"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"
Edmund Burke
Brief for the Prosecutionby C. H. DouglasPart 1 I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII Part 2
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
PART I In the main, the indigenous British do not
take kindly to explanations. Whether by education, heredity, climate,
diet, or the accident of geographical situation, and all of these
have been adduced in extenuation, we distrust logic, prefer action
or experiment, and view life as a process of dealing with situations
as they arise. Nevertheless in 1940, when the native had shaken
himself loose from some of the fetters forged for him by the idealist,
he once again demonstrated his active power of survival. It was not
the planners who saved at Dunkirk the British Army which they had
insisted should be centralised under the senile incompetent Gamelin
- it was the Baconian little ships. Idealists everywhere view with alarm, the language
used to describe the backbone of the Classless State, "Returns in
triplicate, accompanied by the appropriate vouchers." Try reading that extract at a "Workers" meeting
in any industrial town. That is to say, Socialism and Fascism stem
from the same root. It is part of the purpose of this book to show
that practically all forms of economic, industrial, and political
totalitarianism can be traced to the same root. My object in traversing a somewhat familiar
terrain is not so much to attack or condemn any particular body of
opinion, as to bring into relief something which forms a peculiar
handicap to our native talent for "dealing with situations as they
arise." FRANCIS BACON, Earl of Verulam, may not have been the first
man to apprehend our danger. But his emphasis upon the necessity
of
"restoring or cultivating a just and legitimate familiarity between
the mind, and things" strikes a pure note of consciousness which establishes
it as an authentic scripture. Mr. Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of
"England" may be heard to murmur "Nationalisation? We welcome it."
A much abler, if less theatrical banker, Sir Edward Holden, Chairman
of the London, City and Midland Bank (Midland Bank) during the 1914-1918
war, when told that his policy was leading directly to nationalisation
of banking, replied "Well, I don't care. I should still manage it." We shall see in the course of the following
pages that its source can be identified within fairly narrow limits.
It is preferable to establish its realistic implications, as well
as the devices employed to bring it into actuality before concerning
ourselves overmuch with personalities. They can wait. It is clear that to have a meaning in political economy, you must have a unit common to "sacrifice" and ''preference.'' For example, fifty years ago, the British Railways were the finest in the, world. It would be almost impossible to decide how efficient " they were, but if your "preference" was rapid, frequent and comfortable travel, and your "sacrifice" was monetary, you obtained a high degree of "preference" for a small amount of "sacrifice." To say that all their conditions of employment
were ideal would be absurd. Yet employment by them was highly coveted.
Nowadays, the British Railways are "rationalised," i.e., approaching
an absolute monopoly, and there is scarcely a graduate or professor
of the London School of Economics who would not explain to you how
much more efficient they are (we are considering, for the moment,
pre-war conditions). It is not difficult to see that the flat contradiction
between the opinion of the man in the street, or the morning train,
and that of the London School of Economics is due to a failure to
agree on the object for which railways exist, and, more subtly, whether
that object can be pursued without incommensurate loss. It is now twelve years ago since the whole world was ringing with the cry of over-production," and sabotage and destruction of almost ever description was in progress. But it should be remembered that all the efficiencies sponsored by the London School of Economics and it Fabian-Planning associates aim at restriction of production from the point of view of the consumer, in precisely the same manner that the grouped railways have restricted production (services) under the stress of propaganda for efficiency. It may be convenient at this point to clarify an important factor which is often overlooked. The modern world in which we live derives its material character from technological advance in the industrial arts. It derives its social and political character, to an increasing extent from Socialist-Communist propaganda in the State schools and the Universities deriving their funds through endowments from shadowy "benefactors" whose policy is the complement of the Marxian Socialist. Nothing could be further from the truth than to imagine that such advance as has been made in civilised life has any connection with social and political progress. On the contrary the prime objective of Socialism and Cartelism is to batten on the technological advance to which it has contributed nothing, and to prevent this advance from achieving, as unrestricted it would have achieved, the emancipation of the human race from bondage. The more completely centralised in political organisation such countries as Germany and Russia have become, the more obviously technological advance has, firstly failed to benefit the general public, next, shown clear signs of itself coming under the law of diminishing returns, and finally, like a powerful drug misused, has plunged the world into convulsions of war and revolution. A few years ago, a reference to "inexorable economic laws was certain to be well received in the best circles. It had a scientific sound, combined with a slight suggestion of Puritanism and of the essentially inhospitable structure of the universe. In the higher realms of finance and commerce, it became to some extent displaced by the slightly occult word, " trends," which was felt to be even more scientific, as being a cautious under-statement. Neither of these expressions escapes the risk of ribaldry, nowadays . . But the idea was clear enough. The world is an unpredictable place. Terrible things happen, but no-one is essentially to blame for them. On the whole the mathematics of chance and probability rule us, and, if we appear to be losing on black, our only course is to put our money on red. On this theory, wars, revolutions, depressions, business amalgamations, rationalisation and nationalisation, taxes and bureaucrats, are natural phenomena as inevitable as the flowers that bloom in the spring. An attitude of reverent agnosticism combined with disciplined acceptance is all we can adopt pending a codification of the " trends," which clearly require data compiled and card indexed over a long period of time. It seems inseparable from the acceptation of this theory, however, that we school ourselves to agreement with the remark, "Credo, quia impossibile." We must be able to believe that the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had no connection with monetary inflation; that Domesday Book did not interest William the Norman's Jewish advisers, or that the expulsion of the Jews and the suppression of the Knights Templars who became primarily bankers, had no bearing on the prosperity of England in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We must be able to believe that the foundation of the Bank of England had no influence on the National Debt, and that the appointment of Mr. Montagu Norman as Life Governor was an accident to which his American connections, and the visit of Lord Reading to Washington in 1917, made no contribution. Clearly, it is much easier to hold this negative view of history if we are prevented from noticing that similar events frequently have similar causes. If we are told that the fall of Rome was due to immorality' or malaria, and that William the Conqueror thought of Domesday Book all by himself, that the Jews who accompanied him were "refugees from Christian intolerance" and that the Bank of England had an "American" Adviser from 1927 to 1931, if not before and after, because it wished to learn the latest methods of banking, our attention will not be so likely to be attracted to the idea that both the economic and political fortunes of mankind may be not so much at the mercy of inexorable natural law, as the outcome of manipulation by small groups of men who know exactly what they are doing. This distinction is vital. Consider the events of the years between the European phase of the present war, beginning with the Armistice of November, 1918, and the resumption of hostilities in 1939. The first point to be observed is the crystallisation of policy along lines clearly recognisable as imposed by a determination to adhere to the conventional subservience of a debtor to a creditor, and, with it, "employment" as the backbone of Government. While it is probably not true to say that the United States, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, was determined to use the highly artificial position created by the insistence on the assumption of all financial liability of the "victorious" belligerents by Great Britain, it is certain that German-Jewish bankers in America were fully aware that it was much more important to win the peace than to lose the war, and that this was the weapon with which victory could be achieved. The War Debt due from Great Britain to the United States was $4,368,000,000. Since it was stipulated that it was payable in gold it was equivalent to £897,534,246. Without traversing the endless arguments as to whether the, as usual, disproportionate losses in men and material, in a common war, on the part of Great Britain (America's losses in killed and wounded were 322,000; ours nearly three million) accompanied by fantastic taxation, were not a just ground for claiming that no debt was reasonably due, it is essential to understand that the benefit of the orders placed in America was immense to the Americans. Not one dollar, of course, went to pay for war material produced in Great Britain.
Mr. Balfour had previously stated officially that Great Britain would only ask from her allies, such financial payments as would meet the demands of her own creditors, i.e., the United States. The result of this was to make the United States the only and very large financial beneficiary of the 1914-1918 phase of the war (see Hansard, December 15, 1930) and to leave all the other 'victorious' combatants heavy losers. The question of the military loser, Germany,
requires separate consideration. It was stated in many quarters that
the large payments which for a time were made to the U.S. Treasury
in connection with the arrangements negotiated by' Messrs. Baldwin
and Norman were of little consequence . This rather confusing statement
- confusing, that is, to the ordinary individual whose financial
means, and consequent personal comfort, are subject to the more ordinary
arithmetic of daily life, emanated from the Central Bankers who no
doubt based their statements on the knowledge that they could adjust
taxation so that the payments were concealed. The abrogation of it, and the Washington Naval Agreement limiting Japan to a position of naval inferiority, did two profound injuries to the British Empire. It was an unprovoked and rather ungracious blow to Japanese "face " - the most vulnerable aspect of Asiatic diplomacy. And it demonstrated to the whole of Asia, including India, that the important capital to placate was no longer London, but Washington. Nothing could have made a new war more certain. In the domestic sphere, the most easily apprehended
instance of the general policy is the horse-power tax on motor vehicles.
Here again, it is not so much the monetary aspect which is important,
although it is quite possible that the restriction of high-powered
cars to the very rich had a profoundly disruptive social effect,
playing into the hands of the agitator concerned to suggest that
the poor are poor because others are not so poor. There is little doubt that it was also intended to kill the development of the British aeroplane engine, and the aeroplane itself, but in those objectives only partial success was achieved. In May, 1920, a policy of what can only be described as ruthless restriction of credit was inaugurated, both in Great Britain and the United States. No attempt of any description had been made to deal with the uncontrolled rise of prices, particularly of consumer's goods, and everywhere public discontent at genuine inflation, i.e., a temporary increase in money units in the hands of the public, accompanied by an equal or greater rise mainly permanent in prices, reached such proportions as to constitute a "buyers' strike." That this rise of prices was intentional and a form of hidden taxation, is certain. Heavy taxation, calling in of banker's overdrafts and restriction of trade credits by large industrialists to their smaller trade clients, produced immediate results. Workers were discharged, unemployment rose steeply, reaching three millions in Great Britain, and ten millions in the United States, where the same policy, with, however, much lower taxation, was instituted. In Great Britain, the policy was pursued for a much longer period . Suicides doubled in Scotland and rose 67 per cent, over the rest of the Kingdom the deflationary period of about nine years. Bankruptcies increased by 700 per cent. (See The Monopoly of Credit, graph p. 137.) In the United States, however, the policy was
completely reversed in six months and that country entered upon the
greatest wave of industrial activity and material prosperity ever
known in history, a wave which continued until October 1929. One
effect of this was to cause a drain of the highest - skilled manpower
from this country to America. Many factors contributed to this result, but financial policy is easily pre-eminent. In 1925, after six years of steadily decreasing prosperity, disillusionment, and economic and political frustration, Mr. Winston Churchill, (who had become a Conservative on the practical disappearance of the Liberal Party), Chancellor of the Exchequer, restored the Gold Basis of the Sterling Financial system, with modifications to ensure that the ordinary individual could not buy gold in less than the "standard bar," worth about £1,700. (See The Monopoly of Credit, Chap. 6.) In effect, he could not buy gold except at
the will of the "Bank of England." In 1926 Sir Alfred Mond,
of whom much more hereafter, also forsook the Liberal for the Conservative
Party. More than any other one factor, this influence has dominated British policy in the vital Armistice years. Mr. Lloyd George, the protegé of international Jewry, with his avowed intention to do anything to enable the pound sterling "to look the dollar in the face," i.e., to have a gold exchange value of £3- 18s. 3d. per oz.; Mr. Churchill's close association with financial Jews in England and America, and his restoration of the gold exchange standard in 1925 (for which he has since publicly apologised); Mr. Baldwin's ecstatic remark that the Bank Notes and Currency Act of 1928 had for ever prevented currency reformers from interfering with finance, are evidences, of which there are many more, that the tragedy of the wasted twenty years was not due to inability to pursue any policy, which is the common accusation brought against politicians of that era - it was a fixed instruction to pursue a policy, irrespective of consequences, which can be seen to have built up Germany and enfeebled the British Empire. In these days of coalition Governments, control
by "Planners," and other modern improvements, it is difficult to
realise that Cavaliers and Roundheads, Whigs and Tories, were exponents
of two philosophies. This philosophy, as we shall see when we consider
the case of Germany, runs through Lutherism, Calvinism and other
Puritan movements straight into civil war and revolution. Always,
it is the attack of the black-coated theorist on the pragmatist,
the farmer, the sailor, the pioneer. At the root of it is a denial
of personal initiative and judgment, and the substitution of a set
of transcendental values incapable of, and indeed almost resenting,
any attempt at proof. It will be realised that the re-establishment
of the Gold (Exchange) Standard was the culmination of a considered
policy of restriction, carried out by the visible Government with,
for the most part Mr. Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister, but obviously
inseparable from the covert control of the "Bank of England." It is easy to comment that this attack upon "Labour" was scandalous and indefensible, and if a sufficiently comprehensive view of the whole social and economic system be taken, this is true. But it must be remembered that the Labour Movement was not so much, as it once had been, a wage negotiating body; it had become under international influence a revolutionary political organisation openly claiming the right and the intention to substitute Marxian Socialism for what, without understanding the term, it designated as "Capitalism." The ordinary employer, by which is meant the small and medium sized industrialist of the older type rather than the directors of "public" or international companies or cartels, was forced, in many cases against his desire, into a position of antagonism to his employees because it became obvious that industry was being transformed into a battleground of politics, in which he was being attacked without scruple, not only by the Trades Unions, but by the financial cartels, both aiming at monopoly. Neither the individual workman, nor his employer, had the time or opportunity to realise that they were equally catspaws of a common enemy, and that their legitimate grievances were being used to stampede them into a common ruin. It is necessary to appreciate this situation before the background of the next phase and its bearing on the underlying policy can be seen to be coherent. The General Strike of May 3-12, 1926, ostensibly
developed from a failure to adjust the situation arising from the
termination of the subsidy, which amounted to about £24,000,000,
paid to the coal industry - a subsidy which had been granted under
perhaps the most inept handling (as it appeared) in the records of
Government. In 1920 a Royal Commission under the Chairmanship
of Mr. Justice Sankey, a Socialist, had investigated the conditions
obtaining in the Coal Industry, and certain witnesses had recommended
the nationalisation of coal. It was commonly stated that the pressure
towards this object, together with that for the nationalisation of
railways, proceeded from international loanmongers who wished to
have tangible assets, rather than mere taxing power, behind the large
amounts of British Debt which they held. The Miners' Federation rejected all that part
of the Report which affected them, but supported, without understanding,
the "nationalisation" of coal. The details of the negotiations for
a settlement of the coal dispute, which were without effective result,
are outside the scope of this survey. They are available in the Annual
Register 1926, The Genera! Strike by Sir John (now Viscount) Simon,
the pages of Nature for 1926, and elsewhere. In spite of the fact that both sides made a
great display of legality, the only fact which was ever in dispute
was the extent to which, in the last resort, the armed forces of
the Crown could be employed to defeat the strikers. A Royal Proclamation
declaring a State of Emergency as contemplated in the Emergency Powers
Act of 1920 was issued on May 1, and on May 3 the General Strike
came into effect. On May 11, Sir Herbert Samuel laid before the
T.U. Council the draft of a Memorandum the adoption of which would,
he thought, promote a settlement of the coal dispute. It contained
nothing which was not expressed or implied in the Coal Commission
Report, other than minor adjustments in timing. A deputation called on the Prime Minister to
inform him to that effect, and on May 12, the Strike was called off.
The miners were, of course, furious and continued their own strike,
with a good deal of support from the railway unions. Two facts stand out clearly in retrospect. The ground was prepared for the next steps -
the founding of Imperial Chemical Industries, whose major raw material
is coal, and the Mond-Turner negotiations between Sir Alfred Moritz
Mond who had become a Conservative in 1926, afterwards the first
Lord Melchett, and Benjamin Turner, afterwards Sir Ben Turner, C.B.E.; Since his conference with Mond, the T.U.C. has never authorised a strike. In order to trace the thread of long-term policy in the events we are discussing, it is necessary to give to the career of Alfred Moritz Mond somewhat more extended consideration. In passing it may be observed that steady and continuous propaganda in Labour circles had been devoted to an attack on the private ownership of coal. Most individual miners, besides being convinced that "the coal belongs to the people," were under the impression that the owners' royalty decreased Pie miners' wages, and greatly increased the cost of coal to the consumer. There is no justification for any one of these ideas. There is in existence a Scottish charter, dated A.D. 1202, in which the superior grants the lease of certain collieries in Newbattle, and. the right of the landowner to dispose freely of his coal has never since been questioned, and was set out by Sir John Pettus in his Fodinae Regoles, published in 1670. It should be particularly noticed that property in coal has not been abrogated by the Coal Act of 1938. It has been acquired intact by force majeure accompanied by a derisory compensation, and can be transferred to another owner either by lease or outright sale. Private owners of coal were heavily taxed. Coal
now pays no taxes. The actual royalty received nett by the private
royalty owner rarely exceeded 3d. per ton, and was often less, as
owing to the political weakness of the owners, forms of taxation
which would never have been tolerated otherwise were imposed on the
gross royalty. When the Masonically propagated wave of revolutionary disturbance which swept Europe in 1848 reached the little German town of Cassel, a young German-speaking Jew, Ludwig, a son of Moritz Mond and Henrietta Levinsohn, put on a red tie and harangued the Jewish children of Cassel on the genius of Karl Marx. Prussia had a short way with revolutions, but young Ludwig abandoned street corner politics without apparently incurring any noticeable penalty, and studied chemistry under Bunsen at Heidelberg, marrying the daughter, Frieda, of Loewenthal, the Jewish chemist who is credited with being the pioneer of the German electro-plating and electrochemical industry. At this period, England was greatly under the influence of the Prince Consort and the mysterious Freemason. Baron Stockmar. Young Ludwig Mond and his wife decided to become
English-speaking Jews. They arrived in this country in 1862, three
years after Charles Darwin's MSS. of The Origin of Species had
been accepted by a London publisher. Ludwig Mond was a passionate devotee of Wagner. The neighbourhood of Winnington was transformed
into a stinking eye-sore, and the local population, and particularly
the local gentry, expressed their opinion of him in no uncertain
terms. .That policy is the monopoly of key industries
(Nickel, for instance, is an indispensable component of armour plate
and machine tools, and Mond control Nickel) together with the transference
of information and control to so-called international bodies, the
focus of which was in Germany in the first place. Perhaps the first approach to this end is to be clear that it was largely a "one-way street." The "patent" aspect of the policy forms a good
illustration. The cartel covering the interworking of Mond interests
with the I.G. Farben and others, provides for an interchange of patent
information. In this connection, it is perhaps not without
significance that the (Washington, U.S.A.) Brookings Institution,
which is generally regarded as a sounding-board for "Big Business,"
is (1944) circulating a book by its Principal, Mr. Harold G. Moulton,
and Dr. Luis Marlio, advocating a "soft" peace for Germany, and in
particular, no control for "German" cartels. "All through his life, the philosophy
of Wagner held and guided him" . . . "just as he loved Cromwell's
courage, and sometimes planned his life upon it, so he applied
Wagner's philosophy to the problems of politics and economics." It is one of those inexplicable contradictions of the Jewish temperament that this love of Wagner was in the face of the violent anti-Judaism of Wagner himself. Alfred Mond married Violet Goetze, and the daughter of this marriage married in 1914 Gerald Rufus Isaacs, son of Rufus Isaacs, the negotiator, on undisclosed terms, of the agreement in Washington which arrested the obstructive tactics of the American-German-speaking Jews, in particular the firm of Kuhn, Loeb, and caused them to change from the support of Germany to the support of the Allies. Rufus Isaacs, the brother of Godfrey Isaacs, of the Marconi case, became Marquis of Reading and Viceroy of India. His son, the second and present Marquis, was Chairman of the Central Valuation Committee under the Coal Act, 1938, which governed the acquisition of mineral rights, and is Chairman of the Council for German Jewry. Coal, besides being the main mineral asset
of Great Britain, is the primary raw material of industrial chemistry
and war material. Absolute control of the coal resources of this
country would decide in six months or less our ability to resist
even a minor invasion. Such absolute control was an impossibility
when the coal was in private hands: it is, legally, a fact since
the acquisition of the coal by the "Nation" in July 1942. While, to the onlooker unfamiliar with international intrigue, a chemical combine such as Imperial Chemical Industries might appear to be a source of strength, the entire situation is altered when it is realised that it is certainly possible, and highly probable that certain controls are both extra-territorial and extra-national. And when, as in the case of Alfred Moritz Mond, the channel of communication had high political aspirations both personal and racial, which did not necessarily correspond with the interests of his more or less temporary hosts, the danger is one which no country should tolerate. Mond was primarily a Zionist Jew. His immediate colleagues were Herbert Samuel, Rufus Isaacs, Godfrey Isaacs; Mr. David Lloyd George was solicitor to the Zionist Committee, but the whole of the powerful international group of Jews controlling a large part of world finance-Schiffs, Schusters, Rothschilds, Bleichroeders, Warburgs, and others, have to be taken into consideration. To the uninterested, Zionism is a slightly romantic semi-religious cult of much the same character as the Crusades, which, equally misunderstood, are regarded as a symptom of the rudimentary intelligence of our forefathers. The real force behind the Crusades was probably very different to that we are asked to accept in standard history; and Zionism is something very different to a simple scheme for the return of the Jews to Palestine. That is incidental to the moulding of events and Governments to procure a World Dominion for "Israel." The objective involves a perfectly clear, coherent, and continuous policy on the part of the Zionists. The conditions for successive and major crises must be created and maintained in the world; the means required to deal with each crisis as it arises must be in the hands of Zionist Jews, directly or indirectly; and the use of these means must only be granted to the highest bidder in the surrender of power or the guarantee of its use in the interests of Jewry. In the past the control of money, gold, and credit, has been the primary weapon of the Zionist. But the money myth has been exploded; and legal control of raw materials is essential to the pursuit of the policy to a final and successful issue. Genuine and unfettered private property of any description whatever, is absolutely fatal to it; and the liberal financing of any movement, "Commonwealth," "Liberal," Socialist, Henry Georgite "Single Tax" or Communist, which attacks the idea of private ownership in anything whatever, can be traced without difficulty, if not to Zionism, to Zionist bankers. This is the answer to the fact which seems to puzzle so many people; that the richest body of individuals in the world should subsidise attacks on wealth. Not a single one of the movements mentioned has ever attacked the Money Power or the Jews. Since it was impossible, after the publicity given to the subject by the election of the Social Credit Government of Alberta, to ignore the subject of Finance altogether, practically all the Left Wing parties now include the "nationalisation," i.e., central control, of banking in their programmes. The objective is similar to that involved in the "Nationalisation" of coal. During the early years of the 1914-18 phase of the war, the British Empire was heavily handicapped by the chemical situation, particularly in regard to high explosives. The Government Explosive Factories were under the control of Sir Frederick Nathan. Messrs. Brunner, Mond did what they could to help;: they constructed a large factory at Silvertown with Government money, but unfortunately it blew up, killing 40 people and destroying 800 houses. Much misfortune seemed to attend the attempts to produce aniline dyes, although they were discovered by an Englishman, Perkins. But fortunately, after the collapse of Imperial Russia and the visit of Rufus Isaacs to Washington, followed by the Balfour Declaration on Palestine, things soon righted themselves. As Sir Alfred Mond remarked in a speech to the New York Zionists, reported in the Jewish Chronicle of November 8, 1928: "Has it ever occurred to you how remarkable it is that out of the welter of world blood there has arisen this opportunity? Do you really believe that it is an accident? Do you really in your hearts believe we have been led back to Israel by a fluke?" After the cessation of military hostilities
in 1918 the explosives and allied industries were concentrated into
the control of Nobel Industries, Ltd., with Sir Harry, now Lord McGowan,
as Chairman British Dyes Ltd., with Mr. Herbert Levinstein as Managing
Director, and Brunner, Mond, with its affiliate United Alkali, merged
with these to form, in 1926, Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd. (I.C.I.). The military "defeat" of Germany will, of course,
raise the question of the control of I.G. Farben, the "opposite number." At this point, perhaps it may be desirable to
touch upon the most formidable difficulty which has to be overcome
in mobilising public opinion on major politics. Even well-informed
people, when their attention is drawn to the dangers which threaten
civilisation, are apt to say that we are merely witnessing the results
of the "Capitalist" or "Profits" system. Nothing could be further
from the truth. As Mr: Austin Hopkinson, Member of Parliament for
the Mossley Division of Lancashire (Independent) in a recent speech
in the House of Commons said: This is not the first time we have had to fight against this sort of thing. Many Hon. Members will remember the 'peace in industry' stunt of the late Lord Melchett (Sir Alfred Mond) some years ago, which was exactly the same thing as is being prepared in this country today The idea was to set up large councils for industry on which the big monopolistic firms would have a majority, and if they could work with the labour boss, as they intended to do, they would be able to crush our any chance for any of those young men who are fighting for us abroad. . . . The proposals to which Mr. Hopkinson refers
were the subject of the Mond-Turner Conferences, and a "Joint Interim
Report" of them may be found on pp. 219-230, Trades Union Congress
Record, 1926. There is no fundamental, and nor much derailed, difference between the Mond-Turner proposals and the Fascism which this war purports to eliminate. It will not be difficult to show that it is a coherent part of a much wider strategy, adopted by Germany at the time of "Frederick the Great." But each step of this strategy requires assistance from Powers controlling finance and industry. That is to say, political power has to make terms with economic power. The objective of World Domination is quite certainly sponsored by Germany, and in particular, the German Great General Staff. But behind them, we can perceive the movement of forces whose controllers have very different ideas as to the ultimate Sovereignty. The main proposal of the Mond-Turner Conference was that industrial affairs should be taken out of the hands of Parliament, and dealt with in a kind of Third Chamber, consisting only of members of the Trades Union Congress and the Employers. The resemblance to the Italian Fascist Corporation Council is striking. Associated with Mond, on the Employers side,
were Sir Hugo Hirst (Hirsch), Lord Ashfield, Lord Weir, Lord Barnby,
and Mr. Lennox Lee. How far his associates understood the implications
of the policy, it is, of course, impossible to say. "On the subject of rationalisation" (i.e., squeezing out small firms) "the Conference decided that this tendency should be encouraged" (Lord Melchett) with certain pious reservations. In October, 1929, a year after the (British) Bank Notes and Currency Act had placed the British currency and credit system under the control of a non-governmental, and, so far as is publicly known, possibly - foreign - controlled, institution, the "Bank of England," the nine years' period of almost fantastic commercial and industrial prosperity in the United States - a period in which shiploads of millionaires found time to visit Europe, including "Britain," for the purpose of acquiring the assets of our bankruptcies - came to a sudden end. In a month, stocks and shares became almost unsale-able; workmen were discharged in millions, to be followed at a short interval by black-coated staffs and technicians. The United States, and the world in general, had entered on the greatest economic depression in history. The late Sir Henry Strakosch was ready with an explanation. Primary prices had fallen. Notice the natural phenomenon. No-one to blame. It is probable that complex theories of Trade Cycles and the effect of sunspots on industrial activity are already in preparation in the London School of Economics and Columbia University, in order that historians may have the material to explain the economic blizzard. But meanwhile and in fact, its cause is beyond dispute. Under more normal conditions, industry in the United States is preponderatingly financed by bank loans or overdrafts. In consequence the manufacturer and farmer are under the complete control of the banker, who can, and often does liquidate them almost without notice. The system constitutes the most comprehensive control of policy of which it is possible to conceive, extending to the ability to penalise opinion by economic ruin. During the decade of abnormal industrial activity, much of which consisted in the manufacture of goods for the reconstruction of Russia and Germany, the American manufacturer accumulated large sums, and bank balances, which, towards the latter quarter of the period, he found it difficult to employ in industry. As a result, he not only made less use of bank money, but actually entered into competition with financial circles for the provision of funds to borrowers not only in the U.S.A. but abroad. Not only were the profits of money-lending
threatened, but the industrial subservience to the book-keeper was
endangered to an extent which called for immediate action. It was
taken. The industrialists were not organised to lend "call money" and their funds were placed on fixed terms of three months, or more. At the end of October, 1929, the New York banks, without notice, called in practically every overdraft, and advanced the rate for "call money" from a normal 3 per cent, to 30 per cent. or more. The effect was instantaneous. It is probably not without significance that the President, elected by the Republican Party, was by profession an engineer with a natural tendency to favour the producer rather than the financier and the trader. As an instance of the attitude assumed by the Money Power in relation to the Administration, it may be recalled that Mr. Hoover dictated an official memorandum to Eugene Meyer, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, drawing his attention to the disastrous consequences of the Board's policy, and requesting reconsideration of it. Mr. Meyer acknowledged the receipt of it and took no action. Eugene Meyer was appointed Chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation by Mr. Hoover's successor. The Governor of the Bank "of England," Mr. Montagu
Norman, adopted much the same attitude, remarking to the "MacMillan"
Commission on the working of the Gold Standard, "If the Government
will inform us of their policy, we will co-operate as though we were
under statutory obligation to do so." It is the essence of the history of the period that in the face of disastrous unemployment the armed forces were depleted both of men and equipment, and every effort was made to re-equip Germany. The effect of continuous trade depression on business organisations is uniform. First profits decrease by competition in a decreasing market causing a fall, but not necessarily a heavy fall, in prices. There is no evidence to support the statement sedulously propagated, that the depression was caused by a fall in prices. Before the panic of October, 1929, American
prices were still at a profitable level. Such fall as did in fact
take place was equivalent to a rise in purchasing power and in all
probability increased for some time the volume of goods bought, and
delayed the next stage - the disappearance of profits, the liquidation
of reserves, and the separation of business undertakings into two
classes: In fact it can be seen both by the depression itself; and by the means which were inaugurated to end it when the process was considered to have gone far enough, that elimination of competition was its primary objective. Lord Melchett (Sir Alfred Mond), speaking at
Harvard in 1928 on the Mond-Turner Conference, said: "The high
purpose of the Conferance could not be more amply illustrated than
by the fact that the first agreed resolution published to the world
was a Joint Memorandum on the Gold Reserve and its relations with
Industry." Without commenting on other qualities of the Trades Union participants in the Conference, it is safe to say that their qualifications for discussing the effect of Gold Reserves and their understanding of monetary theory were equally nonexistent. The tragic policy to which reference is made with such complacency, besides subjecting the working population of Great Britain . supposed to be represented by the Trades Unionists at the Conference, to six years of desperate misery, is beyond doubt the most important factor amongst those culminating in the Second World War, and the hair-breadth escape of Great Britain from complete disaster in 1940. On April 21, 1932, Mr. Winston Churchill made the following statement in the House of Commons: "When I was moved by many arguments and forces (my emphasis) in 1925 to return to the Gold Standard, I was assured by the highest experts that we were anchoring ourselves to stability, and I accepted that advice. But what happened? We have no reality, no stability. . . . This monetary convulsion has now reached a pitch when I am persuaded that producers of new wealth will not tolerate indefinitely so hideous an oppression." The gold exchange standard was abandoned in 1931. Seen in the light of subsequent events, its resumption had accomplished its purpose - to emasculate British military, naval, and air power, and to create the atmosphere in which "the threat of war" would "induce the British Government to undertake comprehensive Planning." (P. E. P.) In 1932 the "economic blizzard" approached
its height in the United States, President Hoover was completely
discredited, most of the smaller industrial firms were wrecked, and
attacks on the banking system, as a system, and as a credit monopoly,
were increasing to a formidable volume. There were over twelve million
unemployed. The old Scottish Banking system, which had many
good features, was similar. The prohibition of Branch Banking had
been a great safeguard against the mammoth Wall Street banks, but
its fatal weakness was the need to borrow for the purpose of lending.
The freezing of re-discount loans by the Reserve Banks ultimately
controlled by the Federal Reserve Board, had put the country banks
in the position of being helpless against a "run," which occurred
in practically every case. The new Administration, surrounded by such men as Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter and other international Jews, acted with vigour, and clearly in accordance with a carefully prepared programme. Selected banks were re-opened, and the Federal Reserve Banks, until now entirely quiescent, poured out credits to them on dictated terms which removed any danger of revolt. Large contracts for public works were placed with contractors, and State Employment organisations, whose barely concealed object was the lavish spending of money, rose and expanded. At the same time "controls," which can be recognised
as the groundwork of the Planned Monopolistic State, were imposed
on each main industry. Three months later, Mr. Montagu Norman took
a holiday, and while he was at sea Great Britain renounced the deflationary
policy so relentlessly pursued. We require an intergrowth of the German and
Slav races, and we require too, the cleverest financiers, the Jews,
for us to become masters of the world. We require an unconditional
union with Russia, together with a mutual plan of action which shall
not permit any English schemata to obtain the mastery in Russia. In the main, no great error is involved in dividing responsibility for world disasters into action on two planes. The first plane is that on which very long term
policy, as we consider length of time, is pursued by the same organisation.
An attempt to outline policy on this plane is contained in a previous
work, The Big Idea. It is quite possible, and even probable,
that we have to take into consideration more than one tradition.
Prussianism seems to be the modern embodiment of one World Empire
concept possibly descending from the Teutonic Knights of the Crusading
period, just as the Financial Empire of Judaism is another. That
the two should unite in Germany appears just as logical as that internal
enmity would be inevitable. But the instruments of this policy, Nations
or States, are chosen and retained for much shorter historical periods,
and are discarded when a better instrument becomes available. The philosophy of Frederick, if it can be so
described, is not in doubt. He remarks: "As it has been agreed
among men that to cheat our fellow creatures is a base and criminal
act, it has been necessary to find a word which might modify the
idea; and the word policy has been sanctioned to that end. In all
probability, this word was selected only for sovereigns, for they
cannot really be called rogues or rascals." (Note the curious
suggestion of outside influence -Author.) It is possible that the preceding paragraph contains in the shortest form the guiding principle of German national action. And the instrument of this principle is the Great German General Staff. It is necessary to be clear in our understanding of this statement, because the words represent an idea which is completely unfamiliar to the average British or American mind, and misunderstanding of them leads to a misunderstanding of the problem of dealing with Germany. The Great German General Staff (G.D.G.S.) is Germany, and the German people are its instrument. For instance, not very many people connect the attempt to bureaucratise Great Britain with the German General Staff. They do not understand that words such as "military" or "civil" are merely used in Germany for the deception of foreigners. In Germany the "Civil Service" is simply a branch of the General Staff - an inferior branch. "Big Business" is another branch. "Eric Bramley-Moore," the pseudonym of an American
banker resident in Berlin during the Armistice years, remarks :- There is a direct line through Marxian Socialism and the endowment of the London School of Economics by Sir Ernest Cassel, the large sums donated to the Labour Party by German-speaking Jews, and its close connection with German Socialists, which connects the German General Staff with the attempt to bureaucratise this country. The object is simple. The G.D.G.S. knows exactly
how to use a bureaucracy for its own ends, without that bureaucracy
having any conscious participation. And the end is the downfall of
Great Britain, as a step to World Dominion. Once this central idea
is grasped, the absurdity of supposing that we are merely menaced
by Hitler and something called National Socialism, is only equalled
by the naive idea that there is any fundamental antagonism between
the significant German-speaking Jews whether in Germany, Wall Street,
or elsewhere, and the heads of the General Staff. At the present time, when we are supposed to be fighting the German spirit as well as the German armed forces, we hear through all the main channels of controlled propaganda (and all the main channels are controlled) of the necessity for "economic planning." The original coiner and user of the phrase was General von Moellendorf, of the German War Office. The German Weltanschauung of political and economic world hegemony must be recognised, therefore, as a coherent and unified policy having successful war as its continuous objective. It is in this that the fundamental difference
between the German and the British General staffs can be seen. The
British General Staff is quite as capable technically and professionally,
but its objective is quite different. The problem put to the British
Staff Officer is to be prepared, within the narrow limits of peace-time
financing, for any eventuality, and especially for the more likely
eventualities. His role is essentially defensive and strategically
passive. It may be desirable to point out at this juncture that the so-called efficiency of the German is purely functional and has led him from one disaster to another, as it would lead us if we copied it. The weakness of democracy, in its present form, is not lack of "planning," but in the existence of financial and industrial oligarchies whose mentality is sympathetic to Prussianism, and in fact is largely interlocked with it. Since the origin of the Russian "Communist" policy is identical with that instilled into Frederick II by Anarcharsis Clootz, they are in essence similar. The coalition of Germany and Russia is logical, but the Russian mentality is very dissimilar to that of the German, and may easily contribute unrehearsed developments. ON November 11, 1918, at eleven o'clock - the
eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, an Armistice
in the World War came into force between Germany and the Allies,
France and Great Britain, with the Associated Nation, the U.S.A.,
concurring. London abandoned itself to an orgy of relief
and rejoicing. It must be remembered also that Great Britain entered the war a large creditor of America; parted with gold and securities to an amount almost equal to the debt; and received in return war material, much of it so inferior as to be almost useless, and all of it at tremendously inflated prices. It is impossible to understand the extraordinary collapse of the power and prestige of Great Britain at the end of a victorious war on any grounds other than that the terms upon which the United States entered the war (which were certainly dictated by German Jews to Wilson), contained provisions which were designed to ensure not merely the temporary defeat of Germany, but the permanent impotence of Great Britain. The freedom previously enjoyed by Great Britain in regard to foreign policy disappeared with the entry of the U.S.A. into the war. What, then, did the economists mean? There is little doubt of what they meant. It was not that Germany could not pay, and not even that Germany could not be made to pay. It was that all the politicians were in the hands of the financiers, and had been made to understand quite clearly that the interests of finance were paramount. This involved certain clear issues. The first of these was that every effort must be made to re-establish gold as the basis of payment. (Rufus Isaacs, Lord Reading, had agreed in Washington that British debts to U.S.A. should all be paid in gold). The second was that everyone should be poorer - or think themselves poorer - so that "employment" for wages might be re-established everywhere as quickly as possible. Whoever was to be paid, it must on no account be the ordinary individual. The third was that debts to bankers must be given priority over debts to Governments. And the fourth was that the American-speaking German-Jewish bankers such as the Warburgs and Schiffs who were paramount at the peace conferences, were determined that Germany should be in a position to renew the struggle at the earliest possible moment. Apart from other reasons they had done too well not to wish for a repetition. The first payment ordered by the Reparations Commission was in kind. The German Government were ordered to deliver 2,234,000 tons of coal per month. After numerous protests at non-delivery by the French Government, the Reparations Commission informed the Allied Governments on June 30, 1920, that Germany had voluntarily defaulted on coal deliveries. She could deliver, but she would not. At Boulogne in May and June, 1920, the Reparations Money Indemnity was fixed at 269 milliards of gold marks, spread out over 42 years. The Germans did not pay. The paper mark began to fall in exchange value
which would normally indicate that she was importing more than she
exported. Enormous quantities of paper marks were sold to speculators
in foreign countries for gold currencies. When these became valueless
the Germans had received a considerable war indemnity and wiped out
their own National Debt. We now enter the almost incredible period of
the Dawes and Young Plans by which Allied and American bankers, under
an American Chairman, supervised the building up of German credit,
and provided the funds for the modernisation of German industry.
With Mr. Montagu Norman as Governor, and a nominee of the Federal
Reserve Board, Dr. Sprague, to advise him, the "Bank of England" co-operated
with New York banks in assisting Dr. Schacht, described by Lord Vansittart
as "the most oleaginous rascal I have ever met," to obtain large
sums of money from both countries, small fractions of which were
returned as "reparations." Turning to the military aspects of this period,
Article 160 of the Treaty of Versailles read, "The Greater German
General Staff and all similar organisations shall be dissolved, and
may not be reconstituted in any form." The Treaty limited the Germany Army to 100,000
men. It may be convenient at this juncture to emphasise
an aspect of the matter which has an importance, if possible, greater
at the present time than during the period of German re-armament.
Both Britain and France had staffs of men in Germany on the Reparations
Commission, and in other capacities, who knew what was going on,
and reported their findings. British business men visiting Germany
reported the drilling of thousands of armed men in every district
of Germany. The Labour-Socialist Party did everything possible to hamper rearmament, and actually stopped the completion of the Singapore Base (not on technical grounds, which appear to have existed, but for pacifist reasons). At the present time, we are being presented with the same description of distorted information on the social conditions of the totalitarian states, and notably of Russia, whose military prowess is systematically confused with social well-being. It is impossible to dispute the evidence which is available that there is a tacit conspiracy between the international financier with his controlled press, and the international socialist, to stampede the general public through the agency of continuous misinformation, just as the same forces prevented the British Government from utilising the unemployment period of 1928-1933 to anticipate and suppress the German re-armament which proceeded throughout with unabated vigour. Does Lord Baldwin or anyone else suppose that the unemployed in the Distressed Areas would have refused to make guns in 1930? It must be obvious to anyone who will give the matter serious consideration that the interests which control British publicity consciously worked to emasculate British military power and to build up that of Germany, and that they were assisted, whether consciously or not, by certain carefully selected Trades Union leaders who moulded the policy of the Labour Party in accordance with the parallel policies of the German-speaking Jew-inspired Fabian Society (later, P.E.P.) and the Zionists . In the Report of the (U.S.A.) Custodian of Alien Property, published in 1919, after explaining the care with which German control had been concealed, it is remarked: "In many of the large German-owned companies taken over by the alien property custodian after investigation it was found that espionage was one of their chief functions. Every scrap of information of commercial or military value to Germany, was carefully gathered by the representatives of these concerns in this country, and quickly forwarded to the home office in Germany. . . . Especially the American chemical industry was a natural centre for German espionage." J. Carlton Ward, President of the Fairchild Engine and Aeroplane Corporation, speaking at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York on January 20, 1943, said:- "Britain began to re-arm very slowly in 1935. That so-called slow phase of re-arming extended through 1937. The British political situation at that time has had a fairly close parallel in the United States. The Government was not free to spend the monies required for armament." It should be noticed, therefore, that German re-armament was being assisted by dominant powers in New York and London; in both centres this re-armament was played down, and political parties notoriously dominated by "internationalism" opposed defence measures; and that Germany and Russia alone devoted single-minded attention to preparation for war. The control of the money policy of Great Britain is predominantly in the care of the "Bank of England." The control of the monetary situation in the United States is predominantly in the hands of the Federal Reserve Board. Since it is probable that the Jewish question will be one, if not the major, preoccupation of the twentieth century, the obvious contradictions of German policy in this regard demand attention. In the world's press at this time (1944) "Nazi"
a Jewish word meaning "Prince" as well as National Socialist, is made
to appear synonymous with the persecution of the Jews. How much persecution
there really has been will not be known until a much later date. That
there has been some, is quite logical and understandable. The inflation
racket inflicted untold hardships on the general body of the German
people. German-speaking Jews were conspicuous exceptions. They appeared
to be possessed of large quantities of American currency or credit,
and used it to buy out every German business, and even personal property,
from a population which saw its means of contact with food and lodging
disappear overnight. A raging thirst for revenge was undoubtedly widespread,
and in the lawlessness of the times some of it found satisfaction But they have an obvious use. They form an
excuse for forcing the barriers of immigration laws. And the objective
is exactly that of parachute troops - to get behind the enemy's lines.
The effect on internal politics of the "refugees" in every country
ought to be sufficient indication as to the identity of the enemy. War is the pursuit of policy by other means. M. Clemceau, "the Tiger," is said to have remarked, "Some essential virtue has gone out of the British." That is possibly, but not certainly, true. "Britain," and the inhabitants of the British Isles, are by no means identical. It may be noticed that when the consequences of our strange peace-time policies bring about a major catastrophe, the shadowy influences which have produced it hand over the situation to some extent to the native-bred, whose efforts are still heroic, if unnecessarily costly. At the outbreak of war in 1939 a paean of joy
ran through the American Press, and the denizens of the various international
Socialist and World Planning bodies, such as the Fabian Society,
P.E.P., and the Royal Institute. of International Affairs, were happy
in the assumption that whoever lost the war, they had already won
it. Mr. Anthony Eden, fresh from a revivifying trip to Washington announced that "it seems that our New Order must be built through war. But it will be built, just the same." The haste to declare our real war aims was perhaps
almost indecent. Although apparently anachronistic, the convenient
time at which to consider the furious attack on Mr. Neville Chamberlain
and his policy of "appeasement" is in connection with its apparent
failure, and to provide it with the correct background it is necessary
to survey a field not very obviously that of foreign policy. Prior to 1914-1918 the Chairman of the Bank, Sir Edward Holden, was known to hold very "advanced" views on the actual nature of the business carried on by banks, and its bearing on national policy. The common idea that a bank is merely a custodian of its clients money, which it re-lends at interest to safe borrowers, was not taken seriously by him, although it is incorrect to attribute to Sir Edward the enunciation of the explosive theorem that "Banks create the means of payment out of nothing" (Encyclopedia Britannica) which was explicitly stated by H. D. Macleod in his Theory and Practice of Banking, at least twenty-five years earlier. But the history of the Midland Bank during the Armistice years is marked by several features unique to it amongst the "Big Five" banks to whom the numerous smaller banks had in the main been affiliated. The first of these was the series of Annual Addresses by Sir Edward Holden's successor, Mr. Reginald McKenna, a politician rather than a banker, of which perhaps the most significant was that containing the famous statement, "The amount of money in circulation varies only with the policy of the banks. . . . Every loan creates a deposit, and the repayment of a loan destroys a deposit . . . the purchase of a security by a bank creates a deposit, the sale of a security . . . destroys a deposit." It is unlikely that these Addresses were actually
written by Mr. McKenna himself, and some grounds exist for the belief
that he did not understand them, but there is little doubt that they
were part of a considered and immensely important policy operating
through the Bank as an organisation. But the Midland took a highly individualistic line even in this. It opened branches bringing its total number up to approximately two thousand, but only in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. All the other banks expanded abroad also. A decorous disapproval of "Bank of England" policy, and of Mr. Montagu Norman, was fairly evident, the "chequelet" incident to popularise small cheque payments being a case in point. But the profits made by the banks were probably the least important aspect of their 1914-1918 activities. The immense production necessitated by the war had rendered it inevitable that manufacturing concerns must borrow on an unprecedented scale, and the inffuence of Sir Edward Holden's views on the methods adopted is beyond dispute. As a consequence all the banks, but particularly the Midland, had come into a control of industry far beyond anything previously existing, just as their creation of the means of payment out of nothing was unique in its magnificence. The situation which must have been clear to the Board of the Bank was precisely that which the big German D Banks, to which the "Big Five" English Joint Stock Banks had been brought to correspond, had achieved before the war under the direction of Ballin, Rathenau and others. Industries were merely departments of banking Government, controlled by debt.
The war had demonstrated that raw materials, and particularly nitrogenous chemicals were the key to victory. Reginald McKenna, who had succeeded Sir Edward Holden as Chairman of the Midland Bank on the latter's death, attempted to bring about a merger between British Dyestuffs and Nobel's Explosives. He failed, for some reason which does not transpire, the project re-appeared under the leadership of Sir Alfred Mond in an enlarged form, the Midland Bank appeared to become more orthodox, and Mr. McKenna became a Director of Imperial Chemical Industries; and Sir Harry McGowan (Lord McGowan) of I.C.I., and Lord Ashfield of the socialistic London Passenger Transport Board, and a Director of I.C.I., became Directors of the Midland Bank, a very bushy tail on an admittedly large "dog." This was in 1926, and subsequent events can
only be understood in the light of these arrangements, in particular
the interlocking of the Midland Bank with the largest American Bank,
the Chase National Chamberlain at once set in motion the mechanism of credit expansion by abrogating the Gold Exchange Standard which made the grip of the Bank of England nearly absolute. Stanley Baldwin was Prime Minister and remained Prime Minister until May, 1937. A Napoleon, a Bismarck and a Pitt, all rolled in one could not have repaired the mischief of Baldwin's tragic fifteen years of power, in the two years of peace which remained. Had it not been for the quiet English gentleman who succeeded him, those two years would have been cut in half, and the Luftwaffe would have been over London without so much as two squadrons of effective fighter opposition from the R.A.F. It is difficult to write patiently of the stream of abuse directed at the Munich policy. The scurrilous attacks of the American press are understandable. The collectivist New Deal was already a failure. The German-speaking Jew control in Washington was even stronger than in the time of President Wilson. No-one outside a few technical experts believed that the United States could be harmed even by a fully victorious Hitler, and a large body of commercial opinion was already mobilised around the slogan, "We can do business with Hitler." The prospect of another war in which America
would keep out and again rise to fantastic prosperity on a war boom
was too alluring to be relinquished. The situation is explained with
engaging candour by Mr. A. D. H. Smith, in his biography of Colonel
House, President Wilson's adviser: But the spate of synthetic bilge regarding our unpreparedness which was poured out from domestic quarters which had done everything possible to encourage Germany and to hinder re-armament in this country is only explicable on the assumption that a well-known technique of the Communist Party was in operation - to accuse your opponents of what you have done, or intend to do, yourself. Not a single word of this abuse was directed to the Money Power, the Press or the B.B.C. It must be remembered that the internationalist policy was interlocked with such institutions as the League of Nations, the International Labour Office and the Bank of International Settlements, inaugurated with the assistance and blessing of Viscount Snowden. The same group of noisy Socialist journalists, most of them deriving such ideas as they possessed from alien sources, who shouted "Down with the Men of Munich," had worked and talked against re-armament and extolled collective security, while demanding intervention in favour of Abyssinia and Communist Spain. Their assumption of the right to a moral attitude for which they were not prepared either to work or fight is perhaps the only palliation of Mr. Stanley Baldwin's foreign policy, or the lack of it. But there can be no doubt that the internal economic system of Great Britain underwent a radical change for the worse in 1931 - that, without the spectacular incidents which marked the inauguration of the "New Deal," a carefully prepared system of controls running parallel to it was imposed, specifically designed to accelerate monopoly. The complete story of the forces brought to bear will probably never be told; the formation of the great cartels and the financial control of British industry during the American boom in the interests of American investors were certainly preparatory; but in that year Britain, no longer great, adopted the beginnings of a new theory of life completely alien to her genius - the conception of the country as a single factory having many departments, the head office and control-room being the "Bank of England." The London School of Economics, endowed by the German-speaking Jew Sir Ernest Cassel, and largely staffed by Socialist aliens, "to train the bureaucracy" (much of it temporarily in "private" employ) "of the coming Socialist State," had come into its own. How much of the responsibility for Dunkirk rests on this hastily imposed bureaucracy will never be known. It must be insisted that the tragic history of the Armistice years was neither adventitious nor inescapable. It is quite true that the number of individuals who are capable of estimating the consequences of an economic policy is not large. But the moulders of socialist-cartelist policy knew exactly where they were going, and they were going in the same direction in every country. The objective was a rigid, comprehensive military-industrial framework in which the individual would disappear except as a tool of high policy. It was the complete antithesis of everything the Englishman had built upon the foundation of Magna Charta and Habeas Corpus, and it led us straight to the beaches of Dunkirk and the arrest and imprisonment of nearly seventeen hundred persons without trial and without the formulation of a charge, under Regulation 18B. The history of the last few years of peace will probably not be told, if at all, for many years. It is obvious that, even if the reorganisation policy to which Chamberlain had obviously committed himself had been intrinsically sound, which is highly debateable, it offered the perfect opportunity to hamper the re-armament. Rearmament was hampered; and it is certain that such success as was achieved was the, result of cutting adrift to a considerable extent from the advisers who surrounded Baldwin, and that Chamberlain's unpopularity had far more to do with that than with any reasonable grounds for criticism, under circumstances for which he was not responsible, of the successful efforts which delayed the resumption of military war. The bureaucratic state, however, demanded war for its final enthronement, and not only war, but a long war. It must be observed that the productivity of the modern power-tool system had brought out into strong relief the effect of the monopoly of money by the banks, and the abnormal consumption of war was needed to force back into the factories the balance of the populations not engaged in mutual destruction, so that "Plans" might be matured to keep them there. It is hoped that the memory of the ordinary citizen, doped with Hollywood films, monopoly broadcasting and defective education, will be short enough to permit the contradiction between the "poverty amidst plenty" of the 1930's and the "full employment" aspirations of the bureaucratic state in the immediate post-war years, to escape notice. It is the fashion to ascribe political mistakes to ineptitude rather than to moral turpitude. To a considerable extent this is justifiable in regard to the ordinary individual. For instance, nothing could be at once more tragic and more widespread than the idea that Socialism and "Planning" is the legitimate inheritor of political and economic liberalism. But the history of the past twenty-five years renders it quite impossible to accept this view so far as the higher direction of events is concerned. There is evidence, conclusive both in volume and character, that the international-collectivist-financiers and their Trades Union allies not only knew that the economic and political crises of 1920-1936 were primarily monetary in origin, but they also recognised in such events as the election of the Social Credit Government of Alberta that the time was limited in which they must acquire a new form of control to replace that which had previously been exercised through the monopoly of credit. Only war could provide the conditions and the time. The writing was-and is-on the wall. Alberta provides perhaps the most decisive evidence of conscious intention, by reason of the Disallowance of all the Legislative Assembly's measures to implement a system of adequate purchasing-power. The drastic and unusual course adopted does not seem capable of any explanation other than that the international money-power knew that they must be successful if tried, and dare nor permit them to be tried . Even against continuous opposition from the Federal Government at Ottawa, and much disadvantageous and unfair discrimination, the Province of Alberta has been uniquely prosperous under an administration actuated wherever possible by the general principles grouped under the term Social Credit. The importance of this matter is greater than might perhaps appear at first sight. There are very few individuals outside the ranks of political vested interests who do not regard the trend of events with concern or apprehension. But the idea has been skillfully injected that we are merely witnessing an inevitable consequence of modern technology, and if, as someone has phased it, you cannot take your telephone out however much you dislike it, we must resign ourselves to the loss of our "individual freedoms" in the interests of a "higher freedom." If this were so, it would be unnecessary to cook the accounts, pervert the evidence and confuse the issues. The world (i.e., the individuals in it) is not yearning for full employment by centralised organisations. On the contrary, a larger number of persons than ever before want self-employment. But they want purchasing-power. It is not true that the larger an organisation is, the more "efficient" it is, even if the efficiency of organisations were the prime, sane, objective of life, which it is not. The greater efficiency of large-scale production "finds scant support in any evidence that is now at hand." (Final Report, Temporary National Economic Committee, U.S.A., Senate Document No. 21,1940, p. 314.)" It should be noted, moreover, that monopoly
is frequently the product of factors other than the lower costs of
greater size . . . where they exist. . . . It is attained though
collusive agreement and promoted by public policies." Since financial results are what is aimed at in business, it is obvious that the conditions of financing small and large business may, and frequently do, make more difference to the profit and loss account than low costs. For instance, bulk buying may enable low prices to be paid for raw material, but this has no connection with the actual amount of labour put into the winning of the raw material. Bulk buying may be, and often is, actually and realistically inefficient; but the low unit price paid produces an illusion of low genuine cost. Within limits, the whole aspect of a balance sheet can be altered by allocating to various accounts charges which in other conditions would swell the cost of production and expose waste. No commercial accountant would certify the accounts of the Post Office in the form in which they are submitted. It may be objected that many of the facts to which reference has just been made have been elicited by "National" Committees, Royal Commissions, and similar bodies. This is true, but it will be noticed by anyone who will take the trouble to read the literature of the Fabian Society or P.E.P. in the realm of industry, or the Royal Institute of International Affairs (" Chatham House") in Foreign Affairs, that such findings are never quoted, and the impression conveyed is always that of the inevitability, as well as desirability, of larger units. A further and equally important indication of what can only be described as conscious turpitude is contained in the arguments adduced in relation to a "managed," as distinguished from an "automatic" money system. The old, orthodox Gold Coinage Standard money system, in which a bank was compelled to pay call deposits in gold if required, pretended to be, although it was not, an "automatic" system. It was contended that politics could not enter into it. Price levels and the "balance of trade" automatically produced certain movements of gold, which acted in the manner of a steam-engine governor and kept trade upon a prescribed rate of revolution. It was not true, and if it had been it would still have been a bad system, since the quantity of gold in existence neither varied in any ratio to the possibilities of production nor the necessities of consumption. But there were two assumptions in the theory
as presented to the general public. Howso great their clamour, whatso'er their
claim, Alfred Moritzmond, 1st Baron Melchett, died in 1930, his attempt to remove industrial policy from criticism of parliament and the general public having for the time being failed. Towards the end of his life he was much concerned with the New York group of Zionist Jews who controlled the Palestine Economic Corporation and were the force behind the "New Deal." In 1931 two closely connected events coincided
with a reorganisation of the Government and the final disappearance
of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and Philip (Viscount) Snowden from politics. For an admirable little analysis of the . origins arid activities of the Fabian Society and its offshoot, P.E.P., the reader should consult The Planners and Bureaucracy by E. Edwards (K.R.P. Publications, Ltd., Liverpool, 1943). The nature of the former is well exemplified in a pamphlet, The City Today, published jointly by the Bureau and the Jewish-Socialist, Victor Gollancz, over the pseudonym of "Citizen," which reads as though it were written by an international banker concerned to idealise the Money Trust. The public activities of P.E.P. emerged in 1933.
In 1938, Planning, the publication dealing with such of its
activities as it was desired that the public should apprehend, declared "Only
in war, or under threat of war, will a British Government embark
on large scale planning." It is frequently observed, by those who have given only superficial attention to the matter, that it is perverse to object to planning. Much play is made with "the necessity of regarding the problem as a whole." The implication is that the planning to which reference is made is the alternative to what is commonly called "muddling through." The fact that practically every article we use, from a teaspoon to a motor-car, is the result of skilled, intensive planning is apt to escape notice, yet we do not plan teaspoons and motor-cars "as a whole." The planning which results in a teaspoon or a motor-car, however, is the outcome of a desire to produce a teaspoon or a motor-car of a particular pattern, and in a free economy the pattern is conceived in the hope that it will appeal to the individual, and will be bought in competition with alternative patterns. But the planning of the Fabian Society and its colleague P.E.P. is and must be precisely the opposite. It is the planning of whole peoples on the model of Germany by a totalitarian State which is designed as a whole to be the best instrument of war, the national objective of Germany. The teaspoon and the motor-car alike have to fit into this conception. Comprehensive planning requires one single objective which never varies and to which the individual is subordinate; and comprehensive planning is only justifiable on the assumption that military war is merely one aspect of continuous war. To repeat the dictum of Clausewitz, "War is the pursuit of policy by other means." Whose policy, and to where it leads, is undisclosed. Once this conception is grasped, it is not difficult to realise that "only in war or threat of war" could the social and political economy of Great Britain, the great barrier to World Dominion, be remodelled in the hierarchical pattern of the German Army. That there is no contradiction between practical
Socialism (Planning) and extreme militarism, was fully recognised
in Germany fifty years ago. In 1892 August Bebel, a leading Social
Democrat (Socialist) told Bismarck that "the Imperial Chancellor
can rest assured that German Social Democracy is a sort of preparatory
school for militarism." It is at this point that the fundamental and irreconcilable antagonism between the German and the British, the socialist and the liberal (without a capital) conception of life becomes plain. It is not that the Briton is incapable of understanding, and, unless bedevilled by alien propaganda, appreciating, the necessity of rank and consequent discipline. His point of view has been put once for all by the poet of Scotland, Robert Burns. "The rank is but the guinea stamp, a man's a man, for a' that." The German outlook was put with even greater brevity by the Kaiser -" cannon-fodder." The matter may be phrased somewhat differently, and in a manner more closely applicable to the present situation, by saying that the German, or socialist proximate objective is government by administration, whereas the English conception is government of administration. The first is the unbridled rule of the expert: It is a remarkable tribute to the sound instincts of the English that they have always distrusted experts in politics. If the average man, assuming that there is such a person, were to be told that this distrust is probably the root cause of their survival, and that it took the form of skepticism in regard to the Encyclopaedists who were responsible for the French Revolution, he would probably repudiate any understanding of the subject. But if the average craftsman, small trader, or farmer were asked why he voted for a Conservative, he would be quite likely to reply, "These socialists are too clever. I don't trust 'em." Some instinct warns him that sympathy for the under-dog is one thing; an under-dog Party in the House of Lords, a School of Economics identifying the Gold Standard and international cartels with Under-Dog Economics and providing its picked graduates with desirable positions in the "Bank of England," and Somerset House, is quite another. Where the unreasoning instinct of the Englishman (and in this the Scot and the Welshman are not so obviously included) has been so remarkable is that it has led him to a decision on a matter in regard to which reason would require an array of fact inaccessible to the great majority. Without argument, he accepts the bureaucratised state as largely inevitable in war; without argument, he indicates that it is unpleasant in war and intolerable in peace. But it is doubtful to what extent it is generally realised that retreat from the centralised, Socialist State is much more difficult than progress towards it. Vested interests in bureaucracy are not alone
the cause. The situation has been put with accuracy by Professor
Brutzkus, from 1907 to 1922 occupant of the Chair of Agricultural
Economics at St. Petersburg, who remarks: The foregoing paragraph, and indeed the whole of the book from which it is taken, will repay careful study, Since it contains either implicitly or explicitly indications of the tremendous problem with which the world is faced in the bureaucratised or "planning" State. Professor Brutzkus, who had unrivalled opportunities of observing the transition from Czarist to Communist Russia, and was highly critical of the former, concludes: "Russian experience bears out in the clearest manner our basic conclusion - namely, that the principle of socialism is not creative; that it leads the economic life not to fruition, but to win." But it hardly requires insistence that such arguments as the many adduced from various sources on the unsatisfactory condition of Russia and Germany, both examples of the planned bureaucratic Socialist State, have little or no bearing on the likelihood of a change in the system. Its very defects strengthen the System. Can anyone seriously suggest that Hitler or Stalin, together with the Great German General Staff and the Moscow Communist Bureaucracy, will resign voluntarily? And if they will not resign voluntarily, "the most impotent of all peoples" are not exactly in the best strategic position to force a resignation. The Gestapo and the Ogpu can deal competently with anything of that nature. There is no essential difference between the higher officials of a Trust, Cartel, or Trades Union, once they are free of Parliamentary control, and a Russian Commissar or an "Office General" of the Great German General Staff. None of them is creative; all of them are primarily concerned with their own positions and the perpetuation of the system which maintains them in positions of maximum power and minimum responsibility. And not one of them can pursue an independent policy. The policy is that of the type of organisation to which they belong - it is the organisation which makes the man, not the man the organisation. Sir Alfred Mond's plan was one way of ending
Parliamentary control of the bureaucrat; failing, resort was had
to the New Despotism, "P.E.P." One clue can be found in the nature, transformation, and mechanism of taxation. The fundamental idea of taxation can be discerned in the maxim "inter arma silent leges." Taxation was originally a war measure; it was not law, it was not legal. It was simply a recognition of the fact that when the house is burning down, the mill race may have to be tapped to put the fire out. The income tax, introduced by Sir Robert Peel, was a temporary tax to replace the revenue lost by the abolition of import taxes on various articles and like Peel's Bank Charter Act, Police Legislation, and general policy, can be seen to have been a portion of a definite plan to familiarise permanent taxation, of which it is most improbable that his was the creative brain. During the whole of the nineteenth century we can see the conception of taxation as being a device to finance specific ends, changing into something entirely different - a political weapon, in the main aimed at agriculture but in general intended to make Finance the Supreme Government. The core of the plan was the National Debt and the Balanced Budget working in conjunction with the Bank of England. In order to avoid repetition, the reader who is not familiar with the technique of Government Finance may be referred to The Monopoly of Credit, Chap. V, for further detail. Knowledge of finance was confined to a select few, and the general public was gradually trained to believe that in some unexplained way, life was becoming much more expensive. In actual fact, the general population was receiving a decreasing share of wealth produced. It never seems to have been generally observed that the "social services," which were often given as a reason for higher taxation, were almost wholly due to the inability of the individual to get by purchase what was physically obtainable, since public bodies did in fact obtain it, paying by loans which further increased taxation. The individual was not to be allowed to spend his own money. It seems so obvious to anyone who is completely ignorant of the subject that the poor are poor because the rich were rich, that no decent minded person could object to make the rich poor by taxation even if in some curious way the general body of the well-to-do became poor without the poor becoming perceptibly more well-to-do. It has been proved repeatedly, by the most orthodox economists, that the distribution of surplus money income over the bare subsistence level would be quite inadequate to raise the general standard of living to any tolerable stage, and would kill any but elementary industries. Over twenty years ago, Dr. Bowley stated that the confiscation of all incomes over £160 would only provide £25 per family if the sum confiscated were completely and evenly distributed. It is being proved at this time, when we are spending £14,000,000 per day that the confiscation of the money-wealth of the well-to-do would not take us very far, since on Dr. Bowley's figures, when there were well-to-do, they, collectively, had only about two-thirds of a million a day to spend. The detail of this question is intricate and
far-reaching, but the main dominant fact is simple. A landowner may have property, the price value of which is £100,000, but to pay his taxes he must get money from somewhere. And the money is created, not by the ownership or the cultivation of land or even by the sale of it, except to a bank, but by the banks -"out of nothing" as the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it. Had this been widely understood, the fantastic taxation of the past thirty years in particular, beginning with Mr. Lloyd George's Budget of 1910, would never have been tolerated. It was not widely understood, but it was thoroughly
understood both by the international forces which brought Mr. George
to power, and by the German High Command which realised that the
landed proprietor was the backbone of the fighting strength of Great
Britain, and that his elimination would leave the "internationalist" in
a commanding position. An understanding of this matter is essential to even an elementary insight into the politics of at least the past two hundred and fifty years. The fact that money has been kept in short supply has deluded the vast majority into believing that wealth was in short supply. By keeping (no matter what the improvement of process and the increase of production) the less fortunate, short of money, a discontented body of the population could be, and has been, kept available for agitation against every type of property except the credit or money-creating mechanism. Skilfully financed propaganda against property itself as a "private" conception has provided votes to transfer it to institutions governed from the shadows, or has so depreciated market values as to amount to virtual confiscation, without in any case detaching the conception of ownership by somebody or something, from it. Out of this has grown a feature new in British
life - the idea that uninstructed criticism of one's neighbour's
business is normal and proper, and can reasonably be extended to
any infringement of his "privileges" which does not involve interference
by the police. Speaking in the Canadian House of Commons on
February 2, 1944, Mr. W. F. Kuhl, M.P. (Social Credit, Jasper-Edson)
quoted from the Speech from the Throne as follows :- The curious resemblance to a P.E.P. manifesto is noteworthy. Commenting on this paragraph, and others to the same effect, all of which are similar (even in literary style) to official statements of policy appearing simultaneously in every Dominion of the British Empire, as well as in Great Britain itself, Mr. Kuhl said: "I have yet to hear any individual, either on the Government side or on the opposition benches, indicate what he means by full employment. . . . Why do we have an economic system? Judging from most of the speeches I hear both in and out of the House, the complete purpose of an economic system is to keep people at work. . . . I wish to dissent completely from that point of view. . . . I assert that the purpose of an economic system never was, is not, and never will be that of providing jobs . . . the only sound, sane, sensible, logical and legitimate purpose of an economic system is to provide the maximum amount of goods and services with the minimum of work and trouble . . . it is not 'work' that anyone objects to, much; it is being compelled to work either by Government or nature. . . . When a Government, whether it be this Government or any other, seeks to compel the people of the nation to work, whether it be on public works or work of any other kind, then that Government is imposing a condition of slavery upon the people. The Work State is nothing less than a slave state. "I wish to say with respect to private enterprise that I do not consider it the duty or obligation of private enterprise anywhere to provide jobs . . . there is a lot of criticism being made of private enterprise today. The only thing I can see wrong in private enterprise is the abuse of it . . . when the socialists contend that the way to deal with the abuses of the private enterprise system is for the nation to take it over, that is equivalent to saying that we ought to abolish freedom lest it be abused." Mr. Kuhl then demonstrated that the agency through which the private enterprise system was perverted was the financial system, whose defects would remain unaltered by the abolition of private enterprise, and could be rectified without nationalisation. While to the minority who have avoided the political economy of the London School of Economics in devoting serious attention to the problems which it obscures, there is nothing in Mr. Kuhl's speech to arouse comment beyond its clarity, it is probable that to the general body of the public such sentiments would appear at the best eccentric, and at the worst subversive. The idea that a leisured class is decadent, and therefore, a fortiori, a leisured nation is a nation lost, has been so carefully injected into common consciousness, that evidence to the contrary is powerless to inspire reconsideration of the patent fallacy. It is not so much that an inner ring of clear-sighted and immensely powerful men realise that "employment at a fair wage" is the key to the universal serfdom which they are determined to impose on the world, which is dangerous; it is that large numbers, perhaps the majority of the electorate, are nearly incapable of conceiving of a better condition in life. There is not a newspaper of large circulation, no matter what its alleged politics, which does not stress "the necessity for full employment" while at the same time either openly or covertly hinting that bare workhouse maintenance, if that, will be allowed to objectors. The point is one of major importance. It is not work, or even the proceeds of work with which the planners of the Servile State are concerned. It is that everyone shall work under direction. The conception is identical with that of the Great German General Staff. As it has been suggested earlier in these pages, there are sound technical reasons for regarding the large monopolistic structure of industry, with its universal wage and salary system, as being economically defective, and it is therefore all the more significant that, with a technique which, as such, must exact admiration, the whole body of controlled propaganda contrives to ignore the elementary dilemma in which the planners are placed. Either the factory-world and the mechanised farm are effective in producing an immeasurably higher standard of living under more pleasurable conditions, with much less labour, or they are not. If they are, why more employment? If not, why pursue the policy? When the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Temple, said "We need supremely the control of human purpose" he merely voiced, doubtless without realising it, the views of the world dominator everywhere. The only distinction which can be legitimately drawn in Power Politics, of which the Archbishop's phrase is a synopsis, is the relative degree of progress to the goal of domination, and in this the Great German General Staff represents the summit of achievement up to the present. To what extent the United States of America is briefed, under the same essential direction, to assume the major role is not so apparent as it was some time ago. There is nothing like the same homogeneity either of race or sentiment as in the case of Germany. But in any case, the important point is that the object of Power Politics is Power. It is sheer delusion to suppose that men ultimately mould an organisation. The exact contrary is the case. The effective man is moulded by his pursuits, and the only result of a dichotomy between a kindly, tolerant, individuality, and a power social and economic system is nervous instability; a fact of which the Germans are both aware and resentful. The well-known remark, "We Germans will never be gentlemen, and you British will always be fools" was, in the sense in which it was intended, a scientific statement of fact. But it must be conceded that we have been brought to a difficult situation. The wage system could have been quite a good form of organisation if it had not been perverted in two major directions. The first, and for some time the lesser evil of it was that a man became an employer of labour by accumulating "savings," miscalled capital, with which to finance a new production venture, and the "savings" system was and is an economic fallacy resulting in restricted distribution. But a far more serious evil developed with the removal of the guild control of wage rates, accompanied by the systematic debasement of the unit of currency by the financiers. This was the inability of the wage-earner to contract out of a starvation wage. It is this inability to contract out, which
has enabled the plotters to staff the police forces, reaching their
apex in the Russian Ogpu and the German Gestapo. It is by police
power that the serfdom of the world, the Socialist State of Sir Ernest
Cassel, Sir William Beveridge and the other surprising allies of
the submerged tenth, is to be maintained. It is interesting to notice the resemblance, amounting almost to identity, between the methods of expropriation employed in Great Britain since 1931, under the direction of P.E.P. and those employed by Hitler. In his revealing book, The Germans and the
Jews, the Jewish writer F. R. Bienenfeld, remarks That is an almost exact description in essence of the methods employed in the last twelve years to expropriate the ordinary British property owner, and is almost word for word the proposal of Lord Hinchingbrooke and his so-called "Progressive Conservatives." On the declaration, of war in September, 1939, and more especially, on the entry of the Labour Party into the Government in May, 1940, it was clear that the carefully prepared Socialist State for Great Britain was about to be inaugurated. The ordinary law was abrogated; by Regulation 18B the mere opinion of the Home Secretary was sufficient to procure the arrest and indefinite incarceration of a British subject, a power which was almost exclusively exercised against the political opponents of the Labour Party and its shadowy allies. A savage attack on private property and privacy itself was inaugurated by the evacuation and billeting regulations whose horrors were, only equalled by their complete collapse - a collapse which did not occur without many terrible and completely unnecessary tragedies. It is safe to say that the ordinary citizen, during 1940 and 1941, came to dislike his own Government only less than that of Hitler. It would be absurd to deny that the immanence of modern three dimensional, mechanised warfare renders drastic inroads upon civilian comfort inevitable. But the legislation which was imposed upon the country under the threat of war was precisely that referred to in the P.E.P. statement that no British Government would accept it under conditions less compelling. Perhaps, amongst many, the provisions of the Agriculture (Miscellaneous War Provisions) Act, 1940, form an example of the combination of measures clearly justified by a state of war, and measures intended to alienate property rights, and powerless to assist in a victorious outcome of the conflict. To understand the situation it must be realised that both land owning and agriculture had been penalised in every possible way in the armistice years, both to enable payment for overseas investment to be made and to destroy the political power of agriculture. Thoroughly experienced and capable farmers stated openly that high production was ruinous. Tenant farmers, unless rigidly supervised, had "farmed out" their land and then sold out, leaving the soil exhausted and nearly useless without fallowing. In addition, the substitution of artificial fertilisers for humus had brought in its train a state of organic unbalance. The submarine blockade made it obvious and vital that this situation should be rectified as soon and as far as possible, and the War Agricultural Committees which were set up were given the powers of a totalitarian state. The mere statement by an Executive Committee was sufficient to expropriate either a landlord or a tenant on the ground that land was not "at that time" being cultivated in accordance with the rules of good husbandry. That is to say, a condition which had been largely induced by Government policy in peace time, if it existed in the opinion of a body obviously required to justify itself by action, was a ground for expropriation under conditions which made, for the first time for many years, high cultivation profitable. Assuming without examination that better results were obtained by this process, the inequity of it was explained by paramount necessity, although clearly providing grounds for generous compensation. But paramount necessity cannot be invoked in respect of Part IV of this Act, which provides, inter alia, that "The Minister . . . may, after and notwithstanding the expiry of the said Act, continue in possession of the said land, either by himself . . . or by any person with whom a contract has been made under the following provisions of this section, for any period not exceeding three years from the end of the war period." That is to say, although no law may exist to justify possession, possession may be retained or delegated until it becomes unprofitable again, and this possession is dependent on something notoriously difficult to define, "the war period." But the injustice goes much further. "The Minister" may spend indefinite sums of money for his own purposes, and when the land is given back, the owner, who has not been consulted, and whose opportunity to benefit by the expenditure has passed, is called upon to repay these sums. And for this purpose "The Minister" is placed by statute in the position of a mortgagee, so that he advances money to himself as tenant without effective check, on the security and credit not of the tenant but of the owner who cannot control him. Clearly, that is not a war measure - it is a political manoeuvre of a far-reaching nature, involving a complete body of powers expressly repugnant to English Common Law, as well as equity. That the policy pursued is not a war-time necessity, but is an instance of the use of a public emergency to abrogate the principles of the Constitution in the knowledge that Parliamentary powers could not be obtained for the measures desired, is proved by the use made of "delegated legislation," against which so masterly a protest was made by the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Hewart, in his book The New Despotism, published some years before the declaration of war in 1939. The technique, described by Lord Hewart as "administrative lawlessness," is to pass an Enabling Bill so widely drawn that it will include practically anything, while at the same time giving no information to the Parliamentary representatives of the people affected; and subsequently, to issue Orders in Council, having the effect of law, which are not debated in Parliament; i.e., the anonymous civil servant in the background, who is immune from responsibility, becomes at once the lawmaker, the judge, and the executioner. More than two thousand of these Orders in Council were issued in the first three years from the resumption of hostilities. Many of them created new crimes with ferocious penalties, many of them were contradictory and quite a large number were unintelligible. The body of legislation proposed or enacted under the general cliché of "social security" is even more obviously inspired by revolutionary rather than military activities. The much advertised Beveridge Plan, to which
is ancillary the proposal to nationalise the medical profession so
that the medical certificate can be "controlled," is a lineal descendant
of Bismarckian Germany. The comment on the evolution of German mentality
under Bismarck, That this criticism is not unduly harsh may be verified by anyone who will take the trouble to observe the omissions in the abridged explanation of the Plan officially issued, or who listened to the broadcast recommendations of it as a novel and notable advance in civilised organisation. It is perhaps unnecessary to recall that Sir William Beveridge was from 1919-1937 - the dates are significant - Director of the London School of Economics, the institution endowed by Sir Ernest Cassel, the German Jew, "to train the bureaucracy of the future Socialist State," and a member of the Royal Commission on Coal to which reference has been made. To anyone who is prepared to consider the evidence, it must surely be conclusive. The episodic conception of the history of the past hundred years is quite untenable. It would be absurd to suggest that the period does not comprise a large number of unrelated incidents of high importance, in much the same way that the life of a man with one single and over-mastering ambition is bound to include events which are neither sought nor anticipated. But in the main the picture is clear. Germany, from the time of Frederick of Prussia, has been the chosen instrument of power politics, the objective of which is simply concentration of power - the stripping from the individual of the freedom of action which is his birthright, and its transfer to an organisation which, from one point of view, enhances the power of a small number of chosen individuals beyond anything conceivable in the absence of the policy and its appropriate organisations. Without in the least attempting to introduce
an argument which is germane, but belongs to another plane, it may
be observed that this aspect of the matter has been closed some time
ago by the enquiry, It may be objected that there is no ground for
the separation of this period from any other - that history is one
long struggle for power. That this is true is perhaps most clearly
expressed in the words of F. R. Bienenfeld, the Jewish writer previously
quoted: "Within the Jewish community as a whole, a phenomenon
may be noted which has regularly recurred during the past 2,000 years,
namely, that at any given period that section was always considered
the most advanced which had most freely submitted to the influence
of the high culture of its environment, and had been most active
in furthering it. This is precisely, with certain reservations, the impression which must be obtained by an intelligent observer - that the rise and fall of nations is due to a manipulating influence interested in conflict. That this statement is legitimate must be admitted by anyone who will consider the distance which separates the personal aspirations of the average individual from the life which he is forced to lead when conscripted by the all-powerful state to fight in a quarrel which is not his in any fundamental sense. It is remarkable that, for instance, Herr Bienenfeld does not appear to notice that the passing of Germany is the culmination of a period in which German culture has been almost passionately admired, and largely dominated by Jews, while the transfer of this element to Anglo-Saxondom is contemporaneous with the attempt to impose upon Great Britain and the United States a "planned economy" of precisely the nature associated with the Great German General Staff - a culture and economy which can be demonstrated to lead to the same ultimate catastrophe. But the synchronism is incontestable; and a recognition of it ought to expose the fallacy of supposing that the defeat of Germany, by itself, will dispose of the menace to civilisation. Still less, that a so-called Anglo-Saxon hegemony infested and dominated by the ideas which have been uncovered "in war, or the threat of war," would do anything but ensure a further holocaust. But a consideration of this evidence, while it does nothing to diminish our recognition of the task with which we have allowed ourselves to become confronted, does indicate the general direction which must be pursued. And that direction is radically different from the official programmes current at the moment. Salvation is not to be found in greater and still greater agglomerations of power - in "Law, backed by overwhelming Force," in International Air Forces ruling the skies and the earth by an Aerial Board of Control after the manner of Kipling's story, as easy as A.B.C. - doubtless an indiscreet dramatisation of an already contemplated policy. It is, and can only be found, in bringing into actuality the existing cleavage between the individual desire to pursue an individual end and the group pressure to reduce the individual to an amorphous mass - a biological entropy. Only an outline of major strategy to this end is either possible or desirable at this stage. But it may be helpful to consider this in general terms. Restoration of the sovereignty of the individual over his own affairs is of the essence of it. CHAPTER I Certain premises are an essential starting-point
for any useful suggestions in respect of the situation we have to
face. There is, fortunately, no Jack of the former, but there is immense confusion as to the latter. It is in this difference that one of the greatest difficulties of genuine reform resides. The complaints of the under-privileged have been wholly justified; their remedies have often been inspired by their deadliest enemies. In small matters, most people are quite aware that it is absurd to tell their shoemaker how to make shoes, but reasonable to complain that their shoes hurt. But, to take an important example, once the average voter has grasped the idea that there is something wrong with the money system, it is rarely that he does not attribute its defects to something he has been taught to call private enterprise, and agree that it should be perfected by the nationalisation of the banks. Since monetary reform is not merely vital, but is becoming topical, we may begin the examination of a new policy by a consideration of certain elementary aspects of money, and perhaps the simplest approach is by an inspection of its origins. We may observe that, amongst many reasons for this, is the fact that previous researches have established the fact that centralised sovereignty is at the root of the world's ills; and money is connected with economic sovereignty. The word "pecuniary" derives from pecus,
L.cattle, and probably the earliest form of currency, by which we
mean something which is not wealth, but can be exchanged for wealth,
was a leather disc given by a nomadic cattle owner to a buyer who
did not at once wish to remove his purchase. The currency was issued
by the owner of the wealth. The next stage was the accompaniment of war and social insecurity. Wealth was deposited with goldsmiths for safe-keeping, and their receipt became currency. The issue of currency thus passed from the owner of wealth to the custodian of wealth. It is easy to prove that the goldsmith's receipt, which was often a fraudulent receipt, is the prototype of the bank note. Sovereignty largely passed to the goldsmith bankers, who "created the means of payment out of nothing." Finally currency and cheques on drawable deposits
became simply bankers' credit, which was not owned by either the
owner of real wealth, per se, or the producer of wealth. There is nothing in the facts or accounts of the business system to confirm this conclusion, but there is much to suggest that bankers have a concealed lien on nearly all property. There is little difficulty in demonstrating that the money system will only work satisfactorily when sovereignty over his share of it is restored to the individual. It is unnecessary to develop this thesis here, since it has been fully explored in such books as The Monopoly of Credit. The point that is germane to our present enquiry is that there is no evidence to indicate that a nationalised banking and currency system would be anything but more oppressive than a partly decentralised system. Each approach to centralisation, and this approach has been rapid, has increased the tyranny of Finance, a tyranny which in itself is technical, but becomes political by reason of the immense advantages which accrue to its manipulators. There is no more effective claim to totalitarian power than the claim to the sole right to issue and withdraw (tax) money, and no mere manipulation of monetary technique which does not resolve and decide this question can do anything but complicate the problem. It may be objected that the preceding outline ignores the metallic currency of the Royal Mints. So far from this being the case, the royal prerogative of striking coins is a relic and confirmation of the original theory of money. The King was, as the "Crown" in theory still is, the ultimate owner of everything within his sovereignty. Land and chattels were held ultimately from the King, and the possession of his coinage was simply an acknowledgment of a grant by him. Those well-intentioned people who feel that nationalisation of banking, with its attribute of credit-money creation is desirable, would do well to realise what it is they are proposing, which is the Divine Right of Kings, tout court, without a responsible King. It is not necessary to infer from the preceding analysis that the establishment of a mint for every household is desirable. The money system is complementary to, and useless in the absence of, a price system. A corollary of this is that the price of articles is the direct sum paid for them, together with the proportion of involuntary payments in the form of taxation, which accompany residence within the sovereignty. That is to say, every rise in price, whether direct, or in accompanying taxation, is a transfer of economic sovereignty from the individual to a centralised Sovereign. And the imposition of any condition of law on the free purchase of any article is a similar transfer. It will be noticed that managed currency systems ostensibly intended to keep price levels constant, are incompatible with economic decentralisation. Managed currencies are controlled currencies and require a controller. The essential requirement of a free economy is radically different. In such an economy the proper function of money is to reflect facts, not policy. If it is a fact, as of course it is, that the "costs" of production are in reality, if not in unstable currency units, decreasing, then both individual prices, and consequently price levels ought to move to lower levels to reflect this process. The argument that falling prices mean loss to producers and stagnant trade is merely perverse. Compensated prices even of a crude and unscientific type are a day-to-day process at the present time, and deal with this situation simply, comprehensively and successfully. Falling prices, by themselves, are the most perfect method of passing improvement of process on to consumers. They have the effect of increasing real and psychological credit, and raise the international exchange value of the unit, which loses any economic reality if "controlled" or "pegged." The method of "spending money into circulation to 'preserve' [i.e., to raise] the price level" now being advocated under the title of a twentieth-century economic system, is simply a vicious form of managed inflation, ultimately accompanied of necessity by cumulative industrial waste. Assuming that it is understood by its sponsors, it is an attempt to perpetuate government by finance. There is little doubt, however, that while a price system based on facts and consequently insusceptible to manipulation, if the facts on which it is based are published, is a primary essential, a national dividend is only less so. The attempt to capitalise this necessity by a levelling-down process masquerading as contributory social insurance has already been noticed. The justification for a non-contributory dividend both theoretical and practical has already been explored and demonstrated, and it is unnecessary to repeat the arguments at this stage. It may be observed that a satisfactory restoration of the money system to its essential principles is vital to the preservation of money systems of any description. Failure to achieve this objective would at no great distance in the future deprive mankind of what might be one of his most valuable mechanisms. The idea that, in the engaging words of the
letter attributed to the American Bankers' Association, At the present time, we use words for political purposes which either have no meaning, or, if correctly defined, describe something which does not exist. We do this at our peril. Democracy is such a word. Most of the students of this question will find it less elusive if they will bear in mind the legal maxim "No law without a sanction." Who controls the "sanction"- the power of enforcement - controls the law. The etymological description of democracy is "popular government, rule by the people" (Skeat). Out of six words comprising this double definition, four require definition in themselves-" popular," " government,'' " rule " and '' people.'' But even so vague and inexact a definition as that of Skeat would probably not be advanced by most people, who would say that democracy is rule by the majority, or universal suffrage. And if asked to name the democracies, they might reply, Great Britain, the British Dominions and the United States. Great Britain is a limited monarchy, and the United States is a republic. Neither is, even by definition, a democracy. In order to obtain some idea of the nature of the problem, it should be recalled that one aspect at least of a nation is that it is an association to pursue individual ends by common rules. Everyone is familiar with the idea that an association is a contract, and the unilateral abrogation of a contract is universally condemned. The bearing of this on the powers of Government is well illustrated in the difference between the Congress of the United States and its opposite number, the House of Commons. The House of Commons can do, and does, anything. It can pass a law which abrogates every right, and the basis of every plan of the population, simply by possession of a Parliamentary majority, and it does not even require a mandate for such action. On the other hand, Congress can only legislate within the boundaries of the Constitution. An Amendment to the Constitution requires a Proposal by two-thirds of both Senate and Congress, and ratification by three-fourths of the States - a process not lightly to be embarked upon. When a man says he has something of which some kind of a definition or description exists, it is a sound principle, before forming any opinion of the thing, to make sure that he really has it. It is certain, for instance, that the state of affairs in any of the titular democracies cannot be made to agree with even Dr. Skeat. It is almost equally certain that it would be a major catastrophe if it did so correspond. Clearly, there can be two explanations of this. The second explanation has an important consequence - that democracy, being impossible but attractive as an idea, would form the best possible cloak for the condition indicated by the alternative explanation. This is the criticism strenuously propagandised by the admirers of totalitarian rulers such as Herr Hitler and Mr. Stalin (although Communists amusingly describe Russia as a democracy). It can be demonstrated that real democracy is possible; but it must be conceded that a visible dictatorship is preferable to an anonymous tyranny or a manipulated electorate. Mr. Asquith, when concerned to pass the Parliament Act, which abolished the very real safeguard of an effective Second Chamber, said "The will of the people must and shall prevail." This is, of course, an affirmation of essential lawlessness - the right to break a contract unilaterally. With this in mind, an examination of the working of "majority rule" may be helpful. Almost any concrete case would serve, but we may take motor-car taxation as an example. The facts are fairly simple. The tax in Great Britain is the highest motor tax in the world, it is inequitable and irrational, and it is detrimental to motor-car design and economical production. It is highly popular with everyone who does not pay it. It was imposed under a strict undertaking that it would be devoted to road costs (Car Licences are still called Road Fund Licences) which under-taking was almost immediately abandoned with complete cynicism. Yet this is an outstanding instance of majority rule. The explanation is that fewer people possess motor cars than are without them. An election on whether motor-car taxation should be abolished and the same sum added to the taxation of beer would not be in doubt for five minutes. In the United States or Canada, where a large majority owns cars, British car taxation would not be tolerated. Or take the price of wine. A bottle of good red or white wine in France or Italy ten years ago cost about 2d. The same, or a worse, because adulterated, wine in England cost probably 3s 6d., since wine drinkers in England are in a minority, and can be safely penalised. The successful attack on landowning has the same explanation. Just as taxation on wine is made respectable by "temperance" crusades, and motor taxation, until well established, was justified by deterioration of the roads by motor traffic, so land taxation, the real basis of which is minority ownership, is made virtuous by "Land Songs" and other incendiary propaganda. The instances could be multiplied indefinitely. So called democracy, therefore, is a ballot-box device for despoiling minorities, not, it should be carefully noted, for the benefit of majorities, but for the benefit of third parties. Motor taxes do not distribute motor cars, wine taxes do not distribute wine, and expropriated estates do not go to the landless. There is little doubt that the attempt to apply the principle of majority-democracy to foreign policy is inevitably disastrous. The well-known excuse advanced by Mr. Baldwin, that "our peace-loving democracy" would not support re-armament was true enough so far as it goes and is at least a partial explanation of our failure to halt Germany when she could have been checked without a war. It has been remarked in many quarters, and the argument is receiving more attention daily, that the present political chaos is directly and consciously connected with the doctrine and popularisation of the unproved theory of the origin of species, and its corollary, the survival of the "fittest," which, oddly enough, can be, and is, adduced in support of equalitarianism. There is also much evidence to connect the ideas which Darwin expounded with Malthus and Rousseau and so with the French Revolution. Not the least important aspect of this question is the evident intention to confuse "Progress" with "increase in size." "Progress" as an automatic feature of nature is inherent in this doctrine, which has been termed a theological rather than a scientific dogma. The present vogue of geopolitics, relating wars to a specialised form of dialectical materialism, clearly belongs to the evolutionary blind-force school of thought, from which the German contention that wars, and ever greater wars, are salutary can easily be recognised as a "logical" deduction. It is a curious fact, which may or may not be coincidental, that the type of society which is induced or produced by this type of thinking, bears marks resembling the workings of the thermodynamic principle of entropy - the tendency of energy to deteriorate from a potential to a latent and unavailable state - to "run down." That is to say, so far from this systematic penalising of minorities under the entirely unproved theory that the equalitarian state is a desirable objective and corresponds to anything we can describe as "progress," or the survival of the fittest in any cultural sense, it appears to correspond to the exact reverse. Perhaps the most complete embodiment of dialectical materialism is contemporary Russia, and it will be noticed that the rulers of Russia are living in the monuments of a different era, the Kremlin and the architectural achievements of the period of Catherine the Great, and appear to be unable to produce anything but industrial monstrosities. It would be difficult to find a clearer exposition of the principle at work, and its effect, than that of the Balt, Paul von Sokolowski. He refers directly to the agricultural aspect of land, which can be overstressed, although perhaps not at this time, but it is, mutatis mutandis, true in regard to the effect of unstable politics on all real property, and consequently on society. "There are two processes which weaken man's
hold over Nature and diminish his courage in his fight with her: Neither war with its ravages nor any Act of God fundamentally endangers civilisation, so long as men pursue agriculture for its own sake. But directly the land is mobilised, that is to say, when it becomes mere property, capable of transference and financial-capitalisation, directly it comes to possess only a commercial interest, it loses the inviolable permanence and security without which its care and culture are impossible. To the man whose home is on his own land, the idea that either he or his successors could ever desert the fields of their labour for the sake of any economic advantage whatsoever, should be unthinkable. Nothing in the world should be able to make them willing to sacrifice or exchange their inherited home. Socialisation of the soil is even more ruinous in its effect, for it is likely to take control and care of the land out of the most competent hands; since, regardless of the true needs of the community, it is a temporary satisfaction of the cravings or ambitions of destitute sections of the population by the distribution of landed property (e.g. parcellation of estates). Only one agrarian reform can increase the efficiency of the land: it is the commitment of its care to those best qualified for the trust. A change in agrarian tenure which is made at the expense of the land's welfare - in the interest of no matter what group - should properly be termed destruction of the soil. Socialising land laws undermine confidence in the permanence and inviolability of property, without which proper husbandry is unthinkable; for who is to give even those directly privileged by such reforms the assurance that yet further reforms will not expropriate them from the fields they have just acquired? The faintest recollection of such changes must pass from the memory of the people before confidence, thus broken, is restored. However this may be, the observed working of political systems does make it essential to examine the properties of a political majority, and the first characteristic requiring attention is that of homogeneity. What are the boundaries within which we can
say that a uniform vote reflects a uniform opinion? Because it must be indisputable that to base the actions of an organisation on a mass of votes which do not reflect a rational conception, is difficult to justify by the name of a system. Most people of necessity, and especially in these days of mass propaganda, form their opinions at second hand, and a great deal of opinion formed in this way is purely passive. Little or no critical faculty is applied to it, but on occasion, it is regurgitated as though it had been formed as a result of personal experience. This is always true, but when the opinion refers to a complex or subtle problem, it is a mathematical certainty that what is registered is either a minority opinion popularised, or has no intrinsic value. Legislative action based on proposals submitted to a large electorate must, from the very nature of the case, place the population at the mercy of a trained bureaucracy, and if, as in the case of the British Civil Service, this is irremovable and, to the public irresponsible, the result is indistinguishable from a dictatorship of a most undesirable character. To take an example from comparatively recent history, of what value is the opinion of the average voter on Tariffs? We may further notice, at this point the contemporary emphasis on the virtues of the "common man" - not on his uniqueness as an individual, but precisely the opposite; on his "common "-ness, his resemblance to a mass-produced article. John Buchan (Lord Tweedsmuir) refers to "that degeneration of the democratic theory which imagines that there is a peculiar inspiration in the opinions of the ignorant" (Augustus, p. 340). It would be equally legitimate to doubt the permanent virtue of a considerable body of "instructed" opinion. But we cannot have it both ways. Either minorities have obtained privileges by natural selection, or they have not. If they have, it is a gross interference with the process to penalise it. If they have not, then natural selection is inoperative in mankind, just as it is fashionable to deride heredity in human beings while being extremely careful not to bet on a horse which has not a satisfactory race-winning pedigree. The argument that the breeding of race horses is controlled while that of human beings is not ignores factors which are probably decisive. The further the subject is analysed, the more evident it becomes that the primary perversion of the democratic theory is to identify it with unrestricted majority government. When Mr. Asquith announced that the will of "the people" must prevail, he meant that he would present a bribe to the electorate at the expense of a minority in such a way that he would get a majority. It is that situation which has to be altered. It is easy to demonstrate that minorities (not to be confused with any particular economic class) are invariably in the forefront of improvement, and that while a minority opinion is not certainly right, a right opinion on a novel problem is inevitably a minority opinion - beginning with a minority of one. Nevertheless the democratic idea has real validity if it is separated from the idea of a collectivity. It is a legitimate corollary of the highest conception of the human individual that to the greatest extent possible, the will of all individuals shall prevail over their own affairs. Over his own affairs, the sanctions of society
must be restored to the individual affected. There are two essential
provisions to a genuine democracy of this nature. A mass of evidence establishes the fact that
there is in existence a persistent and well contrived system intended
to produce and in practice producing a despotic power which at
one and the same time places Government Departments above the sovereignty
of Parliament and beyond the jurisdiction of the Courts. Since a considerable portion of the earlier portion of this book is devoted to an examination of the process and the origins of the situation to which Lord Hewart refers, further emphasis on the fact is unnecessary. But the statement just quoted, great as its value is as coming from a Lord Chief Justice of England, only deals with half the indictment. The system to which he refers does not merely place the anonymous bureaucrat above the law. It places the law, and the sanctions of the law, at the unchecked disposal of the bureaucrat. It should be realised that the situation of an anonymous lawmaker has become at least temporarily impregnable, and is a violation - admittedly only open rather than covert - of the principles of Parliamentary government without those principles having been renounced. That is to say, while the Act proceeds from the bureaucrat, or his shadowy inspiration, the responsibility, and the odium, rest still upon the Member of Parliament who is constitutionally, but not actually, able to check him. The stealthy separation of power from responsibility, which is so marked a feature of secret societies, is now incorporated into Government activities. For some time, much too long a time, no Bill has been presented to the House of Commons which has not been drawn up by the Treasury, whoever ostensibly sponsored it. But someone did sponsor it, and a façade of responsibility has been maintained until recently. This has now gone. "The State" makes laws tout court. "The State," in fact, is quite probably some little naturalised alien full of bright ideas from the ghettoes of Mid-Europe, looking for preferment to any quarter rather than that affected by his law-making. To employ a colloquialism, lawmaking has become altogether too easy. Law is taking on a new aspect. For centuries concerned to maintain every man in his rights, it is mainly now employed to take them away. Interference in small matters, to have any rationality, apart from desirability, must postulate an over-riding policy, and if unlimited latitude is allowed, even in regulation-making, control of policy goes with it. To illustrate this, we may consider the proposed large projects for the "utilisation" of Scottish water-power. The Report on which the proposals are based remarks " No vested interests will be permitted to interfere" with them. That is to say, the proposals represent an over-riding policy which will be empowered by the sanctions of the law to sweep existing vested interests out of its path. At the same time it is admitted that the objective is more power for factory industry, and notably for electro-chemical industry. Who committed the nation to that policy? When was it submitted to the judgment of the House of Commons? When, and by whom, was it decided that one vested interest is more important than several? It is symptomatic of the paralysis which has overtaken British thinking in the past fifty years that this phrase "vested interest" which merely means stability of tenure, can appear in the Report of a Royal Commission, without amplification, as though it described a public evil. There is probably not an individual in the country whose waking hours are not largely devoted to acquiring a vested interest in something or other, even if it be only a tooth-brush. In fact, it is precisely those predatory aggressors on vested interests concerned with the monopolisation of Scottish water-power, and the industries for the use of which it is intended, which transform concentrated vested interests into a public danger. The widespread distribution of vested interests would be the greatest guarantee of social stability conceivable. This sweeping away of minor vested interests by a major vested interest is policy in action. But the policy is not defined and is carefully kept from Parliamentary discussion unless a nebulous connection with "full employment" can be regarded as a definition. Large-scale utilisation of water-power for the generation of electricity has been feasible for at least fifty years, and the benefits arising from the general use of electricity have been widely recognised if not realised. It is curious that, while the prime mover, the water turbine, has not been radically improved during that period, and the prime mover used in the generation of elcctricity from the use of coal, the steam turbine, has been improved out of all recognition, the sudden decision to transform Scotland into a water-power factory has awaited the "nationalisation" of coal. From an orthodox economics point of view, the case for hydro-electric development on a large scale is weaker than it was in 1900. The proposal has been presented to the public so as to suggest that water-power represents an alternative to power from coal, whereas at the present time it is doubtful whether the development of all the power in the rivers of the Highlands would represent 2 per cent of the power generated by other methods, and if the total rises, the water-power which is inextensible, becomes still less important. In 1938 the generated units of electricity in Great Britain were approximately 26,000,000,000. Excluding war production, which was already considerable, it is doubtful whether industrial demand was 50 per cent. of that figure. At the present time, i.e., before any of the proposed water-power has been developed (war-time electricity-production-figures cannot be given), it is very greatly in excess of the pre-war figure. There is no possibility of utilising power from extensive hydraulic development for many years after any normally contemplated termination of hostilities, and such termination must cause an almost immediate drop in the demand for electrical power. By the time the immense works contemplated are complete, industrial demand, in the absence of war, will have fallen far below present electrical supply capacity, and will not be replaced by equivalent domestic use. To the extent that this capacity displaces man-power (the objective of using electrical power) the unemployment situation, looked at from an orthodox point of view, will be worsened. The proposal to increase greatly the generating capacity of electric power-stations, therefore, requires far more justification than has publicly been offered for it, by whatever means the power is generated. The idea that there can be no limit to the generating capacity required is not merely absurd on the face of it, but is contradicted by experience, except in war. If it has been decided to adopt the philosophy of the Great German General Staff, that the primary objective of a nation is war, that is another matter. Even so, it is far from certain that these large power-stations do not constitute the gravest possible military risk. There is a considerable mystery surrounding their comparative immunity from attack. We must therefore link up the development of water-power with the "nationalisation" of coal. A considerable proportion of the coal mined in Great Britain goes to provide the energy which is distributed as electrical power. A good deal of careful propaganda has been devoted to the "wastefulness" of burning coal, but in fact the subject is far from being susceptible to unqualified judgment. What is obvious is that coal is the principal raw material of the chemical industry: that every ton released strengthens the chemical industry: and that the chemical industry with its collateral, electro-metallurgy, is making preparations to take delivery of a high percentage of the electrical energy generated by Scottish water-power: and that the propaganda for increased export may easily result in the export of our capital resources on an even larger scale than in the past, without the fundamental policy, and its possibly disastrous consequences having ever been discussed by those most affected. On the other hand, the minor vested interests which are adversely affected are numerous. Perhaps the first in importance, although apparently the last to be considered, is the antipathy of the resident population. The Scottish Highlander has never taken kindly to the industrial system. He is entirely unconvinced that "the development" of the highland areas would be to his advantage, and in fact the arguments which have been adduced to convince him, are both perfunctory and disingenuous, and, in one case at least, the comparison of the proposals to those carried out by the Tennessee Valley Authority in America can only be characterised as unscrupulous. The Tennessee Valley works, themselves the subject of embittered controversy, are primarily flood control schemes, and bear no resemblance whatever to Scottish conditions. The natural Highland water-power is almost ideal for the utilisation of small, high-fall installations taking water from small streams at a high altitude, and returning it to its original bed several hundred feet lower down, without interfering in any way with the watershed or the local amenities. Such plants, rarely exceeding two or three hundred horsepower, under local control and possible in nearly every village, offer advantages to the local population obtainable in no other way, and are almost specifically excluded from the project. The Commission proposals are radically different. Whole catchment areas are to be monopolised, glens are to be flooded, villages submerged, immense dams and pipelines built, with secondary effects on climate and vegetation which are unknown but certainly considerable. No one can say with certainty to what extent American soil erosion is affected by large power schemes. The electrical energy generated is transmitted at so high a voltage that its utilisation locally or en route is impracticable, and is in fact disclaimed. After rendering lip-service to the need to arrest the depopulation of the country, the country's chief assets are to be at least damaged, and at most destroyed, and its power transmitted almost intact to selected industrial areas farther south. The Severn Barrage Scheme which is free from many of the objections to Highland industrialisation appears to have every claim to prior consideration. While the Highland project, brought forward under cover of war, when probably 75 per cent. of the individuals whose lives will be affected are prevented by absence or other causes due to war, from expressing their opinions on it, affords a compact instance of the working of the Supreme State, it does not differ, save perhaps in magnitude, from hundreds of similar cases. The technique is always the parade of "the common good." As Madame Ayn Rand so truly remarked in The Moral Basis of Individualism, "no tyrant ever rose to power save on the plea of the common good." To anyone who will take the trouble to penetrate
through the veneer with which written British history has been
overlaid, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the political
instinct of the people has deteriorated, rather than progressed. The native instinct has intuitively recognised in the past that it was not so much the question of who held certain powers which was important, as that those powers should not be concentrated. The derided phase, "That is not done," embodies a sound, if now perverted, national conclusion. One of the more ominous symptoms of this political degeneration is often to be found in those quarters which in many ways represent the flower of our culture. It takes the form of a lament that "the unity of purpose which we find in war cannot be carried over into peace." The short answer is that it can be and is, in Germany and Russia, and that if that is all that is required, why not surrender to one or the other? This attitude arises more than from any one other cause out of an almost perverse determination not to recognise the persistency of a policy of centralisation of property rights and in consequence, the absolute necessity for the equivalent of a Bill of Rights ultra vires of Parliament, together with a permanent professional body, trained to attack not only an existing law, but armed with permanent power to bring out into the open for cross-examination at any time the originators of any law which encroaches on those rights. It is essential to exalt the man above the machine. It is nothing less than suicidal to concede the idea of abstract and unquestioned omnipotence to the products of a law-making system of the chain-store variety such as we tolerate today, and such "laws" as Regulation 18B, which sweep away the hard-won safeguards of a thousand years, are the logical outcome of this mental attitude. It is perhaps hardly necessary to observe that such a body would be appointed and dismissible by individuals, not by the administrative Civil Service. One of the first results of such an arrangement would be an arrest in the flow of law-making. If the world is regarded as a factory run by officials on would-be mass-production lines, continuous works-orders camouflaged as laws are inevitable, though quite rapidly fatal. But, in a world in which it is realised that the more action is spontaneous within the limits of personal sovereignty the less the friction and the higher the general satisfaction, they are both redundant and objectionable. It will be remembered that Great Britain has no written Constitution, and it has often been claimed that this is an advantage. The claim is more than suspect. The Constitution of the United States, for instance, is a body of Superior Law which is a powerful check on "Administrative Lawlessness," as President Roosevelt discovered when he tried to pack the Supreme Court in order to obtain a favourable decision on unconstitutional measures of the New Deal. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution makes it impossible to enact or enforce such a measure as the Regulation 18B under which large numbers of persons have been imprisoned for years without trial. There are several unofficial bodies in existence whose intentions in regard to this problem are excellent, but it is no detraction from their public spirit to say that they are wholly inadequate. We have to deal with the usurpation of powers which derive from a completely different conception of the nature of the state, and these powers require to be brought into proper relation to the world of today by measures as carefully designed and powerfully supported as those with which they have to deal. It is often said, and with justice, that
we hear too much in these days of "rights," and far too little
of duties. When Karl Marx (Mordecai), in his Message to the First International in 1870, observed, "The English are incapable of making a Socialist revolution, therefore foreigners must make it for them," he placed on the record a statement of high historical and practical value. Whatever the ultimate result may be, it is a simple statement of fact that social disturbance, economic and industrial distress in Great Britain can in almost every case be traced to alien influence. The native English, in particular, have their own methods of dealing with a distasteful situation, as anyone intimately conversant with the tragi-comic breakdown of the alien billeting system in 1939 can testify. But revolution is 'not one of them. The immense stability underlying race homogeneity is the main factor in this characteristic, a sense of proportion contributes its quota, and a curious corruptibility, which is always ready to accept an immediate benefit rather than persist in a long-term vision, helps to make the way of the social incendiary one of successive disappointment. But this latter feature has taken on a new aspect in the present century. Social revolution has itself become a profession in place of being a religion, paying, in its higher branches, and subject to compliance with a code, high dividends both material and social. Socialism is a highly organised business, showing marked resemblance to the chain-stores which it favours, and its various activities, political and economic, provide lucrative careers, not least to the private owners of businesses engaged in furthering its propaganda. As it is completely parasitic, living off a production process to which it contributes nothing, it is quite possible that the most realistic approach to an understanding of it is to regard it as a disease of that system, to be cured by indirect methods. The effect of this parasitism has been to create, primarily in London, but to a less extent in all the larger towns, what can only be described as an alien culture, in the main bureaucratic, but linked with mechanical industry by the Trades Union official. This culture also has its own type of Art. It
is not an exaggeration to state that if the whole population outside
these circles were to cease work, the social revolutionaries of the
Fabian and other varieties would starve to death in a month, while
on the other hand the disappearance of the Socialists and bureaucrats
would hardly be noticed except with general relief. The indigenous culture is one of tolerance combined with a strong desire to mind one's own business directly, rather than by pooling processes. Once given access to the sanctions of the state, an alien culture can be imposed on such a national temperament with comparative ease. Whether it can be maintained is another question, but it has been demonstrated that the centralised state, once achieved, is difficult and costly to dislodge. Without carrying the German conception of Blut und Boden to the absurd lengths characteristic of its protagonists, only the type of mind which has absorbed the abstractions of Bloomsbury would dispute the large element of truth which it embodies. A nation is amongst other factors a culture, and while a culture probably contains many components which do not derive from the soil, it is certain that no culture which is not rooted in the soil and racially related to it has the character of permanence. The astonishing resistance of nationalism to the massed forces of international finance, cartelism and Freemasonry seems to have put this question beyond further argument, and the chameleon-like element in Jewish behaviour no doubt has its explanation in the Diaspora. If this conception be accepted as broadly representing
reality, then the efforts of the foreigners mentioned by Marx, and
their employees in various gainful occupations in this country, take
on a somewhat different and more sinister aspect. We have not to
deal with a mere propagandist endeavour to introduce the latest improvements
into administrative machinery, which might conceivably be well-intentioned,
even if demonstrably wrongheaded. There can be no peace until one side or the other is defeated. No civilisation is tolerable which suppresses agitation from within its own borders against an existing condition, however mistaken that agitation may be. But no civilisation can survive which will permit members of an alien culture to settle within its borders in order to make the exploitation of grievances real or fancied into a highly lucrative profession. It is remarkable that the British Dominions overseas are in the highest degree sensitive to any suggestion of interference from the official British Government in London, while tolerating barely concealed attempts to impose, via specially trained representatives of the London School of Economics working in conjunction with the Central Banks, a comprehensive tyranny entirely foreign in its origin and character. It is not difficult to apprehend that naturalisation laws have a vital bearing on this matter, and that naturalisation laws are affected not merely quantitively but essentially by the relation of the culture of the immigrant to that of the country of his choice. Apart from a few points on the seaboard, for instance, the culture of the North American Continent in the seventeenth century was that of the North American Indian. Immigration has wiped out that culture, not wholly or even principally through frontier massacre, but by the sheer incompatibility of the indigenous culture with that of the immigrant. The immigrant himself was in the main a variant of the general European culture although of differing national stocks, and a culture with recognisable European features was characteristic of the United States until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as it is in Canada today. A consideration of the history of American expansion lends a grimly humorous aspect to the solicitude for India now so prevalent in the United States. The immigration and the culture which is being forced upon Great Britain by every device of propaganda and covert political, social, and economic pressure is not fundamentally European, is not accompanied by immigration of European stock, and is as incompatible with the native culture as was European culture with that of the North American Indian. It is just arguable, and it is very loudly argued, that a small influx of foreign strains can be absorbed without great disadvantage. But it must be small, and it is essential that it should be absorbed. Our alien population is not small (its dimensions are systematically falsified), it is increasing, and it is not being absorbed. In spite of strenuous denials it is certain that the dominating influence in the State at this time is alien in culture, whatever the particular passport of its protagonists may be. M. Leon de Poncins, whose book, The Secret
Powers behind Revolution, is one of the most conservative enquiries
into the subject, remarks That is to say, it is only important to the powers behind revolution that there should be unrest; given unrest, control of publicity, propaganda, and educational facilties, it can be invariably directed to the advantage of the unseen manipulators. It is clear that such organisations as the Royal Institute of International Affairs have no antagonisms with P.E.P.; and P.E.P. derives ostensibly from the Fabian Society and the London School of Economics. Its first Chairman was Sir Basil Blackett, of the "Bank of England." The Royal Institute of International Affairs is the successor to the shadowy "delegates" and "experts" to the Paris Conference of 1919. At this Conference, Paul Warburg of the Federal Reserve Board headed the U.S.A. delegates, and Max Warburg, his brother, of Warburg Bank, Hamburg, represented Germany. In May, 1919, the "experts" met and decided to form an international institute, and in 1923 this institute was given Chatham House, in St. James Square. The subscribers to it, amongst others, were Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan & Co. (£2,ooo), Sir Abe Bailey, the South African gold millionaire, Sir Otto Beit, the Carnegie Trust, Imperial Chemical Industries, the "Bank of England," Prudential Insurance Company, N. M. Rothschild & Sons, Schroeders, Rockefeller Foundation (£8,ooo per annum), Reuters News, etc. Anyone who has contemplated the changes of front of the Communist movement must be satisfied that it is an extension of international financial intrigue although quite possibly its dupes would react violently to the suggestion. According to the Melbourne (Australia) Herald, It will be remembered that Viscount Snowden,
whose chief concern was that the rich were not poor rather than that
the poor should be rich and that England should be ruled by minor
revenue officials, remarked that the "Bank of England" was the
greatest moral force in the world. It would be a naive student of
British politics who would suppose that an obscure Excise official
could rise to the Chancellorship of the Exchequer and a Viscounty,
and his wife be appointed a Governor of the most powerful propaganda
organ in the world, the "B,"B.C., if their views were regarded as
a menace to the power of "the City," or their policies incompatible
with those of the powers in command of patronage. It was recognised by William Cobbett, probably one of the greatest Englishmen of the past three hundred years. His general contention, implicit if not explicit in all his writings, is just as true today as it was a hundred years ago. Almost any social and economic system is or rapidly becomes tolerable if it is homogeneous and indigenous. The old saying "Let fools for forms of Government contest. That which is best administered is best" is profoundly untrue as it reads, but it does contain an element of potential truth - that the system will rapidly be modified if it is native. In 1290 Edward I expelled the Jews from England, and twenty years afterwards suppressed the Knights Templars, the direct ancestors of Freemasonry. It is significant that the Laws of England which are regarded as "good law" to the present day unless specifically abrogated, date from Edward I. The modern British individual in the main has a totally false idea of the intelligence of his ancestors of that date. Seven hundred years is but a moment in the life of a race, and the inspection of documents relating to the management of either England or Scotland in the time of Edward I will convince anyone that we have perhaps not learnt so much of real consequence as we have forgotten. But it is certain that we are faced with a situation which was threatening England with disaster then, and it ought to be obvious that the first step to take is to restrict drastically alien immigration, and to make naturalisation a rare and exceptional concession. It is desirable to emphasise the wide difference between free circulation and easy naturalisation. The next step is to submit to a mental cold bath on the meaning of "hospitality." We are the laughing-stock of large numbers of our "guests" and of all of their recent hosts. For the last few years our "guests" have been ordering our dinner, and telling us that plain living, watered beer and hard work are good for us, though not for them. A new note has crept into the discussion. The frenzied appeals to save the victims of Hitler's tyranny are giving place to scarcely concealed threats. Unless we mould our foreign and domestic policy as instructed, we are going to regret it. The import of, for instance, an article in the American
Mercury of March, 1944, which remarks that Mr. Emmanuel Celler, Democratic Congressman for New York, informs us that the release of Sir Oswald Mosley, from prison, to which he had been committed without trial, is not within our competence. The suggestion is that the internments under Regulation 18B were made under alien orders. The memory of most of us goes back to the period of the "war of nerves" of 1936-39, and the part played in it by the Sudeten Germans and the racial minorities in general. History is full of examples of the suicidal folly of allowing unassimilated minorities of any description to attain substantial influence. Whether it is too late to deal with the matter comprehensively on the principles, if not by the exact methods, of Edward I, is a large question. But that it has to be dealt with if we are to avoid the fate of Poland, does not admit of argument. THE INDICTMENT Although there is general understanding of the fact that the war is the mechanism by which revolutionary changes are being imposed upon society, it is probable that not many persons would be able either to say what was the determinant of our pre-war civilisation, or, in consequence, what it is which distinguishes that with which we are threatened from that with which we are familiar. With every justification large numbers of the under-privileged associate the miseries of the Armistice years with the fundamentals of the system under which they suffered. That is the impression which the Planners wish to convey, but it has no foundation in fact. The economic phenomena of the great depression were the result of conscious intention on the part of those concerned to wreck society, and could have been avoided without any fundamental change. The core of the pre-war system was "the private income " - the possession of adequate purchasing-power not subject either to governmental interference, nor terminable by loss of employment. "Private incomes were decreasing rapidly in number, but were still considerable. The fundamental object of the so-called New Orders is the abolition of all purchasing-power which is not granted "upon terms," and revocable at any time, thus making "employment" controlled by international cartels, a world government. It was the fear of the extension of the dividend system to universality which inspired the propaganda against "profit" - a propaganda which is so irrational that only careful boycott of criticism prevented its general exposure. In a recent broadcast debate on the profit system between a well-known Jewish Communist Professor and a "capitalist" publisher, the "defence" was, not that it was highly desirable that profits should be made and distributed, but that it was unfair to accuse capitalists of a desire to make them. The same purpose inspired the attack on rent and the ferocious taxation of land, resulting in the deterioration of the countryside, and the ruin of agriculture. The price of overseas wheat was kept down by financial manipulation to make British wheat unprofitable. The immense increase in productive capacity is ignored and world sabotage, ending in greater wars at shorter periods, is relied upon to destroy the unavoidable surpluses. Probably five thousand millions of capital values have been lost overseas in "peace" time. The main pre-occupation of the Armistice years, on the part of those most potent in the world's affairs, has been to prevent the rectification of the dominant financial system, a rectification which would have removed any noticeable distinction between the privileged and the previously under-privileged except those distinctions which continuously serve to ridicule the claim to human equality. Economic equality, which is quite another matter, becomes meaningless in the face of large general surpluses available generally. Under cover of the skilfully financed outcry against "profits," which have been made to appear synonymous with dividends, dividends have been reduced and the control of the shareholder over industry practically eliminated. By taxation, practically leading to confiscation, landed property has been forced into the market to be picked up by financial institutions at less than the mortgage burden imposed by the same institutions. The poisoning of the land by the use of artificial fertilisers has been enforced by "good husbandry" laws, and the effects have been misrepresented in a press controlled by the need for advertisements or otherwise, thus incorporating agriculture into the factory system. Food has deteriorated, housing is deficient and bad, leisure has decreased, security of tenure is non-existent, pleasure and relaxation are "organised," indigenous culture has been attacked and ridiculed in favour of a cosmopolitan tawdriness imposed and spread by bad films and worse broadcasting. Alien assistance in the stultification of Parliamentary control has reduced the House of Commons to an object of ridicule. The "educational" system, in addition to being staffed largely, and in its elementary stages, chiefly, by "socialists" and "communists," whose knowledge of the practical effect of the measures they advocate is measured by their enthusiasm for the Russia to which they prefer not to emigrate, has never included even a rudimentary commentary on the subject which controls the activities of its unfortunate victims from the cradle to the grave-the money system. The currency is debased, and the tax-payer is robbed. The same sources from which "the undermining of national sovereignty" has been financed, have, first covertly, and more recently openly, thrown their whole weight on the side of industrial and financial world monopoly enforced by a world police and brought about by war, and if necessary, more war. In the face of an almost world-wide demand for the local control of such government as may be necessary, local administration has been swept away, local protest ignored, and liberty curtailed. Economic policies which have been demonstrated as a primary cause of world catastrophe are pursued and imposed and their intensification is promised. The country is flooded with undesirable "refugees," while the native-born are urged to emigrate. "Full employment," for the purpose of imposing an industrial civilisation on countries and continents which have expressed their determination to resist the process at all costs, is the culmination of a science which promised to transfer the Curse of Adam from the backs of. men to that of the machine. And it is expedient that a reckoning be had of these and other matters of the same nature and an accounting with those who are concerned to bring them to pass. THE END ABOUT THE AUTHOR During the First World War he was a Major in the Royal Flying Corps and later in the R.A.F. (Reserve). After retiring from his engineering career, he and his wife ran a small yacht-building yard on Southampton Water for several years. The combination of beauty with functional efficiency in a successfully designed racing yacht had a special appeal for him. When he lived in an old water mill in Hampshire he used the water wheel to turn a dynamo which lit and warmed the house as well as providing power for lathes and other tools. Later, when he moved to Scotland, many of his friends and followers remember helping to build his small hydro-electric power house, sited on the local burn which ran through his land. Since decentralisation of economic power was of the essence of his teaching, it should be put on record that he practised what he preached. One of his most interesting jobs, just before the 1914 War, was that of conducting preliminary experimental work and preparing plans and specifications for the electrical work on the Post Office Tube in London, with later supervision of the installation of plant in what was to be one of the earliest examples of complete automation in the history of engineering. While there were no physical difficulties about the work, he used to get orders from time to time to slow it up and pay off the men. When the War came, however, he noticed that
there was no longer any difficulty about getting money for anything
the Government wanted. It appears that he was sent to Farnborough
in 1916 to sort out "a certain amount of muddle" in the Aircraft
Factory's accounts, so that he had to go very carefully into the
costing. This he did by introducing what were then known as "tabulating
machines"
- an approach which anticipated the much later use of computers, and
which drew his attention to the much faster rate at which the factory
was generating costs as compared with the rate at which it was distributing
incomes in the form of wages and salaries. Douglas then collected information from over 100 large businesses in Great Britain, and found that, in every case except in businesses heading for bankruptcy, the total costs always exceeded the sums paid out in wages, salaries and dividends. It followed that only a part of the final product could be distributed through the incomes disbursed by its production, and, moreover, a diminishing part as industrial processes lengthened and became more complex and increased the ratio of overheads to current wages. Unless this defect in monetary bookkeeping was corrected (which in his view was perfectly practicable) the distribution of the remainder must depend increasingly on work in progress on future products (whether wanted or not) financed by loan credit, export credits, sales below cost leading to bankruptcies and centralisation of industrial power, or by consumer borrowing. The result must be predictably disastrous - in fact, the modern dilemma between mass-poverty through unemployment and growing inflation, debt and monopoly, with waste of human effort and the earth's resources to maintain "full employment", requiring continuous economic "growth" and economic warfare between nations leading towards military war. This original engineer's approach, which regarded the monetary system much as Douglas, a former railway engineer, had regarded the ticket system, as a mere bookkeeping convenience for the efficient distribution of the product, was completely alien and unacceptable to the economic theorists of the day. Only one Professor of Economics (Professor Irvine of Sydney) expressed agreement with it, and he resigned his post shortly afterwards. This general condemnation by the economists
was, however, along two different and contradictory lines, viz.: When the Great Depression of the 1930's grimly confirmed Douglas's diagnosis and gave him a world-wide reputation and following, his critics explained that he had mistaken a temporary lapse for a permanent defect in the monetary system; but subsequent events have, by now, so continuously fulfilled his predictions that this criticism is no longer credible. Despite rejection by the Economic Establishment of the day, Douglas was called upon to give evidence before the Canadian Banking Enquiry in 1923 and the Macmillan Committee in 1930, and undertook several World Tours in which he addressed many gatherings, especially in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and also at the World Engineering Congress in Tokyo in 1929. In 1935 he gave an important address before the King of Norway and the British Minister at the Oslo Merchants' Club, and in the same year he was appointed Chief Reconstruction Adviser to the "United Farmers" Government of the Province of Alberta, Canada, which later in the year elected the first Government to bear the title "Social Credit". The Canadian Federal Government, however, frustrated all attempts to implement Douglas's advice by disallowing the legislation, some of which was passed, and disallowed, twice; after which, although the Party remained in power for over 30 years, it progressively abandoned the principles on which it was first elected. It should be placed on historical record, as a precedent, that two "provincial dividends" of little more than token value, were nevertheless paid at one period to the citizens of the Province, and that, while still acting under the advice of Douglas's representative, the province paid its way without further borrowing, and drastically reduced the Provincial debt. This diversion of Douglas's ideas into the dead-end of Party politics has received far more publicity than the original and experimental approach to politics which is signposted in his later speeches and writings from 1934 onwards, notably in his five major speeches in England: The Nature of Democracy, The Tragedy of Human Effort, The Approach to Reality, The Policy of a Philosophy, and Realistic Constitutionalism. In 1934 a Social Credit Secretariat was formed under his Chairmanship, which started an Electoral Campaign involving the use of the vote for purposes desired by electors rather than by Parliament or the political Parties. This was followed by a highly successful Local Objectives Campaign along similar non-party lines, and a Lower Rates and Assessments Campaign which saved the British ratepayers many millions of pounds without loss of services, by reducing loan charges. The Second World War put an end to these activities on an organised national scale, and dispersed them, with the Social Credit Movement, into a decentralised force, better adapted to the present crisis of World centralisation. In the final phase of his life, roughly from 1939 to his death in 1952, Douglas consolidated his ideas in depth, contrasting very clearly the philosophy which underlies them with that which activates the Monopoly of Credit. Although the best known of them, which have already exercised considerable influence in the World, lie in the economic sphere: the concepts of real credit, the increment of association and the cultural inheritance, and the proposals of the National Dividend and the Just or Compensated Price - his political ideas, though as yet little known, are if anything of greater importance. They were always worked out with a characteristic practicality, taking account of the feed-back from the course of events. No one else has thrown so much light on the true nature of democracy, as distinct from the numerical product of the ballot box; on the need for decentralised control of policy and hierarchial control of administration; on the freedom to choose one thing at a time, on the right to contract out, on the Voters' Policy and the Voters' Veto. In his last address, given in London to the Constitutional Research Association in 1947, he put forward his last proposal for the rehabilitation of democracy: the Responsible Vote, in which the financial consequences of his open electoral choice would be, for a time, differentially paid for by the voter in proportion to his income - a literally revolutionary suggestion which demands an inversion of current ideas about anonymous, irresponsible, numerical voting. Hugh Gaitskell, a former Leader of the Labour Party, once sarcastically described Douglas as "a religious rather than a scientific reformer". Perhaps he was more right than he knew! It may be that Douglas's thinking on the subjects of philosophy, policy and religion, and the special meaning he gave to those words, will turn out to be his most valuable contribution to the restoring of the link between religious belief and the principles which govern Society. In his view, a "philosophy", i.e. a conception of the universe, always expresses itself as a "policy" - a distinctive long-term course of action directed towards ends determined by that "philosophy". "Religion" (from the Latin religare, to bind back) is not just a set of beliefs such as are expressed in the Christian creeds (which constitute a "philosophy") but is precisely the "Binding back" of these ideas to the reality of our lives, not only individually, but in the political and economic relationships of our society. The policies of centralisation and monopoly now being imposed upon the World through the closely related agencies of Finance-Capitalism and Marxist-Socialism derive from a "philosophy" fundamentally different from, and opposed to, that of Trinitarian Christianity, which was, however imperfectly, expressed in our Constitution, our Common Law, and the progress towards personal freedom which had been made, especially, in Britain and the Commonwealth. At the time Douglas first put forward his ideas and proposals for carrying forward this traditional policy to its next stage, its Christian basis could be taken for granted as mere "commonsense". Now, that can no longer be taken for granted, and it has become necessary consciously to distinguish the policies at work in our Society, and to relate them to the fundamental beliefs which gave rise to them. In this sense, therefore, "Social Credit" is the social policy of a Christian "philosophy"; and before the end of his life, its founder made this explicit, rather than, as in its beginnings, implicit. |