laplace's Théorie analytique des probabebtés, 1814?) is a little staggering to contemplate.

1 See H. C. Wyld's Universal Dictionary: "superstition,… irrational dread of the supernatural; excessive credulity with regard to what is mysterious and unexplained; …." See also "probability, n . . . 3 (math.). The chance of occurrence of any one of a number of possible events, some one of which is bound to occur:" and under "chance (I), n . . . fr. L. Lat. cadentia, 'falling, esp. of dice'… 1 Events as they happen, course of events, way things occur: 'the changes and chances of this mortal life'. 2. Various senses implying happening of events without any cause which can be ascertained, foreseen, or controlled; a undesigned, unforeseen, unforeseeable occurrence, accidental circumstance, fortune, luck: to be present by the merest chance; to leave things to chance; a game of chance, reverse of one of skill. Phr. by chance, casually, by accident; by probability, likelihood, of something happening: ... "

One of the main uses to which probability statistics is put is the prediction of the course of events, which is, however, more often implicit than explicit. The power of mass-suggestion exerted by this means is quite incalculable; there is a peculiar hypnosis about it which is very difficult to resist, for it restores the ancient belief, in Fate, incongruously enough, under the name of Chance - the fall of the dice, the way things happen-undesigned, unforeseen, unforeseeable - so it is made the basis of prediction. In passing, it should be noticed that dice are very carefully designed instruments, and there is nothing like them in nature.

G. K. Chesterton has written some true words on the subject in his essay on Archaeology (in Generally Speaking, Methuen's third Edn. 1937):-

The future is dead, because all futurism must be a sort of fatalism. It cannot foresee the free part of human action; it can only foresee the servile part… The point of all these lines it that they must all, be mathematical lines; none of them can be free lines, like the lines of a draughtsman. It is only in the past that we find the finished picture, for it is only in the past that we find the free line. In other words, when we look at what men did, we are looking at what they freely chose to do. But when we consider what men will do, we cannot consider what they will choose to do. We can only consider what they must do. Unless it be something they cannot avoid, it is something we cannot predict.

The only qualification one would add to this is that, wherever in the past, Planning, whether financial or statutory, has been in operation, the only 'free lines' discernible are those drawn by the Planners, the rest have bad to toe them; except those few who have refused, and changed the course of history.

The concept of probability is of negligible value in relation to the actual events of which the real Universe is composed; they are all one-in-infinity chances. Consider, for instance, the probability of occurrence of the fusion of two particular sex-cells, giving rise to a particular individual It is only when the real Universe is replaced by 'the universe of discourse,' a pseudo-universe which may be purely ideal, or in part materially arranged, but is circumscribed deliberately by human Planning, that probabilities begin to be calculable. It is only with dice that there is a one-in-six chance of a given result. It is only in the even narrower, pseudo-universe used, for instance, in the controlled scientific experiment, that even higher probabilities may be reckoned with. And the converse is also true: the higher the probability the fewer the degrees of freedom, and the narrower the Planned limitations of 'the universe' which may be deduced. It is extraordinary how many scientists, who well understand the necessity of careful planning and strict control to ensure significant probabilities, cannot understand that significant probabilities imply the existence of careful planning and strict control, on a scale commensurate with 'the universe of discourse.'

All this may seem very theoretical until it is remembered that statistics is a major instrument of 'scientific' Planning, and that, so long as Planned probabilities are supposed to arise from the nature of the real Universe, the will to resist is inhibited.

There is also a direct relationship between the use of statistics and Bigness, in the sense of large numbers, which are essential to significance in the use of statistics in proportion to the complexity and variability of the material. Even inorganic particles such as atoms or molecules, which are individually uncontrollable, change their characteristics when considered and bandied in the mass. Their individual characters; such as valencies, are absorbed and cancelled out within the mass; which takes on quite other (though related) characters, and becomes liable to control and use by those understanding them. With inorganic materials the complexity of the mass is greater than that of the individual particles, but when entities such as human beings, or the soil, of a complexity far beyond the comprehension of any Planner are handled in the mass (or mob, or region), the characteristics of the mass, approaching as they do those of inorganic materials in their simplicity and malleability, represent an appalling degradation of the quality of the individual.

The 'science' of population provides the most impudent and blatant example of this sort of treatment of human beings particularly that aspect of it which treats men and women as functional reproductive units. The whole thing is meaningless except against the background of the assumption that we were all born and came into the World to serve the purposes of Planners, i.e. of those who control us as a collectivity. The increasing aggregation of people into larger masses (e.g. multilateral schools of 2,000) speaks of the same assumption. It is sad to see those who were brought up in a different belief lending themselves to this policy

An important example of statistical Planning, which combines the characteristics of population statistics on the one hand, with those of finance (the control of units of choice) on the other, is the majority vote.

Potentially the vote, an indication of choice backed by the will and sanctions, moral and physical, of an individual is an effective means towards the decentralisation of power. In the days when the long-bow was a cheap and formidable weapon in the hands of every able-bodied man and boy the Ruling Powers found it advisable to yield to such indications of will, and even to institute a mechanism for their expression. It is important to remember that the primary function of the representatives elected by the political vote was to control the finance - i.e. the economic choice- available to the central Government.

Limited as was the parliamentary franchise, it was - but the expression and end–term of something far deeper and more direct and decentralised, the personal influence and pressure of man upon master in the feudal system which was sufficient, acting over the centuries and against the background of Christian thought, to liberate the villein from serfdom and to establish him in that degree of economic choice which arose from common, and later from individual rights in the land. Those were the days when the foundations of English freedom were laid, so well that some vestiges of them remain today, despite the fact that the task of the last few centuries has been to undermine them, rather than, as is commonly supposed, to build upon them.

The idea has been assiduously spread that those products of the nineteenth century, the universal adult suffrage of vast populations, hundreds of times the size of the original electorates, and the secret ballot, constitute between them the sole safeguard and basis of true democracy, instead of being, as they manifestly are, the direct and necessary precursors of the modern totalitarian state. Many people seem to be under the impression that the secret ballot dates back to Magna Carta, rather than to the Ballot Act of 1872.

An anonymous vote is, of course, a meaningless symbol backed by no sanction, except the conventions that it shall be counted, and that a majority of quite arbitrary, and manipulable, proportions shall elect. Since no one will accept responsibility for the vote there is no way of ensuring that these conventions are observed, and as a means of coercing the Power which controls the ballot it is quite fatuous. Equally, as a protection against intimidation by the Power which controls the ballot, it is more than useless. If that Power can be trusted to 'play the game' according to the conventions then there is no need for secrecy; it can be trusted to hold the ring and to protect the voters from intimidation. But if not, then it is provided with information about the voter's attitude while he is deprived of the protection of publicity.

The degree of choice offered to the voter can be limited to any extent desired, even to a single official list, as in the so-called 'Eastern democracies.' There is not the slightest reason to suppose that in such cases the number of votes published bears any necessary relation to the number cast; the whole thing is merely 'a piece of statistical mass-suggestion involving, a kind of ritual submission to the will of the Government on the part of the individual.

In the 'Western democracies' the concentration of financial power has long ago ensured that no fundamental choice of policy is available to the electors, but there remains a choice of Parties with some differences of bias and method. The separation of powers between these probably ensures that, up to the present, the Party vote are in general more or less correctly counted and public, but there are already signs that the real opposition vote -the spoiled ballot paper- is manipulated at will, sometimes being redistributed among the parties so as to obscure the total.

Secrecy is, of course, not the resort of the honest man, but of the underhand, and it provides the ideal cover for the 'rigging' of the results in any way desired. Some confusion of thought has been caused by the fact that the Communists, e.g. in France, have attempted to upset the secret ballot, especially in trades unions, from with it is deduced that it provides some protection against them. In fact, they attempt to upset it only when they fear that it may be used against them by a rival power Group. Once they have got rid of rivals they restore it, as in the Stalin Constitution of 1936.

The essence of the whole business is the relieving of Government of the responsibility for its actions. With the disappearance of the open ballot the vote changed from, at least potentially, a responsible expression of personal will, to an irresponsible expression, of anonymous opinion; and this irresponsibility underlies and corrupts the whole of modern Society from top to bottom. Every form of human weakness, laziness, bad workmanship, breach of contract, breach of faith, even fraud, and dishonesty, is excused and condoned by reference to the fact that, the circumstances were beyond the control of the person concerned, and there is so much truth in this that the temptation is more than human nature can ordinarily withstand. In so far as individuals are, in fact, powerless, the responsibility rests with those who actually hold the power - those whom we call the Planners, whose decisions are enforced by all the powers of the State or the Super-State; but these, hitherto, have been allowed to lay their burden upon the perfect scapegoat, that anonymous, impersonal, unidentifiable, statistical abstraction, the majority voter. It is easy to understand why a Key Planner such as Mr. Lilienthal is strong in the defence of the present-day 'institution of politics'.

The convention of propaganda is that we all, individually, must accept the responsibility for anything the Planners choose to impose in the name of the statistical majority. But anonymous responsibility is an impossibility. A response is a returning or giving back that which is due, or if we go back further to the sense found in the word 'sponsor', it is a pledging in return. A statistical unit cannot respond; a living individual can. If the voter is ever to accept responsibility for his vote (which is the last thing the Planners want) he must make his choice openly, and the results arising from it must return to, and be accepted by, him as an individual. Practical proposals for such a responsible ballot, which would be complementary to the responsible economic vote (the 'social' dividend), have been put forward by Major C. H. Douglas2 and form a vital part of what Sydney Webb called 'the suppressed alternative' to the prevailing policy of centralisation and Planning.

In the special sense in which responsibility is due to the land - that of giving back that which is due - not only is actual association of man and land essential, but time also, if the development of a balanced response between the two is to occur. This means security of tenure and complete lack of interference. Proposals to this effect have, also been made by Major Douglas,3 and it is unnecessary to elaborate them.

Ownership, or tenure, of the land, however, does not confer the right to destroy it. Doubtless there is a point in criminal mismanagement at which a man's neighbours, or the law acting on their behalf, have a right to step in, just as there is a point where interference with a man's treatment of his own family becomes justifiable. But that has nothing whatever to do with centralised Planning and Management; it is the negative Law, the opposite.

2 Realistic Constitutionalism, K.R.P. Publications Ltd., a reprint of an address to the Constitutional Research Association. See also - A Light Horse, Part II in The Social Crediter, March 16, 1946

3 In The Social Crediter, March 20, 1943.

As for the penalising and dispossession of farmers (but never Government Departments) for alleged, or even proven, bad farming, it should be an absolute defence if it can be proved that a part of their responsibility has been taken from them. The Estate Book and Diary lists forty-one Government Departments with powers of interference in some aspect of agriculture and land ownership. If all the persons who have power, and therefore responsibility, were to appear in court as defendants, there should be quite a crowd!

We are so far from putting into effect any sane proposals with regard to the land that it is easy to suppose that there is nothing to do about it; but there is always something to do about it; we can always, start from where we are and apply integrity and responsibility to the situation as it is. It is true that we shall not then be popular with the Planners, or in a good position for obtaining the rewards in pay, promotion, and privilege which they are able to dispense; but with the devaluation not only of money but of practically everything they control they are now beginning to suffer from diminishing returns; and there is no satisfaction to be found in a life devoted to the pursuit of a policy which is known to be evil. There is a great adventure, as well as satisfaction, in opposing it.

Afterword

The Earth has been called our Mother; but so far as this life, and these bodies, are concerned we never escape from her womb. As Bryan Monahan has pointed out, our bodies are a part of the Earth's crust, as it were clouds or vortices moving over the surface through which its matter is for ever flowing and passing on so that in seven years all is replaced. In this we are at one with all the other creatures which are in, and on, and of the soil; and of which, and by which; the soil is made. For the land is not merely a mass of rock fragments, nor even a mixture of these with living things, but a flow of matter through living, forms a continuous movement of unthinkable variety and awe-inspiring complexity, the type of balance known as a dynamic equilibrium--a balance of separated powers constituting, in any given place, one whole, one entity.

For a century now the followers of Malthus and Darwin and Marx have emphasised the struggle for existence until it has become an obsession with mankind, and thoughts being things, thinking has made it so. As if there were nothing but war in Nature - as if in Nature there were no peace. No peace in Nature! Do they expect us to believe that?

It is not, of course, that there is no struggle, or that we should not concern ourselves with it, but the struggle is incidental to the existence, for in so far as things exist they constitute an equilibrium. But our Darwinists seem very ready to forget what the struggle is for! A struggle which is not for existence is necessarily for non-existence; and that is the sort of struggle which is brought to mind by phrases such as 'the survival of the fittest', 'Nature red in tooth and claw', which suggest that it is the aggressive forms of life, the cruel and cunning killers, who are the winners in the struggle for existence.

But the plain fact is that, in Nature, it is not so. It is the meek who inherit the earth, and the killers have enslaved themselves to them by becoming parasites whose very existence depends upon the survival, in superior numbers, of their hosts; whom they, the predators and parasites, serve, in their servile and unpleasant fashion, by ensuring that their meekness shall not become weakness. But if these slaves become masters then indeed they make a solitude which may be called peace, but has nothing in common with the peace of Nature;- a desert in which at first the lion's voice is heard alone (the Prince alone speaks) hungrily roaring for his prey, and then -the universal silence.

It is a thing that we, who kill and eat and dig up and cut down, would do well to remember: that we are stewards, not masters, that what we take away we must give back, and that when we fail to do so we cut our own throats, we dig up our own roots, we cut down our own family trees, and all our pride, and our civilisation, comes down to the earth.

That life and liberty are aspects of the same thing is not just a sententious saying, it is the literal truth; for life is an equilibrium, and the maintenance of an equilibrium is dependent upon the existence of independent, separated powers, i.e. upon liberty; but even more than that, the whole course and development of a life is effected by its expression in the material world. In the simplest case, if we are not free to breathe, or to eat what we need, then that something which expresses itself by causing matter to flow into the form of our bodies ceases so to express itself; and though there are restrictions less total and immediate than these, they all cripple and abort the development of life in some direction. Thus, if we say that it is liberty alone that we fight and contend for, we are only saying that we are fighting for life, that our struggle is for existence and not against it, the defensive, reactionary, in the biological sense (i.e. responsible at the human level) struggle which the 'progressives' so despise, and which alone can preserve the balance necessary for life.

As for the idea that 'Progress' can result from the conflict, it is an hallucination. The struggle is between death and life, between the destruction and the survival of the status quo, with its potentiality for, growth and development; but the progress itself does not arise from conflict of any sort, but from discovery - the development of new sympathies of the mind for the world outside it - the very reverse of a conflict with Nature or, any of her creatures.

Meanwhile there are many solitudes which the Planners make in the name of peace, all having the uniformity and inertia of death: the solitude of statistics, in which the voice of the Statistician alone is heard in the silent wilderness of units substituted for living things; the solitude of monoculture which, like all other forms of Monopoly, is a standing invitation to all parasites to flourish unchecked until they have destroyed their hosts and themselves; the solitude which follows the use of the atomic bomb and the biological poison, the solitude of the World State and all forms of remote control and Monopoly, and the desolation of all things which are too big.

Fortunately there is waiting for every Planner, as for the rest of us, the further solitude of the grave, soon to give place to the plentiful companionship of the earth; and though most of them seem to try to escape this by being cremated and rendered, quite appropriately, into gas, a little sooner than is strictly necessary, they cannot thereby escape their personal responsibility, to give back to the earth its due…

But if they think that their responsibility ends there, they are indeed taking an enormous risk, and staking everything upon the blind faith that the law of action and reaction is limited to material things. Every day the Planners are doing things to other people which are not material. It is not merely that they starve us or keep 'in short supply,' as the phrase goes, the things which are not scarce. The graver crime is that they tempt and bully us into greed and meanness and constant worry and preoccupation with what we shall eat and what we shall drink and wherewithal we shall be clothed; they tempt and trick us into lying in filling in their forms and questionnaires; daily they make new crimes for us to commit; and always they seek to bind our spirit, by the lethargy and inertia of the body, to the physical means of life and comfort under their control.

It is indeed an improbable theory that these things can be done in a vacuum, without effect or response; that when the earth receives its own, all is finished and paid for; and that that something which expresses itself in the flow of the earth's crust into the form of a man arises de novo from the fusion of two small bits of jelly and may be brought to an end at any moment' with a bare bodkin. This assumption, that life arises from the properties of matter, though a long overdue reaction has set in against it, is still generally accepted among 'scientists,' despite the fact that it lies completely outside the 'universe' to which they have limited themselves, and beyond the reach of the only proofs they are prepared to accept. There is no attempt to rely on physico-chemical evidence, or estimates of the statistical probabilities; it is no more than an arbitrary denial unsupported by a fragment of evidence, of the basis of Christianity, and indeed the wisdom of all Ages and of all races of humanity. Now that it has dominated' progress' and 'progressive' thought for over a century it is possible to come to a conclusion about it; and, judging by the way it is working out in the world, the only sane conclusion is that it is unjustified.

But in that case the material world is of more, not less, significance than if it were all, for it expresses something of greater significance than itself, which, nevertheless, may be altered and affected by it; and our responsibilities must begin with the earth, yet cannot end with it.

Life, in the commonly understood sense of an incarnation in time, is an opportunity for choice; and choice is that substance of life which determines the direction of its development; but choice involves responsibility, and it is dependent not only upon life (incarnation) and liberty (freedom to choose between real, not Planned, alternatives) but also upon the third member of the trio, property (in its deepest sense). When we speak of a property of anything we mean that which is proper to it, which makes a part of its nature. In this sense choice is a property of the human personality as we know it. When the word is applied to material things, and especially to the land, it still retains the meaning: that for which one is responsible, one's own, of which one is made.

But a choice must be a proper choice; proper, that is, to the one who makes it, not somebody else's choice. Centralised Planning is the stealing of choices. The effect, which is everywhere apparent in the world to-day, of making other people's choices instead of one's own, is to destroy the personality. It is suicism-suicide of the self; perhaps the only way in which the soul of man can be destroyed. Ironically enough it is attained by the Planners through over-weening pride, a monstrous attempt to swell the self until it can engulf other people, if possible the whole world. It is a fact of observation. As a young man becomes increasingly involved in Planning other people's lives his personality is gradually replaced by another which is much the same everywhere. It is an inhuman personality; it is the Adversary of the human race.

As for the rest of us, its victims or intended victims, to the extent that we seek to save ourselves by submitting to improper choices, we also lose our lives; literally, we lose the very substance and property of life which enables us to develop our personalities. The Planned and regulated years pass, and to the extent that they are Planned and regulated (otherwise than by our own choice) we do not live.

Is it not so? Yet however much is stolen there is always some proper choice left to us, though it becomes increasingly hard to make it. But the alternatives presented by the Planners are always false, that is, they are not those presented by the real World. The great and increasing resources of energy now available to mankind clearly mean that the real Universe offers to each generation as it comes a wider range of choice and of abundance of life; but the centralised form in which these resources are Planned and controlled, and the terms (e.g. as expressed in the formula 'full employment') on which they are made available to others by the small minority which controls them, have in fact inverted this potential blessing into a curse.

We are offered wealth and peace, comfort and security, on the Planners' terms, and the price demanded is always a spiritual price. We must give up beauty for utility, liberty for comfort and security, sovereignty for peace; and when the price has been paid the goods are not delivered, because they cannot be delivered. These things are not alternatives; they go together, and when one is surrendered the other is lost with it. So it is that we gave up our countryside for the 'prosperity' of the industrial areas, in Tennessee they have the 'flood control' and 'soil conservation' of the Great Lakes of the South, and we all have the 'peace' and 'Security' of the Atom Bomb. But there is a reverse side to all this. It is a very ancient lie that the spiritual and the material are in antithesis: the cleavage is in the spiritual world, and the material depends upon it.

About this there is great confusion in 'Christian' thought, much of it as ancient as Gnosticism, but immensely increased and exploited by modem centralist propaganda: the material world is evil; possessions are wrong; Christ and many Saints were poor; therefore it is a Christian act to impose 'austerity' on other people, to tax them, restrict them, and frustrate their material desires. Alongside this, often in the same minds, is the materialist belief that 'a high standard of living' is of itself good and worth any sacrifice to get, and no-one should be permitted to fall below it. Basic to this dual error which dominates political thought and conflict is the conviction that what this wicked world needs is to surrender its power to a few men who will force it to be good.

What is ignored is the truth that it is not possessions, but preoccupation with possessions, which enslaves men; not money, but the love of money which is the root of evil; and it is precisely this which governing policies, commonly called Planning, have directly and wickedly stimulated in all recent years; whether by the money-starvation amid gluts of goods and desperate 'sales pressure' of the 1930's, or by the rationing and controlling, the queueing, 'fiddling' and 'spivving' (with a dollar-finance background) of the 1940's. Never before has a generation been so coerced into unnecessary preoccupation with material things.

We have been told of' a Kingdom which, being within us, is beyond the Planners' control, though not beyond their influence. This if we choose, all the material things we need will be added to us. But we have to choose it, and that not in the next world, but in this; for though, being spiritual, it is not of this world, it is, emphatically, intended to find expression in this material world in which we live. And no Kingdom can exist without its politics, and its economics.

There has existed in the world for thirty years a body and school of thought which has attempted, wherever and whenever it can, to bring down to earth this politics and economics of the Kingdom in the form of immediate, practical, detailed proposals. Its aim has been much misrepresented. It is not to make all men rich or comfortable or safe or equal or poor, or to force them to be good, or to prevent them from being bad, but to give them, within the limitations of our common inheritance, a free choice in the matter.

Since it is diametrically opposed to that philosophy which dominates world politics and economics today, it is not surprising that it receives little publicity from its opponents, and that unfavourable. Meanwhile it lives, grows and matures, and gives some measure of hope and courage and integrity of mind to those who take part in it, and a firm basis for the knowledge that, whenever and wherever, and to the extent that, people are willing to lay aside pride, and study and apply the truth of the matter, a joyful alternative to our present terrible predicament can and does exist.

THE END

Index

A + B and water, 30-31.

Acheson, Mr., 66.

Alabama Power Company, 11.

Alternative, the suppressed, 88.

Ashby, Prof. A. W., 34.

Atomic bombs, IX; 24, 41, 48, 95; Eniwetok, 67, Harwell,

64-65; Russian access to, 65- 66.

Atomic Energy Commission, 25, 66.

'Atomic' Scientists, 59-61, 64- 65.

Bather, Robert, 25.

Ballot Act, 86.

Barton, Mary, M.B., B.S., 69 footnote.

Baruch, Bernard, 25, 66.

Bennion, H. S., 27, 28 and 29 footnotes.

Bigness, 41-42, 66, 72-73, 75, 84-85.

Birkett, Sir Norman, 34.

Bohr, Nils, 60.

Bradley, General, 66.

Bretscher, Dr., 59.

Britain, Great, III, IV, VI

Coal, 20, 34, 35; Electricity Boards, 33, 44;

Land Planning, 13-14, 51; Marginal land, 35;

Soil fertility, 14, 21-23;

Water, 15-16, 35.

British Association, 12, 23 footnote, 34 footnote, 49, 69.

British Empire, 20, 34, 35, 72. British Medical 7ournol, 69 footnote.

Burnham, Prof., 42, 43.

Bush, Dr. Vannevar, 65.

Chemical fertilizers, 8, 22-23, 45-47.

Cherwell, Lord, 59.

Chesterton, G. K., 83.

Chisholm, Dr. Brock, 61-63.

Christian, 55-56, 57, 95.

Churchill, Winston, 59.

Cobbett, William, 21.

Collins, Frederick L., 26 footnote.

Communists, 39, 48, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 87.

Compulsion, good farming, 22; 'voluntary,' 55-56.

Cooke, Alistaft, 65, 66.

Credit, 20, 48.

Dalton, Hugh, 35.

Dams, 7, 15-17, 26-27, 34.

Darwin, Charles, 90.

Debt, 3, 19, 20.

Democracy, 23, 40-44, 85-86.

Depravity (of non-Planners), 3- 4, 49-50.

Dividend, People's, 39, 41; Social, 88.

Douglas, C. H., 88.

Dryden, Dr. I. G. C., 35 footnote.

Education, 9, 45, 46.

Einstein, Prof., 60, 65.

Electric Power, 9, 17, 24, 33-34, 41 footnote.

Elite, 3, 4, 49, 51.

Ellison, Prof.,-35.

Employment, 4, 94.

Erosion, soil, Foreword, 2-5, 20- 23.

Farm electrification, 29, 34.

Finance, 3-5, 20-21, 51-58, 80- 81 (see also under T.V.A.).

Financiers, 24-25, 32, 61.

Flooding, 5, 26-28, 30, 36.

Frederick the 'Great,' 78-79.

FTISC1I, Dr., 59.

Fuchs, Dr., 59, 64-65.

Gardner, C. H., 15.

Gluts, and soil exploitation, 19- 20.

Gnosticism, 95.

Graves, moved, 53.

Gray, Sir Alex., 49.

Great Lakes of the South, 28, 41, 95.

Grid, electric, 13, 15, 34, 37.

Groves, General, 65-67.

Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams, 50 footnote.

Hahn, Prof. Otto, 6.

Halban, Dr., 59.

Hayes, General Wade, 29 footnote.

Hewart. Lord, 54. Hopkins, Harry, 65.

Huxley, Dr. Julian, 9, 37, 59.

Hydro-electric Power Schemes, 7-8, 11, 13, 15, 17, 26, 34- 37.

Hydrogen bomb, 61, 66.

Incubi, and a. I. d., 70 footnote.

Individuality, 42.

Inevitability, 18, 66-67, 82-84.

Insemination, artificial, 69-70.

Inversion, 38-39, 51, 72, 96.

Irresponsibility, 71, 82, 87.

Jacks, G. V. (and Whyte), 6, 19, 59 footnote.

Jefferson, Thomas, 53.

Johnson, Mr., U.S. Secretary of Defence, 66. Jordan, Major, 65.

Jungle (of individualism), 49, 68.

Kowarski, Dr., 59.

Laissez-faire, 49, 57.

Laplaée, Marquis de, 83.

Lasid, Harold, 32.

Latifundia 20.

Law, negative, 53-55, 89.

Lenin, 49.

Lilienthal, David E., VII. Also: Chairman, T.V.A.,1;, Chairman, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 24-25; confidence, 48 - 49; 'decentralisation,' 42-44, 48-49; defends institution of politics,' 43, 88; Democracy (On the March), 40-44; and farm experts, 47; grass-roots, 41-42, 74; 11.-bomb, 66; law and bureaucracy, 53-54; manage- ment, 42-43, 54-55, 75; re- places Dr. Morgan, 26; Scottish visit, 15 footnote; SW Social Credit, 39-40.

Lindemenn, Prof., 59.

Long-bow, 85.

Majority rule, 43, 44, 85-88.

Malthus, 90.

Management, VII!, 42-43, 54- 55, 75, 89

Manchester Guardian, The, 24, 34 and 35 (footnotes), 61, 64-66.

Marlio, Louis, 37,

Marx, Karl, 90.

May, Dr. Alan Nunn, 60, 65.

May, Congressman, 27, 28, 30.

McFadden, Congressman, 12.

Megalomania, 64, 67, 77.

Misouri Valley Authority, 26. Monahan, Bryan, 90.

Monopoly, 10, 15-16, 33, 37, 70, 71, 92. Moon, blue, 67.

Morgan, Dr. Arthur, 26.

Moulding of environment, 26.

Moulton, Harold G., 37.

Nature, War on or Peace with, 19, 90-91.

New Statesman, The, 23, 66.

Qog, Sir William G., 23 foot- note. Original Sin, 50.

Pearson, Karl, 83.

Peierls, Prof., 59.

P.E.P., 2, 12, 17, 44.

Peron, Senor, 35.

Pike, Sumner T., 25.

Planning, Foreword, 51-52, 55- 56, 62-63, 83.

Plenty, 19, 94-95.

Poison, biological, 62.

Policy, 40, 63, 72.

Pontecorvo, Dr., 65.

Portsmouth, Earl of, 15.

Probability, 82-83.

Progress, 3, 39, 91-92.

Property, 53, 93. -

Raushenbush, H. 'S., 32.

Responsibility, 44, 54, 63, 67, 71, 73, 74-75, 88, 91-92.Revolution, 38-39.

Rising, E. W., 27 footnote, 28.

Roman Empire, 16, 20. Roosevelt, President, 2, 11, 26, 32, 65, 66. Rotbiat, Dr., 59. Rothamsted, 22, 23. Russell, Sir John, 69. Russia, U.S.S.R., 6, 17, 21, 25, 59, 60, 65-66; Stalin Constitution, 87.

Scale, Foreword, 8, 64, 75, 79- 80.

Schizophrenia, 52, 65.

Science Illustrated, 25. Scottish Power Scheme, 13, .15, 34. Secret Ballot, 86, 87. Self, 49-51. Shakespeare, 78 footnote. Sieff, I. M., 12. Smith, Elliot, 6. Smith, Ellis, LP., 1, 12. Social Credit, 3, 40. Social Crediter, The, 33, 88. Soil Conservation, 22-23, 29-30, 45-46. Stamp, Dr. Dudley, 14. Stamp, Lord, 12, 14. Statistics, XI; 50, 92. Statists, 78. Strauss, Lewis, 25. Succubi, and a.i.d., 72 footnote. Suicide, 3, 50 footnote, 71, 94. Suicisni, 50 footnote, 94. Sun, blue, 67.

Tenure of farms, 20, 88-89.

Thompson, Carl D., 32. Times, The, 34. Town and Country Planning, 13, 14. Trench, Archbishop, 50.

Truman, President, 66.

T.V.A. (Tennessee Valley Authority), I, II, V, VII. Also:

Accountability for results, 44- 45; Act, 7, 26; dispossessing farmers, 8, 28, 44; drowning land, 28, 41; Electric Home and Farm Authority, 10; Fertilizers, 8, 45-46; Flood control, 27-28; Financial power, 4, 10, 11, 24, 27, 32, 41, 47; Fish, 47; Imitations of, 9, 11, 32, 34, 36; Land restoration, 30, 41; Navi- gation, 7, 29; Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 24, 60, 66; Phos- phates, 45-46; Propaganda, 1, 9, 45; Socialism, 32; Tax- ation, 44; War Dept. engin- eers, 7, 17, 27, 28; Under- cutting State rights, 37.

Wales (and North Wales Power Scheme), 34-37, 71.

Walker, Kenneth, F.R.C.S., 69 footnote.

Wallace, Henry, 65.

War, or threat of, 17, 18, 19, 40,78-79.

Water, control of, 5-6, 7-8, 13, 15-16, 30-31, 35-36.

Waymack, William, 25.

Webb, Sydney, 88.

Wells, H. G., 23.

Whitlock's Zootomia, 50 foot- note.

Whitman, Walt., 42.

Whyte, R. 0. (and Jacks), 6, 19, 59 footnote.

Wiesner, B. P., D.Sc., 69 footnote.

Williams, Charles, 70 footnote.

Yule, G. Udny, 78 footnote.

Zimmerman, B. A. W., '7*..