No More Learning

And certain kinds of honesty have been known for 5000 years. Certain kinds of dishonesty are equally well recorded in history; and the capacity, anybody's capacity, for fooling all men ALL the time is, as Lincoln remarked, limited.
A considerable force, in some cases a force of inertia, has been espoused to my views, to my perceptions, to my patient collecting of data, ever since I had any views, or perceptions, or started collecting data. I have in the main been confined to papers of very small circulation, but not invariably. As I can not AT ALL count on the present hearers, if there are any present hearers, [not] having read a line of [my] writing I have, for the sake of clarity, to repeat things I have said before.
? Sometime the DATE at which I emitted my beliefs adds, or should add, a bit of weight or interest, to the fact shown, or the conviction presented. This is not in retrospect, but in prospect. If I had always been WRONG, as nine tenths of the people to whom you listen, I should have less cause to rake up old articles printed, or old statements made when I have been interviewed, now and again often by reporters who did not expect their copy to get past the editor's desk. New York Sun, April 21, 1939: "We don't think that much will be heard of it since many of the author's comments . . . aren't likely to get beyond the copy desks. "
Most of the lads kept their notes simply as curiosities . . . and so forth, referring to remarks by present speaker, my own conclusion being that an American newspaper can occasionally print something useful, but can very seldom do so TWICE. American editors and newspaper men having a perfectly well grounded terror of the power that rules by night, and strikes mercilessly at the pocket. I did, however, suggest, and it is in print in the files of several N. Y. papers, that there was on April 21, 1939 a group of people in America trying to get a war started, there were people doing so. Mr. Wallace, now Vice President, in a definition of the Democratic body of faith, started off with demanding action based on the will of the majority AFTER the people have had an opportunity to inform themselves of the real facts. Mebbe he has changed his view since 1938, when his book was printed? The real facts about British bank agents in America, Mr. Ikleheimer, etc. , during the past 80 years have NOT been very amply revealed to the citizens. The real facts regarding the connection of at least ONE of Kuhn Loeb's directors, with the British Intelligence Service have not, so far as I know, had the publicity they deserve.
One of the Roosevelt cabinet, in 1939, asked me where I thought the link was? I told him. Mr. Dies hadn't been quite as diligent in looking into the activities of British financial agents in the U. S. as some of his own committee would at that date seem to have wished. What opportunity has the people had to get information regarding gold purchase by
? Morgenthau's department? What facts of American history are widely available? Not only of past eight years' sins against the whole people, but of the record of the past 80 or 100 years? Munitioneers? Speculations in war material? Speculation in other materials made scarce by diversion of work FROM sane activities in production [? ] of food and clothing to war material.
WAR IS THE MAXIMUM SABOTAGE. Nothing so helps the creators of artificial scarcity as a condition wherein goods are rapidly destroyed without doing direct good to ANYONE. There seems today to be at least an audible minority of people who think NOW, as I did in 1939, that some group or groups of interested persons in the U. S. desire and then desired war. My remarks on gold at that time seem to have a considerable confirmation within the past few weeks. In an interview printed on June 15th, 1939, I stated that "A war on Germany in our time would be a war against an honest concern of money. " I cited Schacht's remark about money issued against goods. I might have cited Mr. Zubly in one of the earliest sessions of the American Congress. I should be glad, I should be very glad indeed, if Mr. Wallace and his friends would get busy and give the people an ADEQUATE opportunity to inform themselves of the real facts. "Paths to Plenty," lovely little title for a booklet, but is your gasoline going to be rationed? I can't read you the whole of Wallace's booklet. What I don't make out is how, having written that booklet, Mr. Wallace has been got at--HAD in the interim-- and is now out yelling bloody murder ALL on the side of the loan sharks, the munitioneers, the despoilers of agriculture and murderers of the working man. And what the Sam Hill he thinks a ten years war would do toward attaining the very ideals he was preaching in Californy three years ago? He can't believe in the filthy hell of Geneva, he can't believe in the infamy of the League of Nations with its 20 year record of refusal to make ANY move toward social justice constantly working for the international swine and bleeders and scarcity makers, monopolists. Churchill and company represent usury they represent tyranny oppression, greed, unrestricted exploitation of humanity, by the most
? contemptible batch of egotists the world has seen in our time. Betrayers of their allies, public enemies of their own people. Suppressors in excelsis of those FACTS which Mr. Wallace was three years ago suggesting as necessary for majority opinion. Not even the wildest jungo denies that Churchill is a phenomenal liar. Not even that canting nark Halifax would sustain publicly that Churchill gives the poor deluded Britons the facts, or ever believed in ANY of the main points of Wallace's doctrine. The men with whom Wallace could agree are in Rome and in Berlin. They are not all of 'em in the limelight. They are DOING the things Wallace asks for. How the heck he has got over onto the other side of the fence needs some explaining.
A new order means a world where every man has the chance to work and GET PAID enough to feed and clothe at least four people, himself, wife, and two kids. Roosevelt's 10 million employed are men employed ONLY on condition that cannons are being made and goods sunk. They are NOT promises of a world ORDER. They are proof of the present DISORDER, based on Keynes, Baldwin, Salter, and all the other bleeders and liars who refuse to let facts into print.
#116 (1941) U. K. (20) TO ALBION
I have hesitated several months before asking Rome radio to let me speak TO England. I have been exercising my native right as an American to speak to my own compatriots, but I have not considered it suitable to meddle in the internal affairs of another country.
I did as much as the foreigner of good will could do, to keep you OUT of this war. I am convinced that every honest Englishman did likewise. I am convinced that the minority who got you into it are utter fools, but they are also that particularly unpleasant KIND of fool, the dishonest fool who thinks other men will be taken in by his inept trickery.
? For a decade or more, everyone NOT wholly blinded and hoodwinked has been remarking on the peculiar stink of your press, the mixture of dung and saccharin dished up each morning in your newspapers. Everyone not fed directly BY a putrid and decrepit system has been filled with an increasing DISesteem of your chief politicians, particularly with Baldwin, and in minor degree with his epigones. The various tricks whereby the British Empire has fleeced the world were already threadbare. The Rothschild trade espionage, etc. All old, all stinking, all decrepit, all worn out. Months ago I typed the draft of a radio talk, and destroyed it. I advised you to bump off Churchill before he bumped off all the rest of you.
That appeared to be out of order. It was not my place to advise civic violence in a foreign country, especially as it might cost some clean and decent young lad his life.
Still you had better get rid of Winston. Put him OUT. Get a few sane men into your government somehow.
I am speaking these words in PITY for the decent men left in England. Many of 'em saw Winston coming. Many of 'em prayed to God, or whatever else they invoke, to spare England the final calamity. Only a nation as moderate as Italy would allow me to speak over its radio in this vein and from these motives.
As to right and justice. Your unspeakable government of worn-out pantaloons and senile commedians has NO right to ask MY relative, decent young man from Montana to fight for the scum of the earth and slime of your millionaire ghetto. Sassoons, Beits, Sieffs, and their fellow Christians, the Astors, the owners of your lying and slimy news sheets. That I stand on and am ready to fight. If profiteers in America cheat you out of your eye teeth and betray you, it is no more than you as a nation have done to every one of your dupes and allies.
? You can not wipe out the past. You can not undo your lies, and your cheatings, and your pretenses, from the question of Danzig onward. But you CAN STOP. You can dissociate yourselves from the fools and knaves, who have made you ridiculous by their inefficient deceits, their caddishness to the French dupes, and so forth. You haven't, historically, a leg or a peg to stand on. You lied as to causes of war. You suppressed truth. But that had already become a habit, with your Mendes, Edens, Jecketts, your ape faced Beaverbrooks, and your stock jobbers. It all falls back on your own heads. Your island is being cleaned OUT, you're cattle slaughtered. "As barren as her deck. /My sons shall see the land I am leaving as barren as her deck," wrote the greatest of your living poets, Basil Buntin'. You have silenced your honest authors, or you have [flooded? ] out their speech with the sewers of Fleet Street. Your cranks have stopped their ears with cotton wool, and now it is too late to help it. You refused to hear your soldiers. You put aside all good council. You covered over the facts. A year, nine months, ten months, you can not go back on it.
Your Tommies have been sent to the slaughter. Your leaders have lied, and kept silent. The little cheats are no alternative for the big ones. You had better clean out the lot. I could have found you a better government when I was in London in 1939. I had even then the wild idea that I ought to try to TELL Chamberlain what he was headed for. I missed a phone call. It is probably BETTER for Europe that you were governed by fools, it is probably better for Europe that you cheated, and lied, and dragged in worse fools from Washington to settle the Balkans. But your government of idiots has probably served its turn and it has probably done all the good that it can do. And you had better get out from under, while there are still a few tons of beef left in England, and a few hens to lay eggs for your population.
I am of set purpose writing this a few weeks before speaking it. I wish to set down nothing in haste or in excitement. People who dislike you were saying months ago that, if the U. S. A. came into the war, so much the
? worse for England, as Japan would absorb American products, especially in munitions.
Few nations have ever made a worse showing that you have. France in 1870 did NOT drag down a half dozen innocent countries before her debacle. Twenty years of your reformers' warning were insufficient to turn you from infamy. Many of you do not YET know your sin; or the sin wherein you permitted your loathsome overlords to entangle you. All you can do is to LAY OFF IT.
Stop shooting Frenchmen, and flogging Hindoos. Stop trying to extend the war into still further regions. Lay off it, while there are still a few loaves of bread left in England.
In 1939 I said: in wartime one farmer is worth more than forty lenders of money.
As far as I can recall, no one in England would print that. Some day you may know it.
#117 (1941) U. K. (65) TWO PICTURES
On the 20th of November, two days after the anniversary of SANCTIONS (52 nations vs. Italy), I said to the couple at the next table: Would you say there was a difference of FEELING, I mean FEELING, not thought? I said, would you say there was a difference of FEELING in your country, difference in the way you FEEL about this war and about the last one?
I was in my humble caravansary, the Albergo Rapallo, and they were a pair of John Everyman. I should say PLAIN folk from Germany, of a bit less than my age, but well on, past the middle. The waiter had a try at
? making 'em understand octopus sauce, which is DElicious. I was havin' rice, with octopus sauce, little octopi, young and tender, and before the pair had come in, I had fished all visible bits of octopus out of my sauce dish so as not to lose any tidbits. However, my persuasions were to no avail, once they knew it was octopus. They had some other kind of sauce with their risotto. After that I put my question, saying I shall probably go to the microphone; can you tell me?
Then the lady said: Very . . . First place, sicher. We were using my broken German as medium of communication. First place, no worry about the outcome. And in the second, i. e. , in 1914 our old government MADE the war, started the war. This time our government did all it could to avoid it. It might be time to recall that even in England reliable parties admitted that Mussolini had done all any man could, to avoid an armed outbreak.
Whatever you still think were the facts, I report this conversation. It at least proves a point of view. None of your war muggers have, so far as I know, adduced any evidence to the contrary. There were doubts, fears, lies, but NO evidence. None of your spoutin' pets has ever lined up to a SINGLE ONE of my statements. Not for six years so far as I can remember. That goes back to before the war. And I have told you what Chamberlain's chance was, AFTER he staved off one war, and WHAT occurred in your dirty press within 48 hours, according to my lights, thereby dishing England's chance to regain her prestige. Chamberlain could have had a European triumph of prestige, and England could have jogged on for 40 years, and built up her own inner structure. Which is exactly what some folk figger out, the usury central DID NOT intend that she should do.
God knows I began noticin' cracks in that structure about as soon as I got to your island in 1908. And nobody has yet even accused me of ONE subversive act during the interval. I am still stickin' on with brother Gibbs in these monologues. It may take me a month to get thru with
? him. And nearly everything Gibbs openly loves is loved, I should say, more or less by most human beings. I say THINGS cause when he gits to PERSONS I differ. And I haven't yet wept pink tears at a coronation. I have observed certain dates, such as that on which W. S. Landor departed from England. I have observed that Landor wrote a poem to Andy Jackson, which puzzled me no end when I first read it. I have observed that Byron, Shelley, and Keats lived partly in Italy, NOT with the idea of being hauled up by a pair of counter jumpers like Percy Loraine and the late Lord Lloyd as national advertisements.
I have heard of an Earl of Oxford, I think it was, already farmin' out his rents in the time of Elizabeth.
Subversion was not invented in the days of Disraeli. I have told young Englishmen to read Cobbett. I have heard of Tories and WHIGS, and been told that Whigs were the fathers of Liberals. I got out of London slums, that is to say in 1908 I passed thru Islington; I spent seven days in Islington, and that was ENOUGH. I got into Kensington Church Yard, and during 12 years I took occasional bus rides, but I did NOT go slumming. And the term "distressed area" was not widely current till I had moved over to Paris. So I can't wring anyone's heart.
You got your own native born statisticians to tell you who is not fed. You got your own writers to tell you dole rots the morale of a nation.
My second picture is one Gibbs ought to like. Before my British demise, or whatever it's listed as, it was my privilege to go up a tower. That is, I went up stairs in a manor, where there are some I believe 14 century or thereabouts cloisters. And I crawled over the roof beams of an attic, and thence into the top of a tower, where they conserve a Charter, not Magna Charter, but I think it is Henry II's guarantee or confirmation of what John had pledged to the barons. And I believe her late Majesty Queen Mary, or one or the other, went over the same set of rafters about six weeks later.
? It's not my period, and some specialist in English history may correct me, but that is what I recall of the charter. It is the STATE of the manor that mattered to me as an observer of England. Some of the best pictures had been sold, the library was not in working order, there had been some restoration, about Walpole's time, I should imagine, but the ECONomic system of THAT time hadn't permitted FULL restoration. What had been done when England had far LESS money, was not to be done; and now the place, that OUGHT to have been a center of life, that would have housed 80 guests splendidly was as far from action as you might say Carcassonne or St. Bertrand de Cominges. Then, we drove some miles across country for tennis, and an amiable man explained to me how hound's feet ought to be formed.
I asked something about a hound in a sportin' print or perhaps it was a water color of the-- --sportin' print period, and he said the hound was, as I recall it, a bit long in the pasterns, if that is the word. And all of this, as far as it was ALIVE is, I suppose, what Sir P. Gibbs was upholdin' in his liberal way. In 1938 and before that. But as an economist, I say god damn, here you have the scene, you have the SHELL of the plant (to use a commercial term), you have the perfect setting. You have the OUTSIDE of the picture, and you go on from decade to decade, for hundred years or more years, eating the VITALITY out of it. And this is the work of the USURY system, you have done that with the adoration of PROFITS, you have done that with SLOP in your politics, and the JEWS have NOT saved you. Whatever they have done, they have not saved you and they have not helped you to SAVE IT. And by IT I mean all of your welfare. I mean all of your yeomanry. Jew Rothschild and his fellow Jew Goldsmid and his fellow Christian Baring have NOT helped you to save it.
And I now ask you and Sir Philip WHAT CAUSES that? I will leave one of the regular lecturers here in Rome to talk to you of slums that he knows better than I do. I will merely ask about a FEW rural scenes in England. What caused 'em? Or a few friends from the English country,
? or a landlord of my room in Church Walk, or some of the humbler GOOD people that I met at one time or another, who are the right sort of English, WHAT have THEY had from your system? Or takin' it a grade or two further up, when I was last over in London after a lapse of ten years, about the time Gibbs was writin' his book, a good poet motored me out to a suburb and looked at the shoestring building and said "Jerusalem in England's pleasant land" with FULL understanding of usury, and the dry rot and wet rot. And then went into the Army the minute this was got going, knowin' what started it, but wantin' his own hands clean from the beginning. What do these people, who are the BEST of England, expect from the union of Mr. Churchill and Mr. Gollancz's book club?
#118 (1941) U. S. [? ] QUISLING
Mr. Roosevelt seems determined that England shall not get out of this war alive, and that there shall be no end to the war until the English have been Dunkirk'd out of Cape Town and the Americans had a try at Dakar and the Azores.
It's a hard life, but we have an Italian proverb "chi la dura la vince" [he who holds out longest, wins]. Similar proverbs doubtless exist in other languages. But on the supposition that the war may end sometime, either before or after the collapse of Western civilization, in either case it will be necessary either to continue civilization or to start another, and Mis- INFOR MATION or policy based on ignorance is not recommendable for either purpose.
Several American publications have mentioned the UNWILLINGNESS of their political bigwigs to learn facts about Europe. If their editors are sincere in these expressions, it might be well to start on the case of Quisling. No man has had more mud and slime flung at him from the sewers of British newsprint.
? Mr. Roosevelt used up about ten pages of his twelve-page speech of May 27 with what might have been questions from the particularly low London Daily Mirror, from any issue printed during the past six or eight years. But at one point it appeared that he spoke not merely from prejudice (unconscious or other) but from plain ignorance. We ask what does he know of Quisling.
Norway, like other countries in 1936, had at least varieties of inhabitants. The lowest and vilest of human types represented by the international, and possibly non-aryan financier Hambro, an exploiter of the people, a money lender, who in time of crisis quite naturally fled the country, taking his bonds with him. This is to be expected whether these leeches are Jew or Gentile, whether they are millionaire socialists like Blum and Bullitt, or puppets or larger financiers.
And Norway had also men who wanted a better Europe. Now Italy has no debt to Mr. Quisling, but in the interests of truth and fair reporting we suggest that before America accepts an estimate of Mr. Quisling based wholly on reports from what might be called Harnbro sources and sources allied to Hambro, namely London Jewish and Aryan papers, controlled by Ellerman, Mend alias Melchett, Eden's friends, the Astors, et cetera, some one should go back and look at Quisling's plan for a north European federation, and then decide whether or not the real Quisling corresponds with the London distortion of Quisling. Quisling based his position on the belief that "an old world falls, a new is being born. " This is anathema to the unholy trinity Baruch-Roosevelt and Moses Sieff. NO conclusions drawn for a belief in or a desire for a better social order could bring favor from the Jew-Beaverbrook-Astor press.
Quisling not being in England, and not being dependent on British editors could not be starved directly, starvation being the financiers' FIRST and main mode of attack. There remained only vilification, and President Roosevelt is merely the last recruit to dirt-slingers emergency corps.
? SECONDLY: Quisling observed that the Jewish international had had some effect on the affairs of Soviet Russia. How unfortunate! What an error this would have been had Mr. Quisling wanted favorable publicity in the Sieff-Mond Guardian-Eflerman papers! !
THIRDLY: Quisling regarded the League of Nations with suspicion, thereby forfeiting the support of the Keyneses, Welleses, Streits, and other bootlicking agents of the Bank of International Settlements and its then Paris, and still London affiliates; in short by all these three positions, he dissociated himself from the Mandels, Blums and Stavitskys.
Quisling's position against Bolshevism was to him a position against "universal materialist republic under Jewish dictatorship," a position analogous to that taken by Finland. But Quisling owned, so far as it appears, no nickel mines, and therefore the publicity controlled by "Anglo-Canadian nickel (alias, Melchett, etc. ) would hardly give him a "build up" in "Time" or other Jewish-owned American organs. At the time of Sanctions, Quisling's party was for Norwegian neutrality. This of course showed the cloven-hoof from the Morgenthau point of view. Quisling was and is, however a Norwegian and judged the matter in its relation to Norway's interest. His movement however took NO sides. He was worried by the Soviet participation in the League of Nations and by the Jewish factor in Russian politics. It annoyed him that the lives of people IN NORWAY were dominated by foreign policy and not by home politics.
The idea that the citizens of a country should consider their INTERNAL affairs does, of course, render Quisling incompatible with the Roosevelt way of life; but even so it was scarcely high treason on Quisling's part to observe the 1936 situation IN Norway. Quisling was capable of the magnificent axiom: "The influence of a state in foreign politics always corresponds to the degree of development of its INTERNAL strength. "
? How unlike the Roosevelt technique of raising hysteria, both for personal and national use. In fact Quisling advocated autarchy, rather than GRABarchy. Autarchy for Norway, and co-operation BY Norway and foreign states. He saw Czechoslovakia bucked by international Jews. He saw the Brito-yitto attempt to encircle Germany was provocative of unpleasant tension. AND he observed the GE-O-GRaphic position of his own country in case of Germano-Russian unpleasantness. "Norway, the cross-roads between Russia, Germany and England. "
BUT he did NOT turn against England, as the British Jews would have wished him to. He saw a RUSSIAN attempt to use Norway in a flank attack on Germany AND on England, and advocated a union of Norway with ENGLAND and Germany. A nordic world federation. Why do WE in Italy mention this?
Quisling was not pro-Mussolini, the Axis was not yet in being. Contrary to the Edens and Churchills WE in ITALY do not believe that continual lies about everyone will help to a new and better world order.
QUISLING considered that peace between England and Germany was vital to Norway. Therefore the Beaverbrook and hog press have for the past four years denounced him as a traitor to Norway. Which is what we expect from Lord Beaverbrook, Sieff, and the Astors, and why the prestige of the British press has during the past years notably declined on the continent of Europe, in Asia and in South America, though apparently NOT in the Morgenthau circle.
To Quisling, "peace and conciliation between Germany and England" was the one way in which Norway could escape from war and chaos. With no tenderness for the Latins, Quisling went beyond this conciliation of Germany and England and wanted a Nordic federation containing these two great powers, plus the Scandinavian countries, plus Holland and Flanders.
? OBVIOUSLY such a union would not have been as advantageous to Italy as the Axis. However it is not the Rome end of the Axis which is demanding Quisling's head. It is our opponents who have done their utmost to turn his name into a common verb and make him a synonym for anti-national activity whenever and wherever.
OBVIOUSLY Quisling's plan would have been to the benefit of the English. They would not have lost so many American bases, nor would our position in the Mediterranean have been, by that plan, at all improved. We might still be where we were in 1937. What is absolutely and uncontestably apparent is that Mr. QUISLING'S OWN country would not have suffered invasion, and this from the patriot's view is of chief importance. The present war would probably not have occurred. At any rate it could not have started as an Anglo-German conflagration.
In any case, what is ABSOLUTELY incontestable is that Norway would not have been invaded; and this from Mr. Quisling's point of view, that is from the patriot view, must be considered as important.
History will possibly decide whether Quisling's attempts to avert war or the efforts of Kuhn-Loeb and Co. , and the yitto-brito financial agents IN the United States to get the war started, and of their American colleagues, half-breeds Bullitts, et cetera to GET the war started, that the American effort to START war in Europe, in order to pick Europe's pocket, and ultimate[ly] to drive the American people into the shambles will have proved to the advantage of England.
At any rate, as indicated in our brief earlier comment on the Quisling paragraph in Roosevelt's speech of May 27th, we believe Roosevelt's allusion to Quisling was due, as are so many of the President's outbursts, to his reading the positively, the WORST type of newsprint, until it obscures his world outlook.
? To sum up, Quisling's plan might have averted war. It would in any case have kept war out of Norway. Hence the abuse of Quisling in the usurocrat, monopolistic, mercantilist press both Jew and Gentile. But the heads of states should not be wholly subservient to the lowest and yellowest papers.
#119 (1943) U. S. (14) PHILOLOGY
I have mentioned Brooks Adams in these talks? I hope I have mentioned his name often enough for it to have sunk in. I know of no better introduction to American history or the understanding of the historical process than Brook Adams' two volumes, Law of Civilization and Decay and The New Empire.
Of course you need collateral readin', other history books, general history of the U. S. No better introduction than Woodward's. Can't trust it at all points but will give you an outline. Unjust to Van Buren and the Adamses but clearly intended to be fair and not a mere smoke screen.
D. R. Dewey's Financial History. Lot of facts, doubt if student ever remembers any of 'em. No key, no clue, nothing in the whole book to help the reader understand "what it is all about. " Nacherly it is THE standard work in the universities. Universities for the past 80 years, increasingly for past 50 or 40, have inculcated respect for lucre. Adoration of money grabbing, bred taste for luxury, called standard of livin', above what student is likely to attain, and told him the great man was the man who got MONEY, no matter how. Religion fadin'; religion, church buildin', a branch of the real estate business. All churches mortgaged. Church buildin', a means to get community groups to borrow money.
Pete Larranaga, Gold Glut and Government, tells you something. Kitson a bad writer in many ways, piles up obstacles for the reader, possibly
? knew more than any of 'em. Even Woodward does NOT give the clue. He gives some clues but not the debt clue. In course of long desultory readin', the FIRST book I ever struck that would lead the student to an understandin' of the whole historical process in the U. S. was Overholser, in 64 pages, published by Honest Money Founders of Chicago, now I hear; at least they would know where to find it.
Doc. Ames, H. V. , at University of Pennsylvania, in 1902 was already gettin' interested in reconstruction. The "Tragic Era" as C. Bowers calls it, period after the Civil War. But he hadn't got down to the debt component. And without study of debt and usury NO history of the U. S. can be written save as a smoke screen, consciously or unconsciously. I don't mean that historians haven't written with intention of tellin' the story, of writing true history, but those that did mainly had NOT found the clue, the pattern in the carpet. And don't run away with the idea that I told you Brooks Adams was the last will and testament of God Almighty. His books are merely, as far as I know, the best introduction. It is written from a mercantile position, with amazin' lucidity and power of synthesis, as you can see if you compare 'em with some of his very rare followers who have written BEFORE having so thoroughly digested their data.
I doubt if you will understand the full imbecility, the absolute squalor of the Knox-Roosevelt (F. D. Roosevelt) Baruch administration till you have read Brooks Adams. He writes about trade routes, the dislocation of trade routes, the FLOP of empires consequent on the dislocation or loss of trade routes. What Frankie and kikie have DONE to you NOW. No author can get the whole history of mankind into one book, or two books. The spectacular drama of history has, let us say, been consequent on the shift of the trade routes, caused by new discoveries of minerals, caused by magnetic compass, or new modes of transport, sometimes ruined by excess charges of administration, such as usury, and false accountancy, false accountancy having corroded all Mr. Adams' nice mercantile systems, though he don't put his main emphasis on that
? component. Wars rise from commercial competition, BUT to have that competition, down under it is the production, production system.
That is what Brooks Adams was not writing about. God knows he had enough to write about. Enough history that hadn't been sorted out in men's minds, in ANY man's mind. Over and above the books I have mentioned at the start of this talk are the actual papers of statesmen. John Adams and Van Buren and so on. Woodward suggests that the explanation of the Adams family is to be found in glandular secretions. I would say mebbe it was due to John Adams, the founder of the line, gettin' spliced to Abigail Quincy, that might explain some of that problem. However, one point that Brooks Adams more or less passes by is noted by Woodward and will do to fill in the chink of the story. Just to keep from introducin' Europe, and foreign systems, topics on which you run ravin' mad out of prejudice. Will you note that John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay worked out in theory what was called the AMERICAN system? Meaning that the U S was to be self supportin'. At a time when there was one party, [the] idea was broached that all sections of the country were to be harmonized, North East to develop manufacturing, supported by protective tariff to keep out European competition; and that the industrial towns would provide a market for the agricultural products of the West and South; and the rural sections would provide customers for goods produced by the factories. Nothing in it that is not plain commonsense. Of course most American prosperity rose from the application of those ideas, partial application. But still the good life in America has been due to 'em.
Well now Europe has GOT that idea. There is nothing fancy or new about THAT idea. It is just horse sense and intelligence. BUT it don't produce war.