CONCERNING THE BEAUTIFUL.

The New Freewoman: No. 6, Vol. 1, September 1st 1913.

by Dora Marsden

TO read the history of the "Idea of the Beautiful" is the best known way of destroying respect for philosophy. It is so revealing of the manner in which philosophers have been wont to "put in their time." Apparently, sweat does not rise to the brow of thinkers of the aesthetic philosopher's level. It may be however that instinctively they felt there was no advance to be made along a track which was a circle: that speeding on was equivalent to hastening back. However that may be, definitions of "Beauty" have made no advance-those of artists no more than those of wayfaring men. The reason is clear-the repeated tale true of almost the entire field of philosophic inquiry. An effect is put up as a cause; from the supposed cause, a quality is supposedly abstracted; the supposed abstraction given a sturdy name and then set free to roam the thin atmosphere of thoughts. Once fairly on the wing, the philosophers are violently taken with the desire to catch up with it again: they want to find out of what it is made. Being made of "nothing and a name" it has the best possible chance in the world of being elusive, and prolonging the hunt. Beauty is one of the thought-birds created in this wise and set roving. The story of the hunt is the history of the science of aesthetics.

We need therefore scarcely pause to deny objective reality to "Beauty." A name which has to hunt for its connotation is obviously before its time. Names are to be bestowed only as in Christian baptism, with the recipient waiting on the spot. The inquiry sets, therefore, not towards finding out what is the essence of Beauty, but what we mean when we say that such and such a thing appears beautiful to us. We require to know what a beautiful effect is, and this we learn by analysing what happens to us when a thing strikes us as being beautiful. The effect ofthe beautiful is mainly that of "repose," of entering into possession of the self, of one's soul, whose scattered members under its influence come together like white-winged birds softly folding in home. It is as healing as sleep and as quiet-not for the eyes that are tired but for the spirit which looks through them. Like scatterbrain child, that has been decently laid to rest, fed, clean, forgiven and good, the "beautiful" reconciles us with ourself, part with part. Usually we realise its presence unawares as if subconsciously, the soul lay in wait for it, ready to respond should its opportunity appear. Apparently this is what actually does take place. The soul has a sense for what we call the "beautiful" which has been evolved out of the soul's need of the experience involved in it.

This feeling for the beautiful has its origin in a need of the soul analagous to hunger in the bodily mechanism. The soul apparently has wants whose satisfactions are essential to its growth. Growth physically is expressed in increasing extent, size. Growth in the soul is expressed in increasing consistency, power of holding together, integration as a separate individualised unit. Therefore the condition of want in the SOUL which corresponds to hunger in the body, is disparateness. Its satisfaction is the achieving of unity. Likewise, just as for the body any chemical combination which is found by an empiric experience to remove the hunger is called a food, so any geometrical and physical combinations which overcome disparateness in the soul is its food. Both are the required satisfactions, that is, in these connections they are not ends in themselves, but dependent upon the relative and variable needs which they subserve. As the intrinsic feature of food is merely that it feeds, i.e., that it can be used up in satisfaction of a need, so in the case of what we call the "beautiful," it is anything which overcomes disparateness in the soul, now being one thing, now another. Sometimes the same thing will fairly regularly answer to the purpose. Sometimes not. All depends upon the specific character of the need. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever," sang Keats. Not so at all. All that which has authoritatively been termed "beautiful" may fail the purpose as likely as not, Grecian urns and all things beautiful, and Greek.

It has been very commonly noted how large a part symmetry plays in what usually serves as the "beautiful." It has been regularly laid down that in symmetry there lay abiding intrinsic merit, and that in the understanding of its "genius" here if anywhere, the soul of Beauty would be found. Closer scrutiny however does not seem to bear out such a view. Symmetry serves, because it is the antidote of the asymmetrical, with which experience is so packed. When experience is otherwise, as when life is monotonous, and of an unvarying "symmetry," the "beautiful" is found in the asymmetrical, for monotony too appears to "thin out" the substance of the soul. Accordingly, when reckoning up the ingredients of "Beauty," the philosophers have found themselves compelled to add "variety" as part and parcel of what is necessary, and alongside these, unity and harmony.

It is of no great profit to catalogue the variety of things which will serve to achieve the effect of the beautiful. It is not necessary to go through the inventory of a grocer's store to indicate foods. It is enough to say that food is what feeds: what satisfies a want. What will feed we find out by a purely empiric experience. The first art of the process in the achieving of this emotional satisfaction lies in the focussing of the emotion, which the "beautiful" does, not so much by attaching it to a fixed point as by drawing it into a coherent whole. The fulness of the response, the sense of answering with one's entire soul to the stimulus is a natural sequence. This accounts for the placing of "unity" among the stock ingredients of "Beauty." It explains the origin of the repulsion of "taste" to ostentation, excessive ornament, to every attempt to achieve the "beautiful" by herding together a collection of "beauties." The over accentuation of a stimulus destroys that which it is the sole meaning of the "beautiful" to effect, the unifying of the emotional force. This explains why one star in the heavens appears more beautiful than a myriad, one rose than a cluster, one jewel than a blaze.

The unity-character of the "beautiful" is first effected in the soul, and by it mirrored back upon the "object" whose accidental appearance has been enabled to satisfy the soul's need. Likewise with harmony. The test whether a thing will appear beautiful will turn, not upon the question of whether it is harmonious in itself, but upon the fact of its being able to harmonise the spirit of the one who is beholding it. Thus there is nothing intrinsically "beautiful" just as there is nothing which is intrinsically a "food." The South Sea Islander (perhaps we are unjust to the South Sea Islands) is not worried with the thought whether or no the missionary is intrinsically a good food. His only concern is to settle a question of fact, to wit, whether the missionary will suit his particular digestion. Thus the verdict whether anything is "beautiful" turns upon the condition of being satisfied, effected in the spirit of the beholder. It relates to a fact and not to a thought, a distinction which accounts for the stubborness of the instinct which has maintained itself that some how the "beautiful" was bound up with the religious sense. The religious man, apart from his "religion," is one who feels that he is a soul, a separate emotional entity, and that in some way the charge is upon him to maintain this as such, and secure its permanence. He feels that his states of emotion are bound together and each affects the character of the whole. To be religious, is to have the perception of a separate life, in which there is cohesion-a "present" bound together with an "after" and "before." Perception suggests perhaps too strong and clear an emotion. "Feel" is nearer. The strengthening of this groping feel for the achievement of the oneness and permanence of the soul into a clear perception of its nature, is the line of development from the mindless savage to a Christ, in whom the perception of having achieved the power to retain the permanent individual character of the self becomes clear. This is the meaning of the instinctive apprehension of immortality, as a like apprehension of the possibility of the wearing-down or binding-together of the soul, lies behind the sensing of the "evil" and "good." Very naturally therefore, strongly "religious-sensed" individuals have been loth to abandon the services of the "beautiful," in spite of the fact that most of that which is called Beauty, has effects all to the contrary of those of the simply "beautiful." The sense for it as a necessity of the soul has remained, as the feeling for food would remain even though the only food available were ill-nourishing or poisonous.

There is one other-and somewhat humorous-character which the philosophers have added to the ingredients necessary in the "Beauty" confection. A thing to be beautiful, they say, must bear such a quality as will make the onlookers' attitude towards it impersonal, undesirous of possession. It must allay any desire for personal gain in connection with it, any desire to derive profit from it. It should inhibit desire; homage being rendered to it as "Beauty in itself." As a matter of common observation however the effect of the "beautiful" is seen to be quite other. The human soul, which is never disinterested, devours it entire. It yields all and demands nothing. The impersonal disinterestedness of one under the spell of the "beautiful" is comparable to that of a hungry man who is dining well, towards the paraphernalia used in serving him. He is not ordinarily inclined to pocket the spoons. He is getting (for the moment) all that he needs, and "enough is as good as a feast."

It is clear that since the effect of the "Beautiful" is sensed-not thought-after the manner in which we sense the effects of putting a hand in ice-cold water or on a hot oven, effects which belong primarily to a thought-process must be eliminated from the category of the "beautiful": all those effects "beautiful because of association" for instance: which shrinks the area of the "beautiful" to very inconsiderable dimensions. As a matter of fact the unmixed sensation of the "beautiful" falls into the experience only of the very virile and very simple souls. It is almost out of the reach of the ordinarily "cultured," who manage however to extract a fairly pleasant if exhaustive experience from the various brands of associative "beautiful" (so-called), of which we will here touch upon the three main-the sublime, the picturesque and the seductive.

The sublime, the intellect-tainted substitute for the "beautiful" which takes first rank in dignity if not in popular affection, usually has as its solid substratum one of the "stock forms of beauty," that is, a form which is held to be traditionally potent to produce the pure (i.e., free from thought), effect of the "beautiful." But thereto is added a characteristic hostile to the effecting, of the "beautiful," in the removing of limitations, which of necessity destroys the possibility of focussing--a main feature in the sensing of the "beautiful." Thus, for instance, to the symmetrical, is added the illimitable progression of symmetrical order, possible only when there exists the intellectual notion of illimitable space. The immensities in nature, the vast stretches of space in the heavens, the thought of illimitable time, the reign of infinite law, the absolute, the all, these are the thought elements which constitute the "sublime."

Its appreciation carries with it a very considerable amount of pleasure, due in part to the quietness which is necessary to its suggestion, but mainly due to flattered vanity. The mind infected with the suggestion of the sublime, is pleased to imagine that when it lays on the little thought-labels it is measuring, handling, "dealing with" the Immense. Nor does a little pensive after thought of quasi-humility springing from the consciousness that in spite of this comprehension of vastness it still remains very incomprehensible, detract from the pleasure. It rather adds that delicate touch of melancholy beloved of the thought beridden. And more than all, there goes with it, the "vertigo of thoughts" which in its presence are able to swoon from one incomprehensible to another. This explains why in comparatively healthy minds the sublime and the absurd are twined. The sublime is so packed with preposterous unreality that the mind feels itself hitched up with a position of extreme inequilibrium, a pose as uncomfortable as the intellectually-cricked neck attitude which is its outward visible counter part. This swift-following sense of the ludicrous, appears to be due to a kind of inherent weighting of the mind towards fact and actuality, and the faintest touch of the actual will put into operation the sudden slide: the transit from the sublime to the absurd-from the unstable to the stable. It is the suddenness and swiftness of this movement which gives rise to the gasp of pleasurable surprise which is the charm of the comic. The down ward sweep of a swinging-boat would be a fair analogy to its effect in a physical medium. Nothing could be further from repose than the sublime, and its distance from repose measures its distance from the "beautiful."

The picturesque is an even more patently obvious, intellectualised beauty-fake. As its name suggests, it is that which takes on the cast of the stock picture form. It is the natural, interpreted in terms of the made-up. The kind of picture-form which gives its character to the picturesque is the one that tells a story, the romantic. The picturesqueness of "ruins" lies in these latter's associations with "glory": armies, empires, kings, knights, warfare, deeds of derring do: tales which have the glamour of the remote. This is the picturesque of "glory." Further there is the domestically picturesque, the associated love-interest. The marble steps and sheltered fountains, the shepherdesses with crooks and high heels, stiles, country lanes and gardens, moonlit landscapes- these things are saturated with the associations of love in its best traditional manner, meetings, partings, tears, sighs, Dorothy Vernons, et hoc genus omne. To suggest the romantic story is the character of the picturesque. The third intellectual fake which sports the plume of the "beautiful" is the seductive, the associated sex-interest. This is the semblance of the "beautiful" which has become the criterion of masculine judgment of "Beauty" in women. It has of course nothing whatever to do with "the beautiful"; it is merely the evidence of a suitability in the objective means to a definite objective end. It is soft, alluring, provocative, amenable. The cannibal finds a like suitability, though for other ends, in the soft pink cheek of the gospeller. Many men have been at pains to prove that "mind" destroys the "Beauty" of women. It appears inevitable. Women do not find "Beauty" in men: but they find other things very serviceable to them. It is doubtful indeed, whether the effect of the "beautiful" as distinct from the intellectualised fiction "beauty" is likely to be obtained from the human form, except perhaps in thc face of an almost totally non-self-conscious child, or in the faded peacefullness which sometimes is found in the faces of old people. The human countenance, even when dull, is too distracting to produce the effect of the "beautiful." Its interest serves purposes other than those of the "beautiful." This fact possibly accounts for the failure, after unlimited output of effort, of artists to produce a satisfying "Madonna." If her countenance succeeds in expressing the calm of the beautiful, with it, it also sadly suggests the bovine. If on the other hand it retains some human animation, it forthwith becomes invested with suggestions which it is not the supposed purpose of the Madonna-cult to arouse.

If we are right in defining the "beautiful" in terms only of the thing it does, to wit, restoring coherence, oneness and composure to the soul; and right too in declaring that these things are the effects it accomplishes, it follows that these plays upon associations with the "at-one-time-beautiful" media, are not merely inadequate; their effects tend in a contrary direction. The intellectual malaise connected with the sublime, the sentimental melancholy of the picturesque, the quickened desires which are the effects of the seductive, tend to dispersal rather than to cohesion. They may have their contribution to make to the soul's need. The casting forth of the seed is as necessary as the reaping of the grain; but for the "beautiful" its function lies in the reaping. Its work is to rally the soul into complete self-possession after being scattered by experience. The inquiry is a subtle and delicate one: necessarily so, since it is concerned with the motions of spirit, but it is not so delicate as to be baffling; for we carry the sense for its apprehending within us. The "taste" for it may be cultivated, but only individually, with discrimination working from within. As the epicure can cultivate the fine edge of the palate for food, so a man should be able to cultivate an infallible taste for the "beautiful for himself," separating it unerringly from that which presents itself with an intellectual taint. As for a standard of taste, it is difficult to understand how there could be one. If we have the courage of them, our tastes are fundamental. Men are divided according to their differences of taste as they are united by their similarities. But they have not the deciding of what these shall be. What a man's tastes are, is his heritage from his past; the character of his ego. How he deals with them here and now is his present contribution to his future.

VIEWS AND COMMENTS.

The New Freewoman: No. 6, Vol. 1, September 1st 1913.

by Dora Marsden

"We are freeborn men, and wherever we look we see ourselves made servants of egoists. Are we therefore to become egoists too? Heaven forbid! We want rather to make egoists impossible. We want to make them all 'ragamuffins'; all of us must have nothing, that 'all may have.' So say the Socialists."

Thus Stirner, more than half a century ago, in the most powerful work that has ever emerged from a single human mind. The quotation comes very pat to-day, when "ragamuffin" has become-as Stirner prophesied it would-a term of respect. The ragamuffin is the person who is devoid of property and also who has no objections to so being. He is the ideal citizen, the pattern in whose presence the defective property-owning ones feel themselves rightly under reproach. The nobler among these latter are merely hesitating in their choice of the best means of divesting themselves of their property that they may become ragamuffins too, when they will have become good citizens- no longer a menace to the equal authority of the State. This is not irony: it is the description of an actual process. Slowly, all persons are consenting to be divested of their real property: the noble, by request; the less noble, by "arrangement." Real property, land, the State can easily obtain by arrangement, i.e. by buying it at the modest market price (oh, shades of Norman William) of good linoleum. The method by which the State may acquire too, the token of property, money, has not as yet been precisely fixed up, but doubtless will be so quite satisfactorily in due order of time.

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Readers of THE NEW FREEWOMAN Will be well aware that it is not necessary to remind us that men own property even when deprived of all external property such as land and working tools: in themselves to wit, in their powers of limb and brain. We have already made that position clear. We had hoped that we had made it equally clear that there was no hope of having control over these personal powers unless external property were possessed also; that they must perforce be used up in working and benefiting the external property of someone else. It makes no manner of difference whether this "someone else" is the state, a corporation, guild, or a private employer. The propertyless person is in the power of those who retain the property, and is a "wage-slave," no matter how loudly he denounces wage-slavery. How easily persons of intelligence will "catch on" to a phrase whose significance they wholly fail to grasp is well illustrated by the argument which the "New Age" offers in reply to THE NEW FREEWOMAN's analysis of its attitude. It says:

"The 'New Age' advises men wage-slaves to acquire property-but the means are clear, and the use to be made of the property afterwards has likewise been defined. The ' property ' the proletariat must acquire is a monopoly of their own labour between the workmen and the state."

There, one can recognise the true "ragamuffin" spirit. Not liking the name of being propertyless, they yet so love the thing that they make it the foundation-stone of their new Utopia of the "national guild." Their "property" is to be not "land," a definite posession, which they can use as they please, but a "monopoly of their own labour power," a specious phrase worth the trouble of analysing. Let us look at it. "The monopoly of one's own labour-power," the power of one's own limbs that is. Well, we have the monopoly already. No one else can use the power of our limbs; the meanest retains in himself that power intact. True, most of us do not possess much of our own whereon to expend it, but that is because we have no external property of our own, not because of the fact that we have not the "monopoly of our own labour-power." Presumably, therefore, what the phrase says is not what it means. Let us worry further into it, into the practical meaning of "monopoly of one's own labour-power." This monopoly is not what one usually means by that term. To establish a monopoly ordinarily, means to defend one's own sole possession of a thing from attack on the part of those who do not possess it. Monopolies are effective only where there is a limited supply of the thing possessed. Labour-power is not a limited commodity of this kind. Save for a very few disabled, labour-power is universally spread among all the children of the earth. It is impossible therefore to establish (save in the labour of genius) a monopoly of labour-power, and likewise impossible to attempt to defend, anything of this nature. What then does this acquiring of a monopoly of labour-power, which is to be carried through by the guilds, mean? If it cannot be a war of defence, it must be a war of aggression. This is exactly what it turns out to be. It is an attempt to lay an embargo upon the exercising of the labour-power possessed by those outside the guild, a very frank attempt to establish a tyranny. The beginnings of it, are already quite plainly in evidence in the attacks on so-called "free labour" by the modern Trade Unions. Just as the cry of militant trade-unionism is "Into the Union or starve," the motto of the guild socialists is "Into the guild or starve." Moreover, as the advocates of guild socialism propose vesting all properties, land, mines railways and the like in the hands of the "State," access to the "use" of these properties can only be effected through a "partnership between workmen and the State"; so that not the guild only, but the full weight of the State-two organisations the story of whose moulding of tyrannical power into a finished art composes the major part of history-stand between the individual and his bodily maintainence. They constitute, one imagines, two fairly high hurdles for him to take before he can begin to enjoy the "monopoly of his own labour-power," which is the supposed objective of the enthusiastic guild-socialist.

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It is not to be supposed that because the facts laid bare above are true that we imagine they are welcome. No characteristic of civilised man cuts deeper than that of the ragamuffin. Most men and women desire to prove ragamuffinism to be the right thing because they hate the thought of its alternative. Quite the last thing they desire is to be independent, when independence means in the first place labour, and in the second place, responsibility; and widely extended individual ownership entails both. The same commentary on THE NEW FREEWOMAN's creed in the periodical to which we have referred, makes the following summary of our position:

"Power means ownership; a woman is worth just what she owns; this ownership must be of something external to her self; the alternative is to sell her sex in the slave market; since this is fashioned, the new freewoman must acquire property to become free. How women are to acquire external property; or what they are to do with it when they have acquired it the writer does not say. She has, it is true, conclusively proved that women are a form of proletariat, and, in this way, in the same box with industrial wage-slaves."

There follows the comment:

"Her adoption of the proletariat solution for the problem of women is surely unreflecting. What natural monopoly have women besides their sex? If THE NEW FREEWOMAN will not allow women to utilise their sex-monopoly as a means of power, their remaining qualities are worth nothing. To parallel (the "New Age") solution of the wage system, THE NEW FREEWOMAN ought not to adopt it identically, but to apply it; and the application is surely this, that women should create a guild monopoly of their sex, and utilise it to force a partnership between themselves and men: the Guilds for men and Marriage for women."

The words we have italicised give a typical example of the naive helplessness of the civilised, faced with a primitive problem. Who is THE NEW FREEWOMAN that it may say how women will acquire property. It can easily say how they will not get it: but how they will, can only be proved by the issue. The most than can be said is that it must be in one of the three traditional ways, by buying, begging, or thieving. Whether it can be acquired at all will depend upon women's measure, the possession of that power which they say they have, and which we are prepared to believe in immediately if they show signs of setting about using it. When they have acquired it, to say what they would need to do with it is easy: be prepared to defend the possession of it, and like old-time women to labour on it. Those are the two fundamental requirements which possessions make upon owners. As modern Mexican history is proving, the rifle and the plough go together in the independent simple life, and a stout heart is needed besides.

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There is nothing to be gained by glancing obliquely at the labour problems of civilisation. The main difficulty of the matter is that the softness of civilisation takes the pugnacious energy out of women and men. Faced with the rigours of nature, they have not the audacious pertinacity of more primitive peoples. The great mass of men are only too glad to creep under the sheltering arm of the few who prove relatively daring, no matter on what ignominious terms of dependence, rather than face the task of justifying their existence by maintaining it. They feel safer, herded together, all mutually responsible, and none wholly responsible. The line which civilised communities take to naturally, is that of the least exertion. This line also marks the road to ruin. We begin to wonder therefore, concerning the amount of dash and verve even in the "overmen." If we take the liberty of referring to the commercial side of this journal, we beg that there be considered in excuse our interest in the project. In an advertisement addressed to "Overmen" which appears on the outer cover of this journal there is an appeal made to:

"brave men and women to take part in an Expedition of Discovery and Colonisation. The object of the Expedition is to found a Free State, outside the territories of the Moneylenders trading as Christendom (alias the Concert of Europe, alias the British Empire, alias the American People, &c., &c., &c.), wherein Art, Science and Literature will not be subject to the control of the British Board of Film Censors and the Labour Party."

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We must not neglect to follow to its finish the out at-elbows creed of our ragamuffinarian contemporary. THE NEW FREEWOMAN ought "to apply it," to wit, the guild-doctrine that "women should create a guild monopoly of their sex, and utilise it to force a partner ship between themselves and men; Guilds for men, Marriage for women." We have to confess to having arrived about one thousand years too late to do anything original in this line. The women have really shown skilled minds in the business. The existing marriage-trade-union offers monumental testimony to their thoroughness. Nor are they satisfied with great gains; they move onwards to completion as to an ideal. Nine-tenths probably of the numerical suffrage strength would consist of women who are looking forward to the possession of voting rights for no other reason than to protect in one form or other the marriage-monopoly. Strange to say, the guild-socialists do not appear to view this consummation of a cherished ideal with special joy. In an inordinately lengthy review of a trifling book written for maidens of sixteen in the "Won't you join the cause" stage, containing certain wild dabs at contradictory theories, the staff-reviewer manages to make clear that the Suffragists have grasped the Marriage-guild possibilities with a comprehensiveness which should give guild-socialists points. Why he should pursue the author, Mrs. Philip Snowden, with the distinctly baleful tone of "NOW, now I've found you out," it is difficult to tell, for the only thing that exists to be found out is a genuine enthusiasm for the cause of a complete sex monopoly.

This monopoly also, like the trade guild is of the "embargo" variety. It is not a defence of something already possessed, it is an attempt on a truly Napoleonic scale to coerce others into suppressing an activity hostile to the maintenance of the authority of the guild. It is a comprehensive organisation of sex activity; in the interests of the married, i.e., guild woman. The power of the vote, in the name of purity and morals, is to be used to stem the copious leakage of sex satisfaction now obtained outside the guild. Gathering from different sources the various tendencies towards this end may be grouped under two heads: the punitive tendency, if a man is reluctant to come into line; and once in, oppressive measures for raising charges. The contemplated persecution is of the kind which Miss Christabel Pankhurst has in view- when she says, quite honestly to her own mind, "Give us the vote and we will end prostitution; give us the vote and we will stamp out venereal disease." She means that given the vote, women will establish so complete an espionage, will so increase the severity of the punishment for certain offences, will so make financial responsibility fall upon men outside marriage as well as in, that marriage by comparison will be a cheaper way out. These measures, added to the fact that she thinks votes will raise women's wages, she concludes will eliminate prostitution. They are in the interests of the marriage-guild as affected by law.

Mrs. Snowden shows how these interests can be forwarded by social convention. Should men, these pains and penalties notwithstanding, "hold themselves free to indulge in vice," they are to suffer social ostracism. They are to be refused admission to the privacy of the home. Should they still hold out, the law must again assert itself and discriminate against them financially. Such a measure is on the point of being carried into effect in France. If, succumbing to persecution, men are "forced into partnership" and marriage, they are to be met with a steadily rising scale of charges, partners' maintenance, children's maintenance, and from any lapse from "faithfulness" the charges and responsibilities arising out of the liaison (the Suffragists will see to this last). Add to this a legal claim upon men's incomes, and a complete control of all sex relations inside marriage ("the equality in sex-relations for which the collective (!) sense of women yearns must be yielded to them," according to Mrs. Snowden), and it becomes fairly clear that for guild-women the guild-monopoly of their sex will have become absolute-a quite natural development of the guild-monopoly theory. It is the "embargo" spirit triumphant: the ragamuffin established in authority: the "have-nots" in power. Thus shall we be when "all of us must have nothing that all may have."