Has Capitalism a Future? P. Johnson

Paul Johnson HAS CAPITALISM A FUTURE? LET me begin by defining my terms. By ((capitalism" I mean large-scale industrial capitalism, in which privately-financed publicly-quoted corporations, operating in a free market environment, and with the backup of the private enterprise money market, constitute the core of national economies. This is a pretty broad definition, but I think it will do. Now the first thing to be noted is that this phenomenon is pretty re cent. I would date it, in its earliest phase in England, only from the Mr. Johnson, a British historian and author, Is a former editor of The New Statesman, a leading academic socialist weekly. His recent break from what he calls the Fascist Left In Britain Is explained In his book, Enemies of Society, reviewed In The Freeman, March 1978. this article, an addres. at the May 1978 Bank CrttdltAnalyst Conference, Is reprinted by permis sion from the September 1978 Issue of The Bank Credit Analyst publication.

1780s. It is thus less than 200 years old anywhere. As a widely-spread phenomenon, it is barely 100 years old. Seen against the grand perspec tive of history, capitalism is a new comer. We now possess some knowl edge of economic systems going back to the early centuries of the third millennium B. C. I could give you, for instance, an outline account of the economic structure of Egypt under the Old Kingdom, about 2700 B. C. Our know ledge of how civilised societies have organised their economic activities thus covers a stretch of more than 4600 years. And in only about 200 of those years has industrial capitalism existed. Now the next point to note is the remarkable correlation be tween the emergence of industrial capitalism and the beginnings of really rapid economic growth. 47 48 THE FREEMAN January Throughout most of history, growth rates, when we have the statistical evidence to measure them, have been low, nil or minus. A century of slow growth might be followed by a century of decline. Societies tended to get caught in the Malthusian Trap: that is, a period of slow growth led to an increase in population, the outstripping of food supplies, fol lowed by a demographic catas trophe, and the beginning of a new cycle.

There were at least three economic uDark Ages" in history, in which a sudden collapse of the wealth-making process led to the extinction, or virtual extinction, of civilised living, and the process of recovery was very slow and painful. The last of these three Dark Ages extinguished Roman civilization in Western Europe, in the 5th Century A. D. It was not until the 13th cen tury that equivalent living stan dards were again achieved-the re covery thus took 800 years. Society again fell into a Malthusian trap in the 14th century and again recovery was slow, though more sure this time, as intermediate technology spread more widely, and methods of handling and employing money be came more sophisticated. Even by the first half of the 18th century, however, it was rare for even the most advanced economies, those of England and Holland, to achieve one per cent growth in any year. And there is a possibility (I myself would put it higher) that mankind would again have fallen into a Malthusian trap towards the end of the 18th century if industrial capi talism had not made its dramatic appearance.

And it was dramatic. By the be ginning of the 1780s, in England, an unprecedented annual growth rate of two per cent had been achieved. During that decade, the two per cent was raised to four per cent. This was the great historic Ulift off," and a four per cent annual compound growth rate was sustained for the next 50 years, on average. Since this English, and also Scottish, perfor mance was accompanied by the ex port of capital, patents, machine tools and skilled manpower to sev eral other advanced nations, the phenomenon soon became interna tional. Phenomenal Growth I don't want to overburden you with figures, but some are necessary to indicate the magnitude of the change that industrial capitalism brought to human society. In Brit ain, for instance, in the 19th cen tury, the size of the working popula tion multiplied fourfold. Real wages doubled in the half-century 1800 1850, and doubled again, 1850-1900.

This meant there was a 1600% in crease in the production and con sumption of wagegoods during the 1979 HAS CAPITALISM A FUTURE? 49 century. Nothing like this had hap pened anywhere before, in the whole of history. From the 1850s onward, in Belgium, France, Austria Hungary, above all in Germany and the U.S., even higher growth rates were obtained; and feudal empires like Japan and Russia were able to telescope a development process which in Britain had stretched over centuries into a mere generation or two. The growth rates of twelve lead ing capitalist countries averaged 2.7% a year over the whole 50-year period up to World War I. There was, it is true, a much more mixed performance between the wars. The U.S., for instance, which in the 44 years up to 1914 had averaged a phenomenal 4.3% growth rate, and which in the seven years·up to 1929 had increased its national income by a staggering 40%, then saw its na tional income fall 38% in the mere four years 1929-32.

But following World War II, growth was resumed on an even more impressive scale. In the 1950s, for instance, the 12 leading capital ist economies cited before had an average annual growth of 4.2%. In Germany it was as high as an aver age of 7.6%. In all the West Euro pean economies, the rate of invest ment in the 1950s was half as high again as it had ever been on a sus tained basis. In several such coun tries it was over 20% of the GNP; in Germany and the Netherlands it was 25%, in Norway even higher. Moreover, this high capital forma tion took place not at the cost of private consumption, but during a rapid and sustained rise in living standards, particularly of industrial workers. These tendencies were pro longed throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. So far as the mature economies were concerned, the sec ond industrial revolution, 1945-70, was entirely painless-and largely so even in Japan, where even higher investment and growth rates were sought, and obtained, to catch up with the U.S. and Europe.

The Key Was Capitalism In short, after nearly five recorded millennia of floundering about, in rel ative or absolute poverty, humanity suddenly in the 1780s began to hit on the right formula: industrial cap italism. Consider the magnitude of the change over the last 200 years or less. We all know the wealth of present-day West Germany; all of us (I am sure) have seen it for our selves. In the year 1800, in the whole of Germany there were less than 1000 people with annual in comes of 1000 dollars a year or more. Or again, take France. France now has more automobiles per capita even than Germany, and more second homes per family than any other country in Europe. In the 1780s, four/fifths of French families 50 THE FREEMAN January spent 90% of their incomes simply on buying bread--only bread-to stay alive. Now I have said enough (I could ,say much more) to demonstrate that industrial capitalism, judged simply by its capacity to create wealth, and to distribute it, is a phenomenon unique in world history. It could be argued that it is the greatest single blessing ever bestowed on human ity. Why, then, am I giving a talk, not in any spirit of paradox either, called HAS CAPITALISM A FU TURE?

You may well ask. But I think we know the answer. I am giving it because capitalism is threatened, and we feel it to be threatened: the question is not academic. But before we go any further, I would like to clear up one important point. The idea has got around, and it is widely believed, especially among young people--and above all, alas, among young people who like to think they are well educated--that industrial capitalism is unpopular, and always has been. That is the work of a tiny, interested minority who have thrust it upon the reluctant mass of man kind. Nothing, in fact~ could be further from the truth. The storage economies of remote antiquity were often hideously unpopular. So was the slave-based economy, combined with corporatism, of the classical world. Agricultural feudalism was certainly unpopular; and mercan tilism had to be enforced, in prac tice, by authoritarian states.

They Voted with Their Feet But capitalism, industrial capitalism-no! From the very start it received the demonstrable appro bation of the masses.· They could not vote in the ballot box, but they voted in a far more positive and impres sive manner, with their feet. And this for a simple reason. The poorest member of society values political freedom as much as the richest and the well educated-that is my belief. But the freedom he values most of all, the freedom which means most to him, is the freedom to sell his labour and skills in the open market. It was precisely this that industrial capitalism gave to men for the first time in history. Hence it is a profound error of fact, in my view, to see what Blake called the udark, satanic mills" of the in dustrial revolution, as the enslave ment of man. The factory system, however harsh it may have been, was the road to freedom for millions of agricultural workers. Not only did it offer them an escape from rural poverty, which was deeper and more degrading than anything experienced in the cities, but it allowed them to move from status to contract, from a stationary place in a static society, with tied cottages and semi1979 HAS CAPITALISM A FUTURE? 51 conscript labour, to a mobile place in a dynamic one. That was why the common man voted for industrial capitalism with his feet, by tramp ing from the countryside to the towns, in enormous numbers, first in Britain, then throughout Europe.

And tens of millions of European peasants, decade after decade, moved relentlessly across the Atlantic in pursuit of that same freedom, from semi-feudal estates and small holdings in Russia, Poland, Ger many, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Ire land, Scandinavia, to the mines and factories and workshops of New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cleve land, Detroit. It was the first time in history that really large numbers of ordinary people were given the chance to exercise a choice about their livelihood and destiny, and to move, not as a member of a tribe or a conscript soldier, but as free indi viduals' selling their labour in the open market. A New Freedom They voted for industrial capital ism with their feet not only because they felt in their bones that it meant a modest prosperity for their chil dren and grandchildren-and on the whole they have been proved abun dantly right-but because they knew it meant a new degree of free dom for themselves.

Indeed, the success of industri alisation, despite all its evils, continues to persuade countless ordinary men and· women, all over the world, to escape the poverty and restraints of rural status-society and to enter the free labour markets of the towns. Hence the growth of the megalopolises all over the world Calcutta and Bombay, Teheran and Caracas, Mexico City and Djakarta, Shanghai and Lagos, Cairo and ~Johannesburg; there are now liter ally scores of million-plus cities all over the Third World. This never-ending one-way flow from countryside to city is plainly a voluntary mass choice, for most governments fear and resent it and many are attempting, sometimes savagely but always ineffectively, to halt or reverse it. It is more marked in the free market economies, but it is marked everywhere. Short of evacuating the cities by force and terror, as is now apparently being practiced in parts of southeast Asia, there is no way to stop this human flood. There seems to be an almost irresistible urge in human beings to move away from the status society to contractual individualism-the central feature of industrial capital ism. And this operates even in to talitarian societies, as witness the efforts, for instance, of the Chinese and Polish governments to limit the urban explosions they are ex periencing.

Well, then, if industrial capital ism is both unique in its wealth-pro52 THE FREEMAN January ducing capacity, and also has the endorsement of a popular mandate, why is it under threat? And who is threatening it? Losing the Intellectual and Moral Battle Let me look at five principal ele ments. The first, and in some ways the most important, is that the free enterprise idea is losing, if it has not already lost, the intellectual and moral battle. Not long ago I went into Blackwell's, the great book shop at Oxford University. I wandered over the huge room which houses the books on politics and economics, and having been disagreeably sur prised by what I saw there, I made a rough calculation. New books extoll ing the economic, social and moral virtues of Com~unism and col lectivism-and there were literal ly hundreds and hundreds from all over the world-outnumbered books defending free enterprise, or merely seeking to take an ob jective view of the argument, by between five and six to one. Now this overwhelming predominance of collectivism was not due to any sinister policy on the part of Messrs.

Blackwell's, which is a highly effi cient capitalist enterprise. It was a marketing response to demand, on the part of students and teachers. And this was Oxford University, not one of the new slum universities of recent years, some of which have been virtually shanghaied by Marx ist factions, but one of the free world's greatest centres of learning, where the battle of ideas is fought under the best possible conditions. There can be no doubt that the intellectual and moral assault on free enterprise, and the exaltation of Marxist collectivism, which is such a striking feature of the 1970s, is directly related to the huge expan sion of higher education, put through at such cost to the capitalist economies, in the 1960s. Now there is in this a huge and tragic irony. For in the 1950s, the decade when the uni versi ty expansion was planned, it was the prevailing wis dom among the leading thinkers of the West, that the growth of higher education was directly productive of industrial growth-that the more university graduates we turned out, the faster the GNPs of the West would rise. This was the thesis out lined by President Clark Kerr of Berkeley, in his 1963 Godkin lec tures at Harvard, and it was a thesis put forward, with immense effect in Britain, by Sir Charles, now Lord Snow. Kerr said: ~CWhat the rail roads did for the second half of the last century, and the automobile for the first half of this century, may be done for the second half of the 20th century by the knowledge industry: that is, to serve as the focal point for national growth." And Kerr added that more graduates would not only 1979 HAS CAPITALISM A FUTURE? 53 mean a bigger GNP but act as a reinforcement for middle class de mocracy, with all its freedoms.

Anticapitalism Now to speak of the ((knowledge industry" was to ask for trouble. Knowledge is not a manufactured commodity. There is knowledge for good and knowledge for evil, as the Book of Genesis says. The 1960s, during which most Western nations doubled, and in some cases tre bled, their university places, did not reinforce democratic freedoms, or enlarge the GNP or strengthen the free enterprise system. They pro duced the students' revolts, begin ning in Paris in 1968; they detonated the Northern Ireland conflict, which is still harassing Britain. They pro duced the Baader-Meinhoff Gang in West Germany, the Red Brigade in Italy, the Left Fascist terrorism of Japan. They produced an enormous explosion of Marxist studies, cen tered around the social sciences and especially sociology and a new gen eration of university teachers and school teachers, dedicated by faith and by a sort of perverted religious piety, to the spread of Marxist ideas.

There are ironies within the gen eral irony. Thus, the new university of the air, created in Britain at enormous expense to bring higher education to adults,. and therefore christened the Open University, sometimes gives the impression that it has become a centre virtually closed to any teacher not of proven Marxist opinion. Nuffield College, Oxford, founded by that great capi talistpioneer, Lord Nuffield, who created the British automobile in dustry, has become a centre of trade union ideology, of the very ideas which, slowly but surely, are put ting the British automobile industry out of world markets and out of business. Warwick University, created in the 1960s as a power house of ideas and clever graduate executives for the West Midlands industrial complex, Britain's biggest, has often turned out Marx ist and pseudo-Marxist agitators dedicated to the destruction of the wealth-producing machine which brought their university into exis tence.

I could go on. It is true, of course, that student unrest, as such, has quieted down. But the steady diffu sion of ideas hostile to our free sys tem continues remorselessly. Indus trial capitalism, and the free market system, is presented as destructive of human happiness, corrupt, im moral, wasteful, inefficient and above all, doomed. Collectivism is presented as the only way out com patible with the dignity of the human spirit and the future of our race. The expanded university threatens to become not the power house of Western individualism and enterprise, but its graveyard.

54 THE FREEMAN January The Ecological Panic There is a second threat, what I call in my book the UEcological Panic." Now this movement, again, began with the best intentions. I well remember when Rachel Car son's· work, The Silent Spring, first appeared in The New Yorker, and the surprise and concern it rightly aroused. We were tending to ignore some of the destructive side effects of very rapid industrial expansion. The wave of concern that followed was justified, and the steps then taken, notably the clean air policies, and the policies for cleansing lakes and waterways have been spec tacularly successful. Thanks to smokeless fuel, London fogs, which were real killers, have been virtu ally eliminated. The last really seri ous London fog was in 1952. The Thames is now cleaner, and has greater quantities of fish, and more varieties in it, than at any time since before the days of Spenser or Shakespeare. Similar successes are now being registered in the U.S., which adopted such legally enforce able remedies somewhat later than Britain did. These are examples of what can be done by thoughtful, unemotional, systematic and scien tifically justified application of con servation and anti-pollution policies.

But most of these were put in hand before the ecological panic started. Once ecology became a fashionable good cause, as it did in the late 1960s, reason, logic and propor tion flew out of the window. It be came a campaign not against pollu tion, but against growth itself, and especially against free enterprise growth-totali tarian Communist growth was somehow less morally offensive. I beg those of you who have not already read it to get a copy of Professor Wilfred Beckerman's In Defence of Economic Growth. Bec kerman is one of the best of our economists, and was a member of the Royal Commission on Environ mental Pollution; he knows the sub ject better perhaps than any other working economist and his book is a wonderfully sane and lucid sum mary of the entire subject. Substitutes for Religion I have never yet been able to per suade any committed ecology cam paigner even to look at this book. Of course not. They have a faith, and they do not want to risk it. One of the most important developments of our time (I would argue) is the growth, as a consequence of the rapid decline of Christianity, of ir rationalist substitutes for it. These are not necessarily religious, or even quasi-religious. Often they are pseudoscientific in form, as for in stance the weird philosophy of.the late Teilhard de Chardin. The ecol ogy panic is another example. It is akin to the salvation panic of 16th 1979 HAS CAPITALISM A FUTURE? 55 century Calvinism. As I say in my book, when you expel the priest, you do not inaugurate the age of reason-you get the witchdoctor.

But whereas Calvinist salvation panic may have contributed to the rise of capitalism, the ecology panic could be the death of it. If the restrictions now imposed on industrial development had operated in 18th century England, the indus trial revolution could not have taken place. It would in effect have been inhibited by law-as of course many landowners of the day wished it to be-and in any event legal requirements would have elimi nated the very modest profits by which it originally financed itself. We would still be existing at 18th century living standards, and wal lowing in 18th century levels of pol lution, which were infinitely worse than anything we experience today-if you want to see what they were like, visit the slums of Calcutta or Djakarta. As it is, the ecology panic has been a potent destructive force. The panic mongers played a crucial role in persuading the Middle Eastern oil producers, especially Iran, to quad ruple the price of oil in the autumn of 1973, the biggest single blow in dustrial capitalism has suffered since the Wall Street crash of 1929.

That was the beginning of the pro found recession from which we have not yet emerged. In the end, as was foreseeable at the time, the huge rise in oil prices did not do anyone any good, least of all the oil produc ers. But it ended the great postwar boom and robbed Western capital ism of its tremendous elan, perhaps for good. As Browning put it, ((Never glad confident morning again." And it is significant that the ecological lobby is now striving desperately with fanatic vigor and persistence, to prevent the development of nu clear energy, allegedly on the grounds of safety. Nuclear Power Now it is a fact, a very remarkable fact in my view, that throughout the West (we have no figures for Russia or China) the nuclear power indus try is the only industry, the only industry, which over 30 years has contrived to avoid a single fatal in dustrial accident. Its record is unique, and has been achieved by the efforts of the industry itself, and the responsible governments, with~ out any assistance from the ecolobby. But of course they would like a few fatal accidents. That would suit their purposes very well.

In Britain recently, we had a long, public enquiry, what we call a statutory enquiry, into whether or not it was right togo ahead with the enriched uranium plant at Windscale. The enquiry was a model of its kind. The ecolobby marshalled all the scientific experts and evi56 THE FREEMAN January dence they could lay their hands on. At the end the verdict was that there was no reason whatever why the program should not proceed. Did the ecolobby accept the verdict? On the contrary. They immediately or ganised a mass demonstration, and are planning various legal and .. il legal activities to halt the program by force. Now it is notable that a leading figure in this campaign is the man who is perhaps Britain's leading Communist trade unionist, Mr. Arthur Scargill of the Mine workers. He has never, so far as we know, campaigned against Soviet nuclear programs, peaceful or otherwise. But the mass of the movement, in the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, so far as I have been able to observe, is not politically motivated. They are sim ply irrational: but irrationality is an enemy of civilised society, and it can be, and is being exploited by the politically interested.

The Growth of Government A third factor in the future of capitalism is the growth of govern ment. Let me put it this way. Indus trial capitalism, or rather the free enterprise economy, and Big Gov ernment, are natural and probably irreconcilable enemies. It is no acci dent that the industrial revolution took place in late 18th century Eng land. It was a period of minimum government. Of all the periods of English history, indeed of European history, it was the time when gov ernment was least conspicuous and active. It was the age, very short alas, of the Night Watchman state. As a matter of fact, the industrial revolution-perhaps the most im portant single event in human history-seems to have occurred without the English government even noticing. By the time they did it was too late; happily-otherwise they would probably have stopped it. It is almost inevitable that government, particularly an active, interventionist government, should view free enterprise with a degree of hostility, since it constitutes a countervailing power in the state.

The tendency, then, is to cut free enterprise down to size, and this may be done in a number of ways. In the U.S. the characteristic tech.nique is government regulation and legal harassment, and this of course has been far more pervasive and strident since the ecolobby swung into action. In Britain the technique is both through direct as sault-nationalization-and slow starvation. In away, nationalization is ineffective, since it allows the public to make comparisons between the performance of the nationalized sector and that of the free sector nearly always to the latter's ad vantage. Starvation is more insidi ous. By this I mean the progressive transfer, by taxation and other gov1979 HAS CAPITALISM A FUTURE? 57 ernment policies, of resources from the private to the public sector. The Starvation Technique In 1955, for instance, public ex penditure in Britain as a proportion of GNP was just over forty per cent.

By 1975, twenty years later, it has risen to nearly sixty per cent. Moreover, this rise was accom panied by a record budget deficit of about 22 billion dollars, itself a further 11~% of GNP. Of course, the taxation had to be provided, and the deficit serviced, by the private sec tor. We have, then, an Old Man of the Sea relationship, in which the parasitical Old Man is growing big ger, and poor Sinbad smaller, all the time. The shrinking productive sec tor has to carry the burden of an ever-expanding loss-making public sector. Thus Britain's nationalized steel industry will lose one billion dollars this year, and it has just been authorized by statute to borrow up to seven billion dollars, guaranteed by government and taxpayer. Now the interesting thing is that in Britain the public sector, and the civil service, generally, are now pay ing higher wages, providing better conditions, and giving larger pensions-which in a growing num ber of cases are index -linked, and so inflation-proof-than the private sector can possibly afford. And of course they are financing these goodies out of tax-guaranteed deficits-that is, from the dwindling profits of the private sector. This is what I call the starvation technique.

When a private firm goes bust, pro vided it is big enough, the state takes over, the losses are added to the taxpayer's bill, and the private sector has one more expensive pas senger to carry. This is the starva tion method. Trade Union Disruption In this technique, the fourth fac tor, the trade unions, play an impor tant part. In Britain it is demon strably true that the legal privileges of the trade unions, which virtually exempt them from any kind of ac tion for damages (including, now, libel), lead directly to restrictive practices, over-manning, low pro ductivity, low investment, low wages and low profits. Thus trades union action tends, in itself, to undermine the performance of in dustrial capitalism as a wealth creating system. In Britain, for in stance, the trade unions can rightly claim that capitalism is inefficient, because they make sure it is ineffi cient. Ford workers in Britain, using exactly the same assembly line machinery as in West Germany, produce between 20% and 50% fewer automobiles. leI chemicals, one of the best companies in Britain, nevertheless has a productivity per formance 25% lower than its Dutch and German competitors. A recent 58 THE FREEMAN January analysis shows this is entirely due to over-manning and restrictive prac tices.

The private sector is now threat ened by two further union devices: the legally-enforced closed shop, which compels the workforce to join designated unions on pain of dismis sal without compensation or legal redress; and new plans to force firms to appoint up to 50% worker direc tors, these worker directors to be appointed not by the work force themselves, nor even necessarily from among them, but by and from the trade union bureaucracy (Bul lock Report). This has to be seen against the explicit policy of some groups within the unions of driving private sector firms to bankruptcy, by strikes and harassment, so that the state will then have to take them into the public sector. Follow the Leader? Of course I don't want to make your flesh creep by arguing that what is happening in Britain will necessarily happen elsewhere. But certainly if the bill now before the Senate giving unions much wider and more effective powers to or ganize goes through, the U.S. will be well launched on the road we have travelled; and I may say there are many other ways in which the pres ent U.S. administration seemed de termined to follow Britain's exam ple. The West Germans, too, are now beginning to adopt some of the in stitutions which flourish in British trades unionism, notably the shop stewards' movement. Businessmen all over the free world may despise the performance of British industry, but trades unionists all over the world admire and envy the power of British trades unionists and are ac tively seeking to acquire it for them selves.

The Communist Threat Let me end on a word ofwaming. I have said nothing of the fifth threat on industrial capitalism and the free enterprise system-the threat from without. But of course this is bound to increase as the military superior ity of the Soviet Union over the U.S. is reinforced. I have never thought that the Communist system would triumph by a direct assault. I have always assumed that it would first establish an overwhelming military predominance and then, by.pressure and threats, begin to draw the polit ical and economic dividends of it. If the U.S. opts out of the competitive arms race with the Soviet Union, while providing, as she supposes, merely for her own defence, then we must expect to see this fifth threat hard at work winding up industrial capitalism and free enterprise all over the world. Thus, when we ask HAS CAPI TALISM A FUTURE? I answer: it all depends on the U.S. West Ger1979 HAS CAPITALISM A FUTURE? 59 many and Japan, it is true, have strong free enterprise economies; they also have a tradition of state capitalism, and would adapt them selves with surprising speed and readiness to a new collective order.

France already has a huge public sector and a long tradition of di rigisme or etatisme. All three are Janus-faced. Britain, I believe, is profoundly anti-collective and will remain so if it continues to be given the choice. But its private enterprise system is now very weak, and its business and financial elites are demoralised and defeatist. Is there demoralisation, is there defeatism, on this side of the Atlan tic? You can answer that question better than I can. I myself think that capitalism will survive, because of its enormous intrinsic virtues as a system for generating wealth, and promoting freedom. But those who man and control it must stop apologizing and go onto the ideologi cal offensive. They must show to ordinary people that both the Com munist world, and the third world, are parasitical upon industrial capi talism for their growth technology. That without capitalism, the 200 years of unprecedented growth which have created the modern world, would gradually come to an end. We would have slow growth, then nil growth, then minus growth; and then the Malthusian catas trophe.

In short, those who wish to main tain the capitalist system must en deavour to teach the world a little history, and remind it, and espe cially the young, that though man's achievements are great they are never as solid as they look. If man makes the wrong choice, there is always another Dark Age waiting for him round the corner of time. , IDEAS ON LIBERTY A Self-Sustaining Population A SYSTEM for the support of indigent persons in the United States was never contemplated by the authors of the Constitution; nor can any good reason be advanced why, as a permanent establishment, it should be founded for one class or color of our people more than another. Pend ing the war many refugees and freedmen received support from the Government, but it was never intended that they should thenceforth be fed, clothed, educated, and sheltered by the United States. The idea on which the slaves were assisted to freedom was that on becoming free they would be a self-sustaining population. Any legislation that shall imply that they are not expected to attain a self-sustaining condition must have a tendency injurious alike to their character and their prospects.

ANDREW JOHNSON A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN In Defense of States' Rights STATES' RIGHTS are usually associ ated with the name of Thomas J ef ferson, who distrusted the centraliz ing tendencies that eventually put his favored yeoman farmer at the mercy of big cities. But Jefferson himself, when he was entrusted with the presidency of the newly federated republic, did more to hurt his doctrine than he did to help it. The whole story is encrusted with a tremendous irony-and there were two Virginians of Jefferson's day who caught the irony even as the drama was being played out. One of the mordantly skeptical Virginians was John Randolph of Roanoke; the other was John Taylor of Caroline. Randolph is the subject of Russell Kirk's John Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in American Politics, which has just been issued in a new edition 60 with an enlarged appendices collec tion of letters and speeches. Taylor, a slightly less acidulous figure than Randolph, is treated as tt a Virginia Cato" in a short but pertinent bio graphical introduction provided by M. E. Bradford for a new edition of Taylor's Arator.