.

The major contribution of the United States to world history has been its written constitutions.

The concept of liberty has often been identified with this country, but that concept has one which had evolved slowly through several generations. It was alive and kicking long before the nation was founded.

The birthplace of liberty was in England, the courageous acts of such figures as Martin Luther and Benedict Spinoza not withstanding. The Magna Carta could be considered its moment of conception, there being no absolutes in analogy. The first feeble kicks in England's belly were to be felt down through centuries of history.

The placenta probably broke in 1640 and the first breath was drawn in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

So liberty was born on another continent, and it has fallen America's lot to rear the child.

We could not have done it without the written constitutions. They were our accomplishment and ours alone. They made liberty stick. They have made possible world sociological and economic advances without match, and they remain the world's best hope for further progress.

Constitutional change comes slowly, but it endures, and America now has one of the oldest unbroken governments in the world.

The very concept of a written constitution is of more recent origin than one might expect. Rousseau's Social Contract, as late as 1762, was considered "revolutionary."

It has been suggested that the Mayflower Compact, drawn up aboard ship, was the first governing document written and adopted through the authority of those who were to be governed.

The early colonial charters were a forerunner. Connecticut's Fundamental Orders, written in 1638, were a more comprehensive code adopted by a self-governing people, although they existed in the shadow of continuing English claims that were not fully resolved until long afterwards.

Prof. Homer Hockett in his Constitutional History of the United States, says, "It fell to the lot of John Locke, however, justifying the Revolution of 1688, to give the compact theory the statement which best satisfied the triumphant parliamentary party."

We will be talking again about Locke and his ideas on "life, liberty and property." It is generally felt that his was the greatest single influence on the framing and the content of our written constitutions.

Locke thought of the compact as the "highest authority, once it had been agreed upon." By entering into the compact the individual surrendered the right of self-help, which Locke saw as a part of his natural liberty, in return for the protection by the government of the more precious rights of life, liberty and security of property.

The justice that comes with the recognition of the world's common rights to the fruits of the earth belongs at this highest level, and is not secure until enough of the "governed" understand the idea clearly enough to put it there.

There have been written codes of law before, of course, and they have lent stability to civilization so long as they have held together. The fall of both Greece and Rome can be traced to a gradual disregard for those fundamental codes, as the roots of power have shifted; and it is of particular interest to us that both civilizations fell as a direct result of a disregard for provisions guarding justice in land.

The codes of Moses (1,500 B.C.?), Lycurgus (900 B.C.?), Solon (600 B.C.?) and Licinius (300 B.C.?) all recognize the common rights of the world to a fair share in the earth.

But none of these codes can be considered a social contract in that they were imposed by their authors on the strength of some higher authority. Moses rested his case on divine inspiration. The Greeks and the Roman on wisdom, together with a measure of political muscle.

It was much more recently that the few pioneer thinkers began to claim that the only "natural" source of authority was with the people.

England had a constitution but it was not written. It did, of course, evolve painfully during the gestation period of liberty, but it did not come to grips with title to the earth.

The constitution came into being, giving us the outline of a bill of rights, in a period marked by the worst assaults on individual human dignity ever made using land title as the instrument of force. It seems ironic that the enclosures went ahead without influencing the unwritten constitution, at the very time the struggle for political liberty was starting us toward a bill of rights.

But there is a reason for that seeming inconsistency and we will examine it later.

The first full-blown written constitution which went into effect only thr6ugh direct vote of the people came during the spring of 1780 -- in Massachusetts, I am sorry to say.

I take a parochial interest in it, because New Hampshire's first written constitution came earlier, drawn up in the year-end holiday season of 1775-76, after the Continental Congress had given its express permission for such a constitution to be written in my state.

It was adopted, however, by the provincial legislature and never went to the people. It was intended as a temporary agreement to see us through the war.

Samuel Eliot Morison has suggested that New Hampshire's permanent constitution, adopted by the people in 1784 after three earlier versions had been voted down, may in fact be the first one validly adopted by the people. He claims that Massachusetts' basic agreement never got the full support of the people, and was declared in effect by the legislature after some finagling with the voter returns. We started writing before our neighboring state, but the writers found the people more difficult to satisfy.

But all of that is nit picking. Who cares about a year or two, one way or the other?

There is nothing to be gained in challenging this statement by Prof. Andrew C. McLaughlin in his presidential address before the American Historical Association in 1914:

"If I were called upon to select a single fact or enterprise which more nearly than any other single thing embraced the significance of the American Revolution, I should select -- not Saratoga nor the French Alliance, or even the Declaration of Independence -- I should choose the formation of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, and I should do so because that constitution rested upon the fully developed convention, the greatest institution of government which America has produced, the institution which answered, in itself, the problem of how men could make governments of their own free will."

It was nine years later that the federal constitution came along.

It is important for our purposes here to note that none of the American constitutions dealt at all with the relationship between world and earth. They include no hint of man's common rights to the planet, and they use the word "property" without clear definition.

We have to ask why.

If we are to consider the hope of getting justice in land equity into the constitutions, we ought first to consider why it was not there to start with.

Since Locke was a major influence on the original writers, it seems strange that there is no qualification of the key word, "property."

Locke understood the ethical basis of property and spells it out in his Two Treatises on Civil Government, published in 1690. It is interesting to us that Henry George's basis for "property" is virtually identical with that of Locke: Since one has an inherent claim to himself, by that very fact he has a claim to whatever he may create.

The line was not drawn absolutely in Locke's discussion, "Of Property," however, and he was willing to allow private property in that amount of land which any man could use.

There were two influences apparent. Locke was living and writing in England when the agricultural revolution was just getting underway, and it would have been impossible on common lands. Individual inventiveness in husbandry, such as that of Jethro Tull, needed individual title to at least some small parcel of land.

It is evident, too, that Locke was aware of the early reports coming back from the new colonies. He reasons: "The fruit or venison which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no enclosure, and is still a tenant in common, must be his…" His thinking is clearly conditioned by a circumstance of plenty, when justice in land is less sharply divisible.

Thomas Jefferson is possibly the clearest link between Locke and the constitutions. He admitted an influence on his choice of words for the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson's identification with tillers of the soil is generally understood, and it is not reasonable to expect him to have seen clearly the relationship between land (or site) values and people in the industrial cities.

He seems to have accepted not only Locke1s ethical basis for property, but the philosopher's concession to private ownership in those cases where land was aplenty. When he drafted a constitution for Virginia in 1776, he made land ownership a qualification for suffrage, but he would have had lands granted from the public domain to all adult males.

Jefferson had no part in the writing of the federal constitution, however, being at that time our ambassador to France.

George Washington was president of the convention, and few of our early leaders is any more clearly associated with land than he. Benjamin Franklin was the elderly "dean" of the convention.

An insight into land speculation as a factor in the framing of our constitutions is to be found in this passage which occurs in a paper on The Yazoo Land Companies, written by Prof. Charles Haskins of the University of Wisconsin in 1891 -- not long after the publication of Progress and Poverty.

"The spirit of speculation in land was a prominent characteristic of the United States at the close of the last century. Although the Crown had received frequent petitions for land grants in the West, there was little westward migration until the time of the Revolution. Then the number of emigrants, the cheapness of the lands, and the lack of an established system of sale in small quantities offered many inducements for the formation of great land companies whose opportunities for speculation were increased by the depreciated currency and the general ignorance concerning the west. So strong did the spirit of speculation become that in 1796 an English traveller would say: 'Were I to characterize the United States, it would be by the appellation of the land of speculation.' In spite of its exaggeration this assertion contained much truth. 'All I am now worth was gained by speculation in land,' wrote Timothy Pickering (then about to become Secretary of State under President John Adams) in the same year, and many eminent men could have said the same, often with a later experience quite similar. Land speculation involved Washington, Franklin, Gallatin, Patrick Henry, Robert Morris and James Wilson, as well as many less widely known."

The Yazoo land frauds themselves, the Minnesota Land Bill, the 20 million-acre Michigan territory scheme, and (of particular interest to me) New Hampshire's colonial governor Benning Wentworth, all of whom grew fat on land speculation … all those appalling things help establish the climate in which our constitutions were written.

The federal constitution failed to come to grips with slavery because some of its writers were slave-holders or sympathetic to the idea, but at least they were balanced off by true libertarians in the North. The convention was at least divided on the issue.

The fact that they failed to come to grips with property in land (as opposed to property in human beings) is easily understood, there being no dissension on the matter, so far as I have been able to discover. Land speculation had yet to work its greatest evils on America and, with "land enough for everyone," it simply did not exist as an issue.

The claim that our constitutions -- particularly the federal document which pulled a nation together -- are "miracle" is, in my judgement, valid, despite the fact they represented so many compromises.

They were a tremendous stride forward for the human race, and the fact that they were not perfect is not enough to diminish them to being less than miraculous.

If we are to criticize the writers for failing to get land justice into the constitution, we might at least look at the question of where it belongs.

Were we to be writing the constitutions now, where would we put the land statement?

It belongs in one of two places: Either in the bill of rights, or in the phrases which set forth the fundamental purposes as protection of "life, liberty and property."

The Declaration of Independence, which sets forth the "certain unalienable rights" as its basis, goes on to speak of life and liberty, but veers off from Locke at that point to the "pursuit of happiness." New Hampshirels constitution, I am pleased to say, goes more directly to the matter1 It starts out with a Bill of Rights, the first article of which insists that "All men are born equally free and independent,?: and the second of which lists the 11certain natural, essential and inherent ri~ts~ as follows: "Among which are, the enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing, and protecting, property; and, in a word, of seeking and obtaining happiness."

It does not, however, and I am sorry to say it, qualify the word "property," although it reveals an even greater influence by Locke than does our federal compact.

The agreement worked out miraculously by Washington, Franklin and the others did not even include a Bill of Rights in its original draft. That came later, in the first session of Congress, and then only through the nagging of Madison, encouraged by a measure of outrage voiced during the several state conventions in which it was adopted.

The preamble sets forth a collection of platitudes, and neither rights nor property is even mentioned.

When the Bill of Rights was finally written, it drew heavily on the English experience and, it will be remembered, justice in land was never conceded there.

It is not until the fifth article, in fact, that the Bill of Rights even gets around to property, and then only in a list of legal rights and processes: "Nor be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law."

The "miracle" of the constitutions is to be seen in the fact that they are still relevant, pertinent and even vibrant today.

We as a nation have come through a crisis in which the constitution was tested as never before. Freedom of the press was the instrument whereby the truth about Watergate was finally established. A presidential transition was made necessary, provided for in the compact, and successfully carried out.

Of the fundamental rights Locke listed, and that New Hampshire's constitution admits, life comes first.

The right to live was no hollow guarantee 200 years ago, but surprisingly there are issues which still remain to be resolved, and on which our constitutions must be made more specific. When does life begin? When does it end? There is real and pressing constitutional division right now in the abortion controversy (the "right to life") and in such specific cases as the Karen Quinlan dilemma.

Our concern for "cruel and unusual punishment," for an example, where shifts in value are still being made, is another example of current vitality.

America's major struggle through the past 200 years has centered around that second "natural" right, and the first of two great constitutional compromises: Liberty.

New Hampshire's insistence that "All men are born equally free and independent" ruled out slavery from the start, but we insisted originally on religious and property qualifications as a basis for suffrage.

The federal constitution not only evaded slavery, but it made humanity a matter of fractions. Article One declares that "three fifths of all other persons" (meaning blacks and slaves) would be part of the formula for fairness in representation and taxation.

Slavery was a regional issue and it centered around state sovereignty, which is a legitimate issue on other grounds. A proper balance of powers between state and federal levels is essential if we are to recognize "heterogeneity" as an element in growth through natural selection. It is just as important as a balance of powers between the three branches of government.

It was abused, however, by its role in the struggle between slavery and universal humanity. The nation tried for 75 years to bring the concept into the constitution by agreement, and failed.

We went to war, and afterwards wrote the several amendments which include the fourteenth. It was another century before those amendments were implemented, and we are feeling the pain of struggle over liberty and universal humanity right now.

The nation, in other words, has been pushed to its limits since the constitution was written in correcting the original compromise on "liberty."

It is little wonder, therefor, that the equally important compromise on "property" should have been neglected.

It is interesting that Henry George seemed to see little relationship between his ideas and the constitutions.

He was sensitive to the Declaration of Independence, apparently, and his Fourth of July speech on liberty (99 years ago this summer, by the way) appears again, part of it virtually intact, in Progress and Poverty.

We find the Declaration in the index of his book. We find civilization, and government, and liberty; but no reference to the constitutions, whether singular or plural.

Isn't it strange that he failed to insist upon a better understanding of the word "property" as it appears in the fundamental agreements in the land, particularly since that word is so central?

The failure becomes even stranger when we consider that his definition of property could easily have been drawn from Locke. (Was it ever admitted to have been drawn from Locke? If so, I have missed the reference.)

The most direct path for land equity is probably through the Bill of Rights, effort made in New Hampshire during the Convention in 1974 to put it there.

The chief concern of its supporters, however, was not economic but environmental. We can look to help in the years ahead from those willing to admit equal rights to a respected environment, although environmental wisdom does not necessarily carry with it economic perception.

We can all expect, however, to run squarely into a pervasive and almost instinctual misunderstanding of the word "property."

The debate over Resolution No. 82, "Providing that all men are entitled to have their natural resources preserved and protected from wanton destruction, damage or impairment," was lost within three minutes, when the lead-off speaker in opposition said, "It strikes at the heart of private property rights."

The effect was electric, and I could see flushed faces all around the chamber that day, when I looked around at those delegates who benefit from private title to land.

There is a certain fire in the blood of any American when he speaks of private property, and his rights, and there ought to be.

We have our work cut out for us, in trying to establish that Georgism is essentially a manifestation of liberty.

The poet Robert Frost's parents were close friends of the George family in San Francisco, yet Frost himself years later dismissed George as a socialist. Wasn't Henry George similarly misunderstood by Pope Leo XIII?

The word "property" is, in my judgment, the heart of the matter, and the place to do battle.

There has been an interesting shift in our thinking since the constitutions were written, and much of it has been done since Progress and Poverty was published.

It does not jeopardize either the constitutions or the book, but it has to be taken into account if we are to keep our arguments on sound, and current grounds.

The change is in our basis for "natural" rights. Are they, in fact, natural? Where are they to be found in nature?

Socialism is probably a more natural organization in the animal kingdom than individualism, or capitalism, or whatever word you may choose. The ants are socialists.

The individual is a human invention, and a fairly recent invention at that.

It is helpful in understanding history to see it as the gradual working out by mankind of individuality.

Rousseau was a most interesting example of confusion on the direction of history. He started with the premise: "Man is born free, yet everywhere we see him in chains." The logical next step was that the world had to find a better way of organizing itself. He started from the wrong assumption that individualism was the point of beginning, or that man was initially free of tribal authority, and so saw socialism under a social contract which eliminated the individual as the way to go.

Robert Ardrey develops the interesting inconsistency between Rousseau's brilliance and his fundamental error in Ardrey's own book called The Social Contract, written 200 years after the Frenchman's. He uses recent discoveries by anthropologists to confirm his position, and in fact the new, emerging understanding of what is actually "natural" about the human animal forms the body of the book.

Locke's inaccuracy on the naturalness of rights had begun to be understood well before Ardrey, however, and Homer Hockett in the first volume of his Constitutional History of the United States said in 1939: "It has been an achievement of modern scholarship to discover that rights, instead of antedating society, have resulted from a gradual process of social creation.

Anthropologists have been able in recent years to establish several things about man's "nature."

We go back a million years or more as a distinct species, yet it was not until perhaps 20,000 years ago the individual began to emerge. We were through all those years tribal, monarchial and predatory. It is likely that our leaders were born, as "alpha fish" are determined naturally. We felt the territorial imperatives of which nationalism and xenophobia are remnants. Thus our "natural" leaders exercised a local authority which may well be the emotional root of private property in land -- or more exactly, in site -- and thus the reason all those flushed faces were to be seen when the words "private property" were invoked at Concord.

Man was the only animal, moreover, which picked up a weapon and destroyed his own kind. Government has all too often been the modern equivalent of that original weapon. It may account for the uneasiness some people are feeling these days as they watch Jimmy Carter's swift grasp of power. Government has long been the instrument whereby some men have wielded power over others; and the "liberty" of which we are so proud is really freedom from each other -- freedom from coercive behavior, legal more often than not, on the part of our fellow men.

So recent is the invention of the individual that the "gradual process of social creation" is still going on. We are concerned today with equal rights amendments, school busing, voting privileges at age 18.

The American constitutions, even ours in the northern states with their religious and economic qualifications, fell far short of universality. But they are the means whereby liberty is being given a broader base.

It would be helpful at this point, I think, to look at the world's recent invention: The human individual.

It was the long distance weapon -- the spear and the sling, the bow and arrow and later the firearm -- that made the individual possible.

The world was bound into tribes or clans so long as man, with his puny brain, was in direct contest with the stronger animals. The long distance weapon first made it possible for man to wander off into the jungle by himself.

(It is a particular personal satisfaction that the first place liberated man wandered was into the dark recesses of a cave, where he painted pictures of the fierce battles he had witnessed between man and bull. He saw fit to include showers of arrows in some of those pictures. Thus the first individual acts, or at least the earliest ones of which we have any written record, are aesthetically creative -- and they reveal an insight of which we must still stand in awe.)

The genius of the human individual has been his creative capability: Economic from the first cultivated seed through the agricultural revolution to computer technology. Each of the million creative breakthroughs has been individual.

We have the old saying: "No opera was ever written by a committee."

And that brings us to what is "natural" about individual rights.

They are not natural in themselves. They are man's own invention. But they are based on a gradually improved understanding of natural law and human behavior.

Thus Thomas Jefferson was not so far wrong after all in his phrase: "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The search for happiness has been a mainspring for human endeavor, and it is increasingly seen that happiness is no more nor less than the condition which results from the fullest possible realization of one's potential self. It is the measure of human fulfillment, and is therefore more properly an "end" of social organization than either liberty or property, which are not ends at all, but means.

It is not surprising that Henry George failed to relate the struggle for justice in land with the comprehensive "gradual process of social creation," or more exactly to relate it to the constitutional arena.

He deals with the evolutionary process in chapter four of Book VII, called "Private Property in Land Historically Considered."

He cites example after example to show that the earth has been considered "common property, in which the rights of all who had admitted rights were equal."

He fails to deal with the fact, however, that as rights became recognized for an increasingly broad base of people the emphasis had to be on privacy rather than on property.

The enclosure movement in England is a case in point. It was, indisputably, an enormous infringement of individual rights. It was even more barbaric and destructive than the legal assaults, first by kings and then by parliament (or the king's parley, to put it in the correct light) on the right of people to themselves, or personal liberty.

But had it not been for enclosure we would not have had the agricultural revolution.

The world first needed to establish the protected right of individuals to apply their creativeness to the earth, and it would scarcely have been possible without private title.

We had to have private title to land before we could have the circumstance for which Henry George found the needed answer.

The essential invention for which he must be given credit is not the common privilege of the world to the earth, but the simple mechanism whereby it could be done without jeopardizing the private title to a fair share of the earth's surface without which individuality would be meaningless.

He wrote movingly about man's inherent rights to a fair share, and compassionately about the injustice that follows when it is denied. He deserves honor for his eloquence, but not for any inventiveness in that respect.

Is any part of Progress and Poverty more moving in that respect than the famous speech of Tiberius Gracchus, who was really fighting the same battle we are fighting, but at a different time when neither individuality nor natural law was understood as it can be understood today. George saw fit to quote the speech, as Plutarch had done 2,000 years before.

The essence of Georgism is not really so simple as I once believed it to be, when I was mistaking the essential invention for the broad concept of justice that has been seen by so many thinkers since Moses, and possibly before.

It is a secondary mechanism, a refinement of a new idea, a device whereby the balance can be struck between social organization and individuality.

It will not soon be as clearly evident as "liberty" or "property" and it could not hope to find its way into our social contract until after the universality of individual rights has found a safe place there.

We will be helped in the years ahead by those who have a concern for "ecology" (a much-abused word, these days) and the security of the environment.

We will be helped in the years ahead, concern over the population explosion.

Henry George's insight in the area of population, and the demographic earth-world balance, is astonishing. His contradiction of Malthus is still unmatched, despite the fact that everybody and his brother is writing about it these days. I think it may turn out eventually to be as significant as his invention of the "single tax" mechanism.

He did not seem to see, however, that procreation is an instinctive manner in which human beings keep fighting for their rights to a place on the earth.

He argued compassionately for the plight of those who are denied a fair share in the fruits of the earth, but he did not warn us that The Blessed Meek will inherit the earth, one way or another. He based his case on justice, whereas it can as properly be based on self-preservation.

America's unique accomplishment in fashioning the first written constitutions ranks above George's invention of the single tax. It takes in more social progress. But there is nothing inconsistent in those two achievements … each part of the "gradual process" and each truly miraculous.

It has taken us nearly two centuries to repair one original defect in our constitutions. Henry George has given us the ingenuity with which to repair the other.

I see nothing discouraging in the fact that the job remains to be done.