Preface

PREFACE Man is an individual being. Man is also a social being. His material success-even his existenoe - depends on the progress of others. Yet, mans fortunes and existence depend also on himself. In 80me respects he is tied to others, but in most re spects he must be freed from others. Defining this relationship between man and his fellow-men, discovering precisely where man should act socially and where he should act individually, has been a challenge throughout the ages. And the solution, if it has been found, is not well known in our times. Today, all over the world - in America as elsewhere - the social side of man is being emphasized to the detriment of man's individual side. Nothingon this earth but understanding - and the clear explanation of such understanding - can eras,e this twentieth-century catastrophe. The friends and staff of the Foundation tor Economic Education have devoted much time and effort to various as pects of this problem. Yet many, if not most, of the answers and explanations still elude us. So the search continues.

This book is merely a progress report on some of our re search in various areas of human relationships. These essays on liberty are offered in the hope that they will at least help to identify the nature and difficulty of the problem we face a problem that must be solved if man is to advance toward his own potentialities. LEONARD E. READ of the Foundatioo staff PRIVATE ENTERPRISE REGAINED blJ AnrlJ JJazttt I AM indebted to Betty Knowles Hunt for sending me a column she contributed to the New Hampshire Morning Union quoting from Governor Bradford's own history of the Plymouth Bay Colony over which he presided. It is a story that deserves to be far better known, particularly in an age that has acquired a mania for socialism and com munism, regards them as peculiarly "progressive" and entirely new, and is sure that they represent "the wave of the future." Most of us have forgotten that when the Pilgrim Fathers landed on the shores of Massachusetts they established a Communist system. Out of their common product and storehouse they set up a system of rationing, though it came to c;c;but a quarter of a pound of bread a day to each person." Even when harvest came, c;'it arOSe to but a little/' A vicious circle seemed to set in. The people complained that they were too weak from want of food to tend the crops as they should. Deeply religious though they were, they took to stealing from each other. "So as it well ap peared," writes Governor Bradford, ,c;that famine must still insue the next year allso, if not some way prevented."