Dr. Coleson is Professor of Social Science at Spring Arbor College in Michigan. His latest book, The Harvest of Twenty Centuries (¹967), pertains to Christian education and the global crisis.
In 1883 an obscure German refugee died in a London slum. A half dozen or so attended the funeral and one of his friends said a few kind words over his remains. Although the deceased had had the advantages of a university education when this was a rare privilege and his wife came of the upper class in her native Germany, the family had lived for years under the most wretched conditions imaginable in a sordid slum while he spent his time in the reading room of the British Museum writing endlessly, piling up heaps of illegible manuscript, much of which was not published until after his death.
The writer was Karl Marx and the friend who supported him over the years, bade him the last farewell, and finally published volumes two and three of his monumental work was Friedrich Engels, son of a wealthy industrialist. Certainly, no "prophet" ever died a more complete failure. Yet no "gospel" has ever spread more rapidly. If present trends continue and communism maintains its current rate of growth, it would be very possible that Marxism could dominate the earth completely by the centennial of the death of its author; that is, by 1983 — just in time to provide the setting for George Orwell’s 1984!
Small Beginnings of Mighty Movements
Many men of good will in our time have been completely overwhelmed by the march of events in today’s world: the seemingly inevitable and inexorable sweep of communism across the earth, the spread of violence here and almost everywhere, the collapse of ethical standards, and all the other symptoms of disintegration all about us. One of their problems is that they fail to understand the growth of movements across the ages and thus are unduly depressed with the present outlook because they cannot see the possible developments of tomorrow. They are not alone in their pessimism. Late in his life Karl Marx lost all hope for the future of the "cause" he had given his life to promote and was very despondent, because he could not see that it would take a generation or two for his efforts to bear fruit. He died a brokenhearted old man. Twenty years later, in 1903, which was just 65 years ago, Lenin launched his Bolshevik organization with perhaps seventeen supporters — still nothing to get excited about but much more significant than his contemporaries could possibly have imagined.
Of course, the socialist movement was much more than Marx or Lenin, and was long in the making, but even perceptive men of the time failed to see how very successful they were becoming. According to Margaret Cole,¹ H. G. Wells, a pioneer British Fabian Socialist, offended his fellow Fabians back in 1905 by reminding them how "shabbily poor" and insignificant their little organization really was. He insisted the members were generally inactive and the tracts they distributed were feeble indeed. He said they permeated "English society with their reputed Socialism about as much as a mouse may be said to permeate a cat." He then challenged them to go out into the Strand and see the enormous capitalist establishments of London which were going about their business as if there were no socialist threat — as indeed there seemed not to be. One might comment that whatever competence H. G. Wells had as an historian, he was certainly no prophet. He simply could not see how well they were doing and how swiftly they would take over England. But the seed was sown and would mature throughout the world, given time, as we are so painfully aware today.
Lest the reader may assume that the communists have some magic formula for success — that it is indeed the "wave of the future," as they themselves claim — let us examine a few other movements to see how they tend to grow.
Christ and Mohammed
In 29 or 30 A. D. a Galilean carpenter was crucified at Jerusalem by the Roman governor to appease the populace. He had twelve disciples, but one betrayed him. Only one followed him to the cross. Yet, thirty-five years later Christians were sufficiently conspicuous around Rome, 1,500 miles away across the Mediterranean, so that Nero noticed them and thought of blaming them for the Great Fire after he burned the "Eternal City" in 64 A.D. In spite of the most systematic and awful persecution, the Church triumphed over her enemies and became the official religion of the Roman Empire within three centuries after the Crucifixion. The teachings of the Master also spread far beyond the frontiers of the civilized world and helped to soften the blow of the fall of Rome. Christian missionaries had already partially conquered the barbarians with the Gospel of the Prince of Peace, which helped to mitigate the horrors of the collapse of civilization.
During the long centuries of darkness which followed the collapse of Western civilization, another faith arose not far from the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity in the Near East. Its origins were humble and unpromising also, but its triumph was indeed spectacular. In 632 A.D. an illiterate Arabian camel driver died. Ten years before, he had escaped from Mecca when his neighbors refused to listen to his new religion and became impatient with his insistent demands that they give up their idols. The would-be prophet was received with enthusiasm away from home and lived to see his new faith triumphant in Arabia.
The Moslem "blitzkrieg" (lightning warfare) speedily conquered Alexander’s old empire in the East and all of North Africa in the West. Within a lifetime the followers of the Prophet had won more territory than Rome ruled at its height. The Mohammedan flood was stopped at the gates of Constantinople in southeastern Europe, but in the West they were more successful. Here, they poured into Spain and on into France, as if the world were theirs for the taking. Never was the Christian West in greater peril: "The crescent was about to round to the full." In 732, a century after the death of Mohammed, the Moslem advance was repulsed at Tours in west-central France. Thus, another great movement was born in another unlikely spot and grew beyond belief to become a mighty force in the earth. And many other examples could be cited.
Keynes’ "Economic Utopia"
Now, it would be a great mistake to assume that just anyone who gets up on a soap box can set off a chain reaction which will sweep the world; most such attempts obviously die on the vine. While it would clearly exceed the limits of one brief article to explore the why of the rise of movements in human history, perhaps we can at least partially trace the growth of freedom in the West during the last two or three centuries and understand the reason for the rapid rise of totalitarianism today. Such a survey should help us to see also what the future may hold in store for us.
Before we attempt this overview of the path we have been following over the years — and, as Robert Frost would say, the "road not taken" by modern man — a quick glimpse of contrasting periods of history may be most edifying. Such an attempt presents ‘real difficulties, of course, since the problem of bias is very real indeed. I’m thinking especially of the history of England and the United States over the past two centuries.
T. S. Ashton notes that according to an exceedingly common view, "the course of English history since about the year 1760 to the setting up of the welfare state in 1945 was marked by little but toil and sweat and oppression."2 To counter this mistaken idea may I quote the British godfather of the American New Deal, John Maynard Keynes himself.3 Lord Keynes, who was born in 1883, the year Karl Marx died, tells how he grew up in the "economic Eldorado" of the late Victorian period when people had forgotten Malthus and his gloomy predictions of mass starvation, when products moved quite freely across frontiers over all the earth and men could travel to any land "without passport or other formality," when men could get any quantity of gold their credit would command and invest it anywhere they might desire. Indeed, Keynes describes this "economic utopia," what one might call our "Paradise Lost," in even more glowing terms than I would.
Actually, his high praise of this era of freedom and rapidly rising living standards is quite like the estimate of Benjamin M. Anderson, although Anderson and Keynes may have agreed on little else. In the opening pages of his Economics and the Public Welfare, Anderson reminds us:
Those who have an adult’s recollection and an adult’s understanding of the world which preceded the first World War look back upon it with a great nostalgia. There was a sense of security then which has never since existed. Progress was generally taken for granted… decade after decade had seen increasing political freedom, the progressive spread of democratic institutions, the steady lifting of the standard of life for the masses…. It was an era of good faith. Men believed in promises. Men believed in the promises of governments. Treaties were serious matters. In financial matters the good faith of governments and central banks was taken for granted. Governments and central banks were not always able to keep their promises, but when this happened they were ashamed…. In 1913 men trusted the promises of governments and governments trusted one another to a degree that is difficult to understand today. The greatest and most important task of the next few decades must be to rebuild the shattered fabric of national and international good faith. Men and nations must learn to trust one another again. Political good faith must be restored. Treaties must again become sacred.4
The Complex World of 1776
Now, many of my contemporaries would allow that what Keynes and Anderson said about the prewar period might be true; but they insist that what was feasible back then is no longer possible in this "complex modern age." People today consider, and quite correctly, too, that life was less complicated back in the "Gay Nineties" or the "horse and buggy days." By an extension of the same logic, Adam Smith’s world of 1776 should have been very simple indeed since he wrote The Wealth of Nations at what might be called the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. As a matter of fact, Smith was writing his great work which supplied the ideas for the new age while one of his friends, James Watt, was perfecting the steam engine which was to supply the power.
But this was no age of simplicity. This was an era of astounding complexity. Smith never lived to see those simpler times which were in part an outgrowth of his own economic and political philosophy. The Wealth of Nations is filled with the writer’s protests against what he considered the inane and oppressive restrictions of the mercantilist period of which he was an unwilling part. Much is said in history courses about mercantilism and "a favorable balance of trade." But suffice it to say, for our present purpose, that mercantilism was an attempt by the government, through a plethora of controls, to regulate the nation into prosperity. Some notion of the widespread nature of these regulations and their practical consequences may be gained from historian Henry Thomas Buckle’s characterization of the period:
In every quarter, and at every moment, the hand of government was felt. Duties on importation, and duties on exportation; bounties to raise up a losing trade, and taxes to pull down a remunerative one; this branch of industry forbidden, and that branch of industry encouraged; one article of commerce must not be grown, because it was grown in the colonies, another article might be grown and bought, but not sold again, while a third article might be bought and sold, but not leave the country. Then too, we find laws to regulate wages; laws to regulate prices; laws to regulate profits; laws to regulate the interest of money; custom-house arrangements of the most vexatious kind, aided by a complicated scheme, which was well called the sliding scale, — a scheme of such perverse ingenuity, that the duties constantly varied on the same article, and no man could calculate beforehand what he would have to pay… the first inevitable consequence was, that, in every part of Europe, there arose numerous and powerful smugglers, who lived by disobeying the laws which their ignorant rulers had imposed.5
Abolish Restrictions
Adam Smith’s cure for the confusion of his age was straightforward enough: simply let the government sweep away the endless maze of controls and let people take care of their own business in their own way. Some notion of how involved mercantilist regulations could become may be judged from the fact that it took over three thousand pages to print the regulations for the textile industry of France — and all of this before the beginning of the industrial age which is supposed to have made life complicated. Even then, they were changed with such bewildering rapidity that no one could keep up with the latest orders. French weavers once went through a whole season without moving a shuttle while waiting for the government to make up its mind. Penalties were so severe that no one could afford to disregard the codes: offenders were hanged, broken on the wheel, or sentenced to the galleys. No less than 16,000 people are said to have perished over — of all things — the regulations covering printed calicoes. Little wonder that Smith rebelled against the needless restrictions, although England never carried the system to the absurd length that France or Spain did.
However, Smith was no anarchist. He sought rather to reduce the legal code to the simplicity of the moral law. He felt that sweeping away the complex and devious economic regulations of mercantilism would relieve the government of an intolerable administrative burden (the task of minding everybody’s business) and permit the sovereign to concentrate on what Smith regarded as the true duty of the state:
All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society. According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.6
Adam Smith and British Greatness
We commonly assume that it was all very easy for Adam Smith, great man that he was, to straighten out the world of his day. Actually, Smith was a rather obscure Scottish professor. While traveling in the mid-1760′s, he stopped off to see a little group of French philosophers who were pondering the problems of France and mankind, although nobody was paying much attention to them, either. They called themselves Physiocrats, which means the "rule of nature."
The founder of this "school" of economics was Francois Quesnay, a self-made man who so distinguished himself as a physician that he became Louis XV’s personal doctor. According to Henry George’s account, Quesnay,
… abstaining from the intrigues of the court,… won the sincere respect of Louis XV (who) made him a noble, gave him a coat of arms, assigned him apartments in the palace, calling him affectionately his thinker…. And around… this "King’s Thinker" was accustomed to gather a group of eminent men who joined him in an aim the grandest the human mind can entertain — being nothing less than the establishment of liberty and the abolition of poverty among men, by the conformation of human laws to the natural order intended by the Creator. These men saw what has often been forgotten amid the complexities of a high civilization, but is yet as clear as the sun at noonday….
That these men rose in France, and as it were in the very palace of the absolute king, just as the rotten Bourbon dynasty was hastening to its fall, is one of the most striking of the paradoxes with which history abounds. Never, before nor since, out of the night of despotism gleamed there such clear light of liberty. They were (however) deluded by the idea… that the power of a king… might be utilized to break the power of other special interests, and to bring liberty and plenty to France, and through France to the world. They had their day of hope… when in 1774… Turgot was made Finance Minister of Louis XVI, and at once began cutting the restrictions that were stifling French industry. But they leaned on a reed [the King]. Turgot was removed. His reforms were stopped. The pent up misery of the masses… burst into the blind madness of the great revolution [in 1789]. The Physiocrats were overthrown, many of them perishing on the guillotine….
On the continental trip he made between 1764 and 1766… Adam Smith made the personal acquaintance of Quesnay… and was, while in Paris, a frequent and welcome visitor at the apartments in the palace, where, unmindful of the gaieties and intrigues of the most splendid and corrupt court of Europe that went on but a floor below them, this remarkable group discussed matters of the highest and most permanent interest to mankind.7
The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith, like the Physiocrats, never saw his ideas put into practice, although he did publish a "best seller" a decade after his trip to France. His great work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, to use the full title, was an instantaneous success, was soon translated into several foreign languages, and ran through five editions in his lifetime. It became a sort of statesman’s handbook, although it was years before it made much difference in practical policy. Finally, some three-quarters of a century later, Parliament took the great step of dismantling the whole system of protection for domestic producers, and Britain emerged as a "free trade" nation.
The most celebrated case of the dramatic fight for economic freedom was the so-called "Repeal of the Corn Laws," which did away with protection for English farmers. England had long had a "farm program," a high tariff on grain, which kept out foreign agricultural products and hence increased the cost of living for the English laborer. Since, traditionally, the aristocrats of England were wealthy landowners and had long controlled Parliament, it took a tremendous popular upheaval to eliminate the Corn Laws. This was effected in 1846, in part as the consequence of the "potato famine" in Ireland which brought the chronic problems of human need to a dramatic focus. Something had to be done "right now," since people were starving in large numbers. Once Parliament started slashing tariffs, it was only a matter of time until they were almost completely eliminated.
Most other Western nations joined in the movement to open their markets also; which led to the great period of peace, prosperity, and progress so highly lauded by Lord Keynes. Britain became the center of world trade and finance. But all of this came to pass a century after Adam Smith and the Physiocrats pondered the problems of the world, just as we today are reaping the harvest of Karl Marx’s sowing.
Ideas: Bomb with a Long Fuse
Why the "gradual encroachment of ideas," as Lord Keynes expressed it? Several factors contribute to the long delay between thought and action. One is the fact that a great teacher arises with some new doctrine or a modern version of an old one, but he can scarcely hope to make much of an impact on his own age which is run by men whose thought patterns are already set; his hope is the student of today. This means that it will take at least another generation, perhaps even longer, before his ideas can bear fruit. Furthermore, when we human beings get in a rut — as we habitually do — we commonly do not change our ways, however urgent or desirable the changes may be. When some crisis comes, such as the "Potato Famine of 1846" or the "Crash of ’29," perhaps then we may get out of our rut only to fall into another. Our "New Deal" rut is some thirty-five years long by now, and a change may be anticipated presently; but it will take quite a jolt to get us out of it. Widespread discontent at the grass roots is an important factor.
One reason why mercantilism, the ancient version of the planned economy, went out of fashion in the last century was that generations of ordinary people had become disillusioned with the attempts of the several European governments to regulate and control their nations into prosperity. A good many people back then were aware of this public nuisance, though they had never read Adam Smith. A lot of folks today, who never heard of Von Mises’ Planning for Freedom, have been vexed with national planning since Henry Wallace "plowed under cotton and killed little pigs." A multitude of Europeans who never read Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom have seen the "Berlin Wall" or the "Iron Curtain." More than a billion people now know what communism is all about, and firsthand, too, although few of them have ever waded through Das Kapital. No doubt, many of them are the bitterest enemies of the system. On our side of the Curtain, the "welfare state" is bankrupt also, both figuratively and literally.
This dramatic failure of socialism in all its forms and around the world gives the man of good will who believes in liberty an opportunity he has not had in a long, long time — the opportunity to present Adam Smith’s "obvious and simple system of natural liberty" as the solution to the global crisis. And if we have the persistence of Karl Marx and the patience of the Fabian socialists, it just may be that tomorrow will be ours — that freedom will indeed be the wave of our future.
***
Dumping
When cheap foreign goods flood our markets
Come into our ports without end
The best way to punish the aliens
Is to buy all the goods they can send.
WILLFORD I. KING, Economics in Rhyme
