Part V - The Blessings of Liberty

CHAPTER XI The Promise of the Future The Incomparable Achievement The incomparable economic achievement of the United States is revealed in. the most obvious facts of our daily life. It is all around us in the present, and it is in the pages of our history. Countless volumes have been written about it; it is the theme of much of our oratorical discourse. It is necessary here only to note briefly the fact of this achievement, for our nlain concern is with its causes and the relation of those causes to future progress. Among the many.;\.merican achievements during the past thirty years has been a capacity to' measure ·our own eco nomic system. The science of economics, when it was largely devoted to theory, provided plenty of room for disagree ment. In certain respects that is still true. But it has, through improved capacity for factual measurement, established a number of reliable calculations that are well known.

For e~ample, we now have fairly good estimates of the volume of national production year by year. We know that in the decade from .1899 to 1909 the physical output of fac tories increased 55 per cent. From 1919 to 1929 we increased it by 65 per cent. In the te~ years following 1929 we estab lished the worst record in half a century, for the increase was 317 The Promise of the Future only 3 per cent. But from 1939 to 1949 the rise was more than 100 per cent. In addition, the record during that half century has shown a great increase in efficiency. The per capita o~tput has been rising at a tremendous rate. From 1899 to 1939 our produc tion per man hour increased at an average rate of two per cent a year, and our working population increased by the same yearly percentage. A few simple comparisons will il lustrate this gain. In 1914, an average worker devoted nine hours of labor to earn enough to buy a pair of work shoes. In 1949, the figure was three and a half hours. In 1914, he worked 41 hours to earn enough to buy a baby carriage; 102 minutes to buy a lamp bulb; 49 hours to earn the price of an electric fan. In 1948, the figures were 15~ hours for the baby carriage; 7 minutes for a lamp bulb; and 4 hours for an elec tric fan.

We have a volume of production almost equal to thatof the continents of Europe, Africa, and South America com bined-an area inhabited by ten times our population. Eighty-two per cent of our national income goes to indi viduals for personal work. Eighteen per cent goes to property in the form of rents, interests, and profits. Americans, with only 6 per cent of the world's land area and 7 per cent of the world's population, own and use one third of the world's railway mileage; half of the improved highways, telephones, and electric power; 60 per cent of the life insurance policies; 85 per cent of the automobiles. They consume three quarters of the world's silk; 60 per cent of the rubber; half of the coffee; and 40 per cent of the salt. Salt consumption, according to economists, is an important· indi cation of a nation's standard of living. Th,ese figures have been reliably interpreted to mean that Americans are nine times better off than the average of the rest of the world's population. The distribution of these and 318 TAe Incomparable Achievement other .indices ·of living standards are on an incomparably wider basisthan elsewhere.:!

Since it became the habit of some left-wing economists to speak of a "mature"· economy, a· number of wholly new in dustries have appeared, are employing hundreds of thou sands of' workers, and are producing billions in wealth. Not able among them are plastics, viscose, and television,' all of which have been developed since one of those economists induced Franklin D. Roosevelt to say "our industrial plant is built." Many inventions originated abroad, but the United States immediately adopted them, mastered' them, and leaped ahead in their practical application. The technique developed in the United States for mass production is recognized~ as a marvel and model for the world. It has been an indispensable factor in building our high standard of living. It will raise the standard of living everywhere, once its principles are mastered throughout the world. O'ne of the factors in mass production, although not the • ftJndamentaI basis of.the proceSs, is the principle of duplicate, or interchangeable parts.

Charles F. Kettering of General Motors once said that the printers were the first to start mass production. . "The invention of movable type," he continued, "was the greatest thing that ever happened in the development ofedu cation and civilization, because with movable type all sorts of things could be set up and duplicated readily. Every word that was printed was reproduced over and over again, exactly the same." Centuries passed, however, before the revolutionary char- . ~cter of .this principle was fully realized here in the United States. Eli Whitney, who had invented the cotton gin, sug- . 1 See Ch. III. 319 The Promise of the Future gested the idea of interchangeable parts to the army as a method of making rifles. But many years passed before manu facturers grasped the idea that behind the principle of inter changeable parts is the careful preparation known as "make ready." B. E. Hutchinson of the Chrysler Corporation once asked me if I knew the meaning of mass production. Out of my imperfect knowledge I said: "The principle of interchange able parts."

"The interchangeability of parts," he answered, "and the benefits that derive from it were only the by-products of mass production. The fundamental idea behind mass production is the substitution of tooling for individual skill, with a con sequent highly functionalized individual operation. This means a highly specialized design for the machine, created by very skillful engineering. Then, when the machine is oper atedto produce the parts, there is required of the operator only a very narrow, specialized skill. The operator-and this applies to the great mass of employees-needs to acquire only one skill, which can be acquired quickly. The product which emerges in great number from this combination of long, ex pensive 'make ready,' plus the fine machine itself, plus the operator with a narrow, specialized skill, will be superior to anything produced as an engineering sample." Kettering provides a forceful exam pIe of this process: "The machine gun is a very good illustration of the point I am trying to make. I remember when one of them was brought to the Frigidaire Plant in Dayton. Our men said, ·We don't know anything about the machine-gun business.' "I happened to be there and I said to the colonel who had brought the machine gun in, 'Will this gun shoot the way you want it to?' "He said, 'Yes, that particular gun has been through all the firing tests and is O.K.' "I said, 'That's all we need to know. If you have drawings 320 ,The Incomparable Achievement of the parts of that gun aU we need to do is. make. parts exactlylike those in that gun, and what can it do but shoot when we put it together?' "

Thus, \the combination of ever and ever more accurate design and tools for standard duplication lies at the basis of an infinitely rich material life.··This is an American achieve ment. We have created capital at a tremendous rate. During the Second World War we added, in 1939 prices,$2S,ooo,ooo, 000 in value to our industrial plant, which was a greater in vestment than that represented by the industries of England, France, and Germany, which were built up over ISO years. We have reached a point at which, unless taxation and other government policies impose a bar, the problem of pro gressive production is solved. The greater. problem is in creased consumption. A philosophical specialist in retailing has deplored the ·saving instincts inherited from Puritan an cestry and has called for an anti-Puritan. economic philoso phy. He calls his methods the "selling of discontent." That, essentially, is. what modern salesmanship strives to do-to stimulate·human wants and thus to create a market for mass production., This aggressive force multiplies both production and consumption and raises the standard of .living. While other nations ration their scarcity, we have had to' organize our abundance.

We have beaten back the poverty line that has enclosed the mass/of the world's people for ages and that still encloses 85 per cent· of them. Right before us, not in the flickering dreams of hope but in the probability of achievement, is the goal of enough for the reasonably healthful and happy main tenance of all. Marxism professed that a bed-rock .security for all could come only by planning for all, by eliminating the' "wastes" of competition and luxury-in. short, by destroying capital ism. We have arrived very close to that.goal of security"not 321 The Promise ,ofthe Future by destroying but by preserving capitalism. We have proved that the "wastes" of competition are the fires that turn the wheels of production~ Like th~ gardener who prunes a tree, competition, by continuous cutting away, produces more and richer fruit. The system that created our achievement we are asked to abandon for another that was planned a century ago by Marx, a man who knew only the infancy of free industrial enterprise, and who considered only its infantile gropings for the means of life.

Incontestable Causes In assigning causes for the American achievement, we should avoid the twin fallacies of coincidence and post hoc, ergo propter hoc. A vast amount of special pleading and careless thinking has attended efforts to interpret our past in tenus of cause and effect. Some socialists claim that the people who settled America merely stumbled on a section of the earth with incomparably rich resources and that greatness would have emerged under any system and with any 'kind of people. Some nonsocialists fall into a like error in singling out one factor, to which they ascribe the qualities of magic. The old Bancroft school of historians credited our good fortune to the hovering wings of Providence. When we direct our. attention to the many specific rea sons for our national eminence we find that nearly all of these causes, including the use of God's gift of natural re sources, have something to do with liberty.

Our unassailable location has protected these resources from barbaric invasion and spoliation. It preserved this con tinent until a congeries of nationalities came with the au thentic seeds of modern civilization. The Indian races were relatively few in number, indisposed to develop resources 322 Incontestable Causes and only remotely related to the springs of great ancient civ ilizations. The people who came after Columbus energeti cally set about to retain the advantages inherent in location by pressing forward to all the areas looking out to the sea. The people of the United States over a century, by hook or by crook, by conquest, purchase, or pure bluff, pushed their sovereignty over a continent perfectly suited to the develop ment of nationality. They made a few gestures at Canada, but either failed in these or gave up because of a recognition of political and racial kinship in which neighborly living was profitable to all.

This location, protected by the oceans, made it possible for our people to develop institutions of their choice,. with no threat of interference from alien attack or from any sort of foreign influence that they were not willing to welcome. The British Isles had a similar advantage, and historical judgments assert that their protected location was a major factor in the development of free institutions. Our physical detachment has been incomparably greater. It is hardly necessary here to enumerate the great natural resources that have been and still are available to our people. r-rhese resources, in terms of minerals, land, water, and cli mate, are common knowledge to our schoolc,hildren. Our enormous coastline, affording access to all the world, is not only an agency of commerce but it opens to us resources, real though almost wholly untouched, in and under the sea. It is a valid law of nature and of history that the pressure of need and cupidity moves people of all sorts to greener fields and richer hills and valleys. The lure of America moved the more venturesome, resourceful, and liberty-loving individuals of the Old World more quickly and persistently.

Thus, there is a connection between these personal qualities and our natural resources which cannot be denied. William A. Dunning, a great historian" used to say that we were settled by a 'hardy breed of "kickers." They were people 323 The Promise of the Future who hated the restraints of entrenched authority. They wanted to be free, they asked no odds, no dearly purchased protection, no subsidies but a piece of virgin land or a post for· profitable trade. This was a manifestation of the love of liberty. The peopling of the United States and Canada was a selec tive process. And this selection was, except in small instances, rio act of a government, but a matter of free choice. Gener ally, it took imagination, courage, and a deep sense of inde· pendence to tear loose from ~radition, home ties, and politi cal allegiance, and come to the New W orld. It is too general and too complacent to say that we are descendants of the best people of Europe. But it is accurate to say that we are de scendants of the kind of people best suited to build a new nation; in whom faith, imagination, inventiveness, hardi hood, and the love of individual freedom were foremo'st qualities.

Collectively, they had an infinite assortment of skills. Their superficial habits and traditions· were of all origins. The least common denominator, however, was a matter of spirit and purpose, and that spirit and purpose were embod ied in opposition to the growth of authority, especially state authority. The anthropologists, notably Franz Boas, have proved that superficial characteristics, even physical lineaments such as color and head shapes, change in a generation or so. But the mental characteristics of a people create new political and economic institutions and traditions. These have been the patterns within which our great achievement has been created. These people also brought their inherited political institu tions. There were Anglo-Saxon institutions and French ideas. There were German and Scandinavian concepts of industrial and community life.. These, too, were favorable to great ma terial and cultural development.

324 Incontestable Causes As the nation began to grow, there was an energetic tide of migrationto~ardthe frontier. Here again, a selective process operated. Those who pulled ,up stakes and moved were of many kinds. There were the imaginative, the young, the am~ bitious, the cantankerous, and· the' visionary. There were also chronic failures like Tom Lincoln. But failure.is not too seldom a mark of nonconformity. The indolent failure is too lazy to move. New sections filled up with those newly ar rived, and they grew to importance in the national scene.2 Another characteristic that h~s greatly ~ontributed to ma terialgrowth and a very high standard of living throughout America ·has been the uniformity of American life. James Bryce in his A merican Commonwealth devotes a penetrati:q.g chapter to this. He noted uniformity of landscape over vast 'stretches of his' journeys and almost indistinguishable towns and cities. "The same fields and crops, the same rough wooden fences, the same thickets of the same bushes along the stream edges .' . . the same solitary farm houses and straggled wood-built villages." There is even less variety in the' great mountain ranges than in the short ranges of Eu rope, he added.

Bryce· wrote that a generation ago. He would now be con fronted .by vastly greater evidences of uniformity. The same makes of automobiles line the streets of thousands of towns and cities. The same products are sold by similar stores, agen cies, and stations, and the same motion pictures are shown in the theaters. The same ,national magazines are on the news stands. The same features appear in hundreds of newspapers. The same· programs are on radio stations. Bryce complained about our uniformity. It was· "the one serious drawback" to the pleasantness of American life. 2 An old friend of mine, Lewis A. McArthur of Portland, in his years of retirement made a study of· the geographical names in the Northwest that signalized the boundless optimism of the pioneers who settled there. Among them were Eureka, Utopia, Joy, Enterprise, Lovely, Paradise, Promise, Eden~ and Arcadia. 325 The Promise of the Future True, but a civilization does not grow for the purpose of pro viding satisfactions for a traveler. It grows to supply the needs of those who live in it. There are great values in our uniformity. It makes possible a stupendous market for goods produced in mass. It was an important precondition to the mechanization of labor, because demand became too great for the labor supply, and machines had to be created to mul tiply the products of men's hands.

Freedom from national frontiers and trade barriers cre ated such trade as has never before been seen over such a great area. The American system permitted the mobility es sential to rapid and substantial industrial growth. If the elder Rockefeller and other pioneers in the oil business had been compelled, when they built refineries and pipelines, to consult such boards and other authorities as the socialists in Britain created, they would have grown old before their product began to serve its purpose. It has been a source of strength that all or most of those matters which required relatively great government expendi tures were absent here: the fear of and defense against pred atory neighbors, feudal and national hatreds, the mainte nance of an unproductive and extravagant nobility, and a submerged class of the impoverished. Moreover, until re cently there has been freedom from the burden that the support of a great bureaucracy places on an economic system.

The interdependence that prevails in our economy is a result of a free market. We have achieved on a massive scale, without government intervention, what has been recognized in socialist or semisocialist governments in Europe as exclu sively the task of government or of government-sponsored cooperatives. The American chain store is one example. A better example is the infinitely complex process by which food produced on the farm is finally delivered to the consumer's dinner table. That process involves, first, the pro duction of the raw food on the farm at a reasonable profit to 326 Incontestable Causes the farmer; second, the processing or preparation of the food for use by the consumer; third, the distribution of the food at an economical cost; and, finally, the delivery of the prod uct to the consumer at a price. w~thin his means. While there are millions of people engaged in this process -and many of them operate as individuals or small com panies-a number of large companies that deal with a wide variety of products have also developed in this field.

Such a company buys directly the products of thousands of farms. The farmers, because of the size and stability of the company, are assured of a certain and profitable market from year to year. The company, seeking the best means of producing a large output at constantly more economical prices, underwrites extensive research and experimentation to improve the proc essing of the products and to devise new, attractive, and nourishing types of finished foods out of the old staple prod ucts of.the land. Since the development of a market for new products de pends upon a growing demand, consumers are educated by advertising. This advertising, far from being an economic waste, as many enemies of the free system assert, is a means of· providing a market sufficiently large to bring down prices by economies in mass production and distribution. It is in effect the big show window for the company. The more that people can be made to want, the greater the means that can be provided to meet those wants.

Finally, the consumer is benefited by a wider and more interesting array of foods brought within his means. In this entire process benefits are bestowed upon every participant-the farmer, the carrier, the various dealers, and the consumers. Finally, the large, stable company provides investors, large and small, with a sound place to put money at work to benefit the nation and provide security for savings. In this field of economic activity, as in many others, small 327 The Promise of the Future and large businesses live side by side with mutual benefits. The research and know-how of the companies that can afford them are quickly known by those that cannot. That gives the smaller companies ideas from which they profit. Individ uals all along the line think of improvements that ultimately are helpful to all. It might be added that the so-called Brannan plan is merely a bad method of doing what food manufacturers have been doing for many years at no cost to the taxpayer and with no restrictions on the freedom of anyone concerned.

CharlesF. Kettering has described the part that freedom plays in our economic system by comparing it with our polit ical system of voting: "We refer to our nation as a 'democracy,' which is just a long way of spelling 'votes.' That's all a democracy is; a coun try where' people vote for things. We think of elections as coming in the spring or in the fall; but these aren't the elec tions that count so much .. These are only the political elec tions. We have continuous elections in this democracy. Every store, on both sides of the street, in every village, town and city, is a voting booth at which our citizens vote every day. A little boy says, 'I want that candy bar. 1 don't want the other one.' A man says, 'I don't want that color on my auto mobile. 1 want this color.' We are voting from morning until night, and out of that voting comes the decision that gives everybody more for his money because it leads to competi tion, and competition is what makes the nation run. .'. .

"That's what stores are; that's what advertisements are: Voting ,and electioneering places for their articles, whether it be a drill press, a necktie or a hat. The man who can keep on making something and giving his customer a profit is the one who is getting the most votes, and that man is sure to succeed." The process of linking production with consumption is the responsibility of. business management. Modern manage328 The Promise of the Future ment is a product of the past century, and its· inventiveness and skill to a considerable degree account for the American economic miracle. Company management is the connecting link among factors in the modern economic system. It serves at" once the consumer, the worker, and the investing owners. Management is the great moderator among many interests, as well as the innovator and director in the process of produc tion and distribution. This role of management needs to be well understood by the public for, without it, America could never have attained its present standard of living.

The Promise of the Future In a free society national goals are not fixed and attained by coercion, as they are in Soviet Russia. Liberty permeates the nation with a million forces; the achievement is unpredicta ble, and therein lies the zest of anticipation. As long as we are sure of the direction in which we are going and are sure of the motives and principles· that guide us, we can anticipate a better life. That should be enough assurance for free men. We cannot take a narrow view when we.survey the facts of change in the half century just past. The transformation of travel and communication, the growth of new industries, and the revival and growth of various regions and communities should be enough to reassure us about frontiers. We have the physical spaces for people and· enterprise. Compared with more compact civilized countries, we a~e still quite primitive and empty. Our resources, despite our past excesses and wastefulness, are bountiful though not boundless. We are nearing the bot tom of the Mesabi Range, but beyond that supply are vast deposits of iron ore available for use when we devise better methods of refining and provide new capital for develop ment. And there are unlimited amounts of pure ore in near-by.Canada and Labrador and in the undeveloped coun329 The Promise of the Future tries to the south. Our coal supplies are good for centuries.

Estimates of our oil resources have been revised and re revised-always upward. There is an immense bed of oil shale in western Colorado, eastern Utah, and southern Wyo ming that, according to the U.S. Bureau of Mines, could yield three hundred billion barrels of oil. The best of this is prob ably in Colorado, where a government demonstration plant is operating and beginning to show that the cost of extracting this oil ,vill in all probability come down to a basis competi tive with the present sources of petroleum. The Bureau of Mines estimates that the shale deposits contain more oil than has ever been produced in this country, and much more than is in proved petroleum reserves still in the ground. Supplies of nitrates in their natural forms may decline, but now we know they can literally be taken from the boundless air. Atomic power is already in sight. These are essentials, and they are to be ours.

We have the sea, too, open for the ingenuity of science. Charles Kettering tells the story of how science solved the problem of bromine. A short time ago, he says, only 800,000 pounds were produced a year. Then "out came the slide rules," and ways were devised to produce 150,000,000 pounds a year from sea water at a bearable cost. That ,vater, says Kettering, has "potassium, magnesium, and all sorts of min eral and biological things." And we have the sun for heat and energy. We have technological skill, which has not reached any thing like its maximum development. The achievements in the la~e war clearly show a momentum that should project itself far into the future. We have, above all, our national character, in which rest less venture, imagination, energy, and impatience of restraint and routine predominate. That they cannot be taken for granted, however, is shown by the quest of so many of us for the illusory haven of bureaucratic security. Already, there are 330 The Promise of the Future disturbing signs of change in our youth. Two years, ago, a survey by Fortune indicated that an alarming number of our college· graduates were enamored of a future security tucked into a job with a pension at the end. They manifested no special inclination to venture in business for themselves. But this survey also showed a minority of young men in rapidly growing states like Texas and Oklahoma who preferred a more risky course.

Our population is still moving. First it settled. the coastal areas and river valleys. Scarcely had a civilization grown there than the drift toward the interior began. Later, there came the railways and highways, and people settled along these new lines of commerce and communication. Now, with the liberation of industry from the necessity 6f being located near coal, iron, and other heavy raw Inaterials, another trek ' is under way. One line of migration is toward more kindly places to live. The increase in California's population in the past ten years has. been equal to the entire population of New Jersey. More significant than this, because it has not been caused by any urge toward ease and government bene fits, has been the movement of people. into the South-into Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi~and the Southeast. The· per. capita income in the eleven Southeastern states from 1940 through 1950 rose 200 per cent. The per capita income rise over· the same period in all the states was 150 per cent. Inventions created by free enterprise have pro vided mechanized means for agriculture on small farms for Negroes and whites. Cattle-raising is moving in, and in large sections the reign of King Cotton is ended. Industry, also inspired by the promise of greater opportunities, has moved southward. Sixteen thousand new factories were built in the South in eight years after 1939. All this was in only a slight degree because of government planning or government help.

It was owing to the energy of free men seeking economic opportunity. 331 The Promise of the Future It is likely that, even if the threat of Communist aggres sion should not be wholly removed, there will be a trend of capital, know-how, and venturesome people into undeveloped areas throughout a world revealed to us in the lurid light of war. The world has more than two billion people, and only a small fraction of them have ever had enough to eat or any of the amenities of life, despite the fact that everywhere rich resources lie undeveloped in the sight of dire need. We have, says Kettering, the arsenal to win the battle of plenty,. But the slowly awakening people of backward areas must furnish the manpower and do the fighting. We can design the tools, but they must do the job. The horizon of knowledge is still in the misty distance. To cite Kettering again, there is relatively little that we know.

This great inventor and master of research, who did so much to revolutionize the automobile, still seeks the answer to such questions as· these: What is friction? How do fuels burn in an engine cylinder? What is fatigue of metals? How do plants fix energy from the sun?· What is a lubricant and how does it work? What is immunity to disease? What is energy? "Every time you tear a leaf off a calendar, " says Kettering, "you present a new place for ideas and progress. All along the future years is spaced new information. It comes by in ventions, by discoveries and by research. We can't stop this development because we know practically nothing about any thing .. We have it all in front of us. We have the perpetual necessity of finding out new information based on the facts that we found yesterday, some proved and some disproved." 3 But progress will not come through research, science, and invention alone. These are merely the loose strands of prog ress.They must be joined by cross-strands. The genius of leadership and management in economic, political, and moral life must give meaning and use to scientific discovery.

Unless this is done, all our science may end in frustration 3 "Get Off Route 25," Colliers, December 3, 1949. 332 Liberty and Progress,One and Indivisible and disaster. There must be freedom in many fields other than mere science. For science alone can be the tool of tyranny. Liberty and Progress,One and Indivisible The forms of authority paramount over the individual have been infinitely varied. In this book, however, we have been concerned only with the authority of the state as one of two alternative ideals. For that is the choice presented to us in the United States. The reality of socialism is not a true merger of the will of many individuals. It is the claim of British socialists, in many cases sincerely uttered, that their ideal isa people's regime in which all individual wills are still existent and operative through free political institutions. It is the claim of Commu nism also that it is a people's government, existing without free political institutions but devoted to the good of all.

Despite much theorizing to the contrary, individualliber ties thus fused result in the loss not only of material but of spiritu~l values to the individual. For when many wills are thus subdued, liberty of action and authority pass to one person or to a group of individuals, who become the master government. There is no such thing as collective planning or collective action, except when all are free. Somebody plans for all, and somebody directs all.4 When that happens, as I have pointed out, these. some 4 "Government in this way becomes the rational art of minimizing the in~ evitable conflicts of primal irrational wills against one another and against the forces of nature at large. If government attempts to go further and to approve one set of irrational wills and forbid another, it becomes itself the agent of a particular irrational will; and instead of speaking for all wills that move in its domain, and showing each the best terms it can make with cir cumstances, it becomes itself a particular set of circumstances hostile to all other wills, instead of wise friend to them all.". George Santayana: Domina tions and Powers (New York: Copyright, 1950, 1951, by Charles Scribner's Sons), p. 434.

333 The Promise of the Future bodies are confronted with tasks beyond human capacity. The complexity of life forbids mastery of details. Also, the susceptibility of human nature to the virus of power is too pronounced to be trusted. For the intoxication of po,ver pro gressively undermines rational judgment. True, the poetry of history describes golden moments un der concentrated authority. We all kno,v the rhapsody of Gibbon over the Rome of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines. But the melancholy end is also known to us. We know, further, of the failure of socialist planning in many modern instances. And we have seen the slave states made according to the blueprints of Marx. We have the alternative and we know its fruits. We have seen the progress of nations that over a century and a half have measurably kept vital the ideal of a free market. That progress has come from the fusion of millions of individual choices in the market without the imposition of any single authority. Free choice has delivered the goods. So far as hu man welfare or, if you will, the general welfare, is concerned, we have that in as rich a form as the world has known. We have also seen that where we have impaired the free market in the interest of this or that group, the result has been pro gressively and finally successful efforts to force surrenders of other interests. The Brannan plan is the lineal descendent of Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures. "The other fellow got it" has been the theme of our political life.

When everybody finally gets it, nobody will have it. True Liberty Is Positive and Constructive I have, except in a few specific instances, used "liberty" and "freedom" as synonymous terms. There is, however, a differ ence in what they connote, and it is essential by way of con clusion to underline that difference. Freedom implies the 334 True Liberty Is Positive and Constructive removal of or exemption from some sort of restraint. The condition that accompanies freedom may be empty, vacuous, aimless. Standing by itself, it implies no vital action, nothing that makes it a material or spiritual value in itself. The pris oner released from Chillon had only freedom-no capacity to participate in the.processes of liberty. And in the sense in which freedom has come to be used in contemporary history, it often· carries with it the necessity that $ome coercive power is essential to preserve it.5 On the other hand, the word "liberty," which is Latin, not Teutonic in origin, implies the capacity within itself for its own protection and the constructive power to create. an en vironment favorable to those who possess it. This is the sense in which it was used by the ·framers of our institutions. I have used it in this sense in my suggestions for natiol}al policies which offer an alternative to the compulsions and spurious gratuities of government. The "free" market became an ideal in political economy when in fact the market was bound by a thousand restraints. But economic liberty has created a sys tem of self-government and vital, creative forces. Today in the United States that system is struggling not to free itself but to retain its capacity to grow and serve as it has in the past.

Liberty, despite attack and serious losses, is still the estab lished order. It has served us well and can serve us better. But material services have not been and cannot be the primary mission of liberty. If life is to have value, liberty must meet the need for a progressive growth in the mind and spirit of the individual. The lesson .of all religion is that we are here because we need to be··fitted for a destiny beyond the material world. Our inward impulses and in.stincts con5 "But freedom from want and fear is only a condition for the steady exer cise of true liberty. On the other hand, it is more than a demand for liberty; for it demand~ insurance and protection by provident institutions, which imply the dominance of a paternal government, with artificial privileges secured by law. This would be freedom from the dangers of a free life. It shows us liberty contracting its field and bargaining for safety first." Santayana: Ibid., p. 58.

335 The Promise of the Future stantly remind us of this lesson. Perhaps that is why in the long history of an individual's consciousness the central fig ure in his universe is himself, and his own well-being his incessant concern. The efforts of that individual to survive and grow create the energy that moves and sustains civiliza tion. Personal dignity and goodness and cultural and spirit .. ual values rise from that inner ego. Liberty, essential for personal effort, is therefore a value per seJ a value indispensa ble for the attainment of spiritual fitness for an unseen but priceless destiny. The fruits of liberty are all around us, but its essential value is within us. Its preservation should be our business in life. 336 APPENDIX Federal Laws GoverningPoliticalAction Committees 1. According to the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, a political committee. is defined as an organization that accepts contribu tions or makes expenditures for the purpose of influencing elec tions for President, 'United States Senate, or the House of Representatives, providing-the organization operates in two or more states. From this definition it can be seen that independent committees organized for the purpose of influencing elections for Federal offices, including electors for President and Vice President in. only one state, would not in any way be subject to the provisions of the Federal Corrupt Practices Act. However, the Corrupt Practices Act does state that branches or subsidiaries of national organizations are included in the definition even if they operate in only one state. As a general rule, it has been accepted that so long as officers of local committees are inde pendent of a national organization the local organization is a bona fide independent committee. Various states have their own corrupt-practices act that govern these local committees.