The New Sovereigntists: No. 4

On the Two Replacement Instruments

Against the Financialist Architecture

Empire and Importation

To our people—from the old heart in England, through Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, to Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa: wherever this tongue still keeps a stone and a ledger.

We are looking for an invasion. We should be looking at the names on the rental rolls.

You know the square. The stone. The names. The hall with the ledger. Look at it now another way. The square itself was laid by hands that meant to stay. The buildings around it—the church, the hall, the shops, the houses—are generations of work in timber and brick and stone. Beyond them the town. Beyond the town the countryside that fed it: fields, hedges, barns, mills, roads cut to market. None of that arrived with the paper. It was raised by the names on the stone, over lives the ledger once recorded as owners. Of those names, how many still own the acre their fathers held? How many now rent the house their people built? How many are gone from the ledger altogether—neither owner nor renter—while a firm that has never seen the town holds the paper, and a foreigner lives in the house those generations raised?

That last state is the invasion this number is about. It did not arrive as an army. It arrived as names on a rental roll, and as a lender who never stood on the acre and never will. The work of building and creating is done. What stands is what those generations already raised. The work that remains is not theirs. It is the Financialists’: a mass of debt that can never be paid and is never meant to be paid, only serviced. Refuse the service long enough and the deputy comes. Refuse the deputy and the gun comes. Most days the gun stays holstered, because the threat is enough. A people held to that service, generation after generation, are not a nation that happens to owe. They are held in a debtors’ prison of their own unwitting making.

Here is the argument, stated plainly before it is proved. A public debt arranged never to be paid off does not go away. It is built as the nation is built, and it grows as the empire grows. It is serviced from taxes on land, houses, wages, and trade, collected from someone who is actually there. When the builders have been taxed, indebted, and sent to war until there are not enough of them left to carry it, the men who hold the paper do not write it off. They restock. There are only two ways. The first is empire: take other lands and other peoples, and make them pay. The second is importation: bring the remainder of those peoples into the core, to stand on the ground, pay the rents, and be counted. Those are the two debt as sovereign servicing instruments.

Four things must be plain before any of the history can mean anything: what the debt is; how the prison is walked; who lives by keeping it; and why it needs bodies on the ground.

First, the debt. I call it the book, and I mean by it more than the national paper. I mean every funded claim that does not die with the man who signed it. The bonds of the Treasury, and of the state, the county, the town, and the school district. The paper of the corporation, which it never means to retire, only to carry as much as the market will bear. Funded means arranged never to be paid off, only carried. The public wing is serviced from the tax—on the acre and on everything the acre yields and holds, and by the registrations, the fees, and every other levy the code can name. That take pays the payrolls, promotions, and pensions of the men who enforce and manage the claim. The private wing is serviced from rents and from the consumption of goods. The fortunes on the exchanges are that corporate paper marked to a price. They are the firm’s wing of the same unpayable mass. Our money itself is created against the public paper in turn paid for by the private paper. Pay either debt off and the money has nothing behind it; let the book shrink and the men paid from its tax go unpaid, and the price marked on the exchanges falls with it. So the double book cannot shrink. It must be fed, at every scale. The take that feeds the public wing must climb. The rents and the purchases that feed the private wing must not be allowed to fail. Against this a self-sufficient parish that keeps its own surplus, owes no one, pays no rent, and buys little of what the monopoly sells is the enemy of that climb must be denied. Every must in the rest of this number follows from that one fact.

Second, how the prison is walked. It is never built on a people who have nothing. It begins with a people capable of building trust of mutual benefice and an empty ground. They clear it. They raise a house, a church, a mill, a hall, a road to market. They make surplus and keep it, and they owe no one. That surplus is the only material this kind of early initial great claim can be laid on, because a debt can be serviced only by those who can actually produce and hold. So the book is seated on their first great surplus, and it is seated on a war’s bill—in England between 1688 and 1694, in America in 1790 and 1791.

Then the nation is built, and the book is built with it. Roads, canals, and railways are raised on bonds and charters; wars and depressions of consolidation leave debts that outlive the men who fought and lived them; the nation’s money is issued against the nation’s debt. Each stage looks like the making of a country, and each is also another layer of claim on the parish. The builders raise the walls of their captivity with their own surplus and their own sons.

The firm goes the same way as the nation. The shops, mills, and companies our people built are bought up into larger companies, or destroyed, and the larger companies grow into monopolies. A monopoly's shares are priced high because nothing competes with it, and it borrows vast sums against that price. Like the public debt, that debt is never meant to be paid off, and it is serviced by the same people: from their wages as its workers and their purchases as its customers. War is the racket Smedley Butler named when he said he had spent his career as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. The state's force, raised and paid for on the public book, is sent to enforce the private book's claims: the concession held, the market opened, the loan collected. The public wing supplies the force; the private wing holds the assets it protects. They are not different methods. They are one method, run through a treasury and a finance department at once.

Then empire. The same people go abroad and build there what they created at home, and asset values on the rim climb because they are there. The book grows as the empire grows: a temporary new wing of the prison on every rim taken, and a new stream of credits and guarantees carried abroad on the parish’s tax. Nor is the rim only acres. It is markets, and corporate paper grows as those markets grow, as inputs are assured at ever lower cost. None of this relieves the people at home. It is the prison built outward.

Then the debt is large enough that the pasture no longer pays what it costs to hold, and the empire is not lost so much as released. The gate that faced out is turned in, and what had been taken on the rim is walked home as people, fetched to occupy the core. The flood is not only a renter for the tax and the house; it is a buyer of the products or services of the firm that cannot be allowed to shrink its debt—one motion, two collections, rent and purchase. That is importation, and it is meant to last as many generations as the paper can still be collected. There is no fourth fuel. When the replacement can no longer service what the builders serviced, the host fails, and the civilization that hosted the book fails with it. That walk—parish, nation, empire, release, flood, collapse—is the building and lifecycle of the prison. The two instruments are but the middle of the walk.

None of it is either accidental or incidental. The first great loan to the new English center—twelve hundred thousand pounds, lent by the subscribers of the Bank of England in 1694 in return for its charter—was not to be repaid while the charter stood. It was a standing claim on the tax of Englishmen not yet born. Perpetual paper of that kind stayed on the British books for nearly three centuries. When the Treasury redeemed the last of the undated gilts in 2015—stock whose lineage ran back through Gladstone’s consolidation of 1853 to the South Sea Company—it paid by issuing other paper. The American seating said the same thing in its author’s own hand. In 1781 Hamilton wrote that a national debt, if not excessive, would be a powerful cement of our union. The debt was meant to bind. It was meant to last. It was built to hold a people in place so they could be collected from as they built and defended their own debtor’s prison.

Third, who keeps it. A prison has an administration. Look at where the great fortunes of the English-speaking world were made, and the far greater part of them were made on a monopoly the state granted, or on a monopoly the state protected while it was being built: the bank holding the sole right of issue, the railway handed its right-of-way and a public domain, the dealers placed first in line at every auction of the Treasury’s paper. The men whose fortunes are the capital markets live by the corporation’s paper the way those first men lived by the charter. These men are not the people inside; their income is the book. They hold the paper, run the houses the paper passes through, and draw the grants the paper pays for. What a parish pays in years, they receive as income. Ask such a class to close the book and you ask it to close its own estate. It has no impetus to end what feeds it. It has every impetus, now that the heritage stock is nearly used up, to evolve it: a lesser inmate subsidized by the book itself, a longer service, the same walls.

The Jeffersonians saw the walls going up. In December of 1787, reading the new Constitution in Paris, Jefferson wrote to Madison that it lacked a bill of rights providing, among its other guarantees, a restriction against monopolies. The restriction was never written. John Taylor of Caroline named the class that would live by paper and patronage. And in 1816, writing to Samuel Kercheval, Jefferson set down where the road ended. We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt, he wrote. If we run into such debts that we must be taxed in our meat and our drink, our necessaries and our comforts, our labors and our amusements, our people must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of them to the government for its debts, and obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers. The fore horse of that team, he wrote, is public debt. He was not guessing. He was describing England, and the men who stood with him were Englishmen, Scots, Welsh, and Irish whose families had lived under that team for generations, had watched the common fenced and the harvest taxed before it was in, and had crossed an ocean to be out from under it. They knew the walk because their fathers and grandfathers had been walked. That is the truth of it, described by men who had left it once and watched it begin again. The hands that began it had, only a few years before, been the hands of their fellow rebels.

Fourth, why the book needs bodies on the ground. A claim written in a courthouse is a traveling thing. It can be sold, pledged, bundled, and sent across an ocean, and the men who live by such claims live anywhere. But a debt secured on land is collected from whoever is on the land. The deed can be sold in London; the sheriff still has to find a man on the acre to tax, evict, bond, or count. Roman law had a word for possession as distinct from title—possessio—and the requirement behind the word never went away. It is in force wherever a deputy serves a writ. For in Roman law a claim on ground is good only against someone standing on it. And ground is held by anyone standing on it who cannot be removed. That may be a man holding his own, able to keep others off. Or it may be a foreign renter paying rents to a foreign owner, whom the courts and the badge protect.

That last distinction is the hinge of this number, so take it slowly. The book needs someone on the acre who will stay there to be collected from. It does not need that someone to be able to refuse, and it does not need him to pay the rent out of his own hand. The rent may be taken from the state as a social provision, paid by the tax, which is to say paid by the book itself, enlarged by one more claim. The renter occupies, and the remaining stock services both his keep and the paper. The book needs both kinds, one after the other, and never the same man as both at once. A man who can hold his own will not stay held in place; before he can be made a renter, he must be stripped of the power to refuse. Here is why.

Take the first of those two. To write the book, and to make it good on ground across the sea, the lenders need a people who can take ground, build it up, and hold it by their own capacity and arms. Such a people is rare in the whole record, though not alone in it. There have been others before, and there are others now; the Russians and the Chinese are such peoples today, each holding its own ground and its own book, beyond the lenders' reach. How rare such peoples are is the question of the next essay. The people this series is written about are ours. It was with ours, and against ours, that the lenders built our prison, first at home, in the building of a nation. Then it was our people they sent across the sea to take ground, build it up, and hold it, so that the prison could be expanded with the empire. They needed us because a paper claim on a distant acre is worth nothing unless someone possesses it, and only a people of this kind can build, improve, and possess it at that distance and hold it for that long, and only while they keep the capacities to do it. That is why empire must be built on such a people.

But a people who can go from empty ground to an empire—who can build, improve, and hold by arms—can also refuse the collector by arms. That capacity is the same capacity. It is why they are a threat to the book, and not merely a fuel. The cry that belongs to such a people is the old one, Molon Labe: Come and take it. A stand of that kind, if it is real and not merely a slogan, is collective, costs the collector more than the taking would yield, and is handed down from father to son, so it can be neither broken one household at a time nor waited out. The lenders know this. They cannot leave such a people unspent—not on their own ground, where they still know how to make a thing and keep it, and where they can still deny the book and its claims on all their ancestors built; and not on even out on the rim, where they are still raising values. So they are used up.

The very most capable sons are spent abroad, holding and building the imperial pasture. They go believing in the rightness of the cause—you know the letter from the draft board, and you know the volunteer who needed no letter—a boy taken from a county, or taking himself, sent to a land he did not name. Some go in uniform. Some go into the intelligence services, to work in the shadow of the same wars. And some go into the firm, to open the markets the wars made safe, run the plants and the offices the empire planted, and keep the private paper growing on the rim. The most productive years of their lives are given to conflicts, wars, and careers that service the book, and in those years they are not at home to defend what their people raised, or to raise the next household, or to deny their replacement. They come home, or they do not. If they come home they are often broken in ways that will not build again and will not defend, or they come home late, their best years spent, with no household raised or one raised too late and too small. The men of the firm come home on a pension invested in the book's own paper, and a man whose old age is paid by the book will not deny it. The rolls are heavier in every case. War, and the service that runs beside it, is not a third instrument in this number. It is how empire spends the first possessor—abroad and at home at once.

Spent abroad and at home, the first possessor thins until the empire can no longer be held. When the empire is released, the book does not retire. By then it is large enough to sustain itself if bodies can be found to service it, and only a sound monetary and financial system, with books cleaned and closed, would end the claim. So they fetch a second possessor, one who can service the book and cannot make that cry: a renting and consuming class, conditioned and trained through a lifetime inside the empire to be subservient to it. What remains of the heritage stock is not spent to the last man, though. Just enough of them are kept, and kept under a perpetual siege in every form—suppressed, and yet held in a permanent readiness for violent conflict and war once more—to hold the wall if those flooded in from the rim should turn on the owners of the paper, or on the paper itself.

For us the date of the second instrument is 1965. That proof is below. Before it come two things that decide how the history ends.

A lesser people can pay the rents and can staff the offices. They cannot keep the institutions running as the impersonal things they were, and they cannot write a new book. The rare people of high trust earned across centuries were necessary to write it; they are not replaceable as its servants, only for a while and at a falling yield. When our people no longer surround the newcomers with the trust that makes the courts and the contracts work, the courts and the contracts stop working no matter how tyrannical they become in the hands of the former colonized. Why the backfill cannot become the founding people, and how it converts the offices from within by kin and favor, are later questions.

Now, before any flood arrives, look at our own table. Our people are already being made renters of what they built. The hard years take the surplus. The wars take the sons who would have inherited and held. The student loan takes the young before either can reach them: a piece of the book laid on each of them by name at eighteen, to be repaid directly out of every working year of an adult life, so that they are spent before they have begun. What remains sits renting its own life back, the hours of the day spoken for before they are lived. That is what I mean by near gone: not vanished from the census, but thinned past the point of rebuilding a middle class under the book or fielding the sons an empire requires. That is the ordinary life of the prison: used up, cast aside, left to die out but not fully, and majority replaced within the same walls. Our people became renters by losing what they had owned. The flood arrives as renters, never having owned the ground it stands on, and is never meant to. The two kinds of possessor are one people walked down into occupancy, and another occupancy fetched to stand where that people stood.

What has now been walked on our own people was walked on others before us, and the proof that follows traces it through them. To follow it, a few words must be held in fixed senses. The method is the walk from parish to flood. Each time the method is seated on a new people, that is a landing. The line is the whole succession of those landings, the book passing from people to people and host to host: Rome, Venice, Amsterdam, London, Washington. Grade is the capacity a people brings to the book: to build, to hold, to keep the courts and the contracts working, and so to pay. Each people brought in to replace the last is of lower grade than the one before it, and the book's yield falls with each replacement. The proof comes in this order: what happens to a man who stands in the way of the book; how the method has moved down that line; how the British and American empires were released; how the gate was opened in 1965; and what a people who stayed on their ground have done before, and what has never yet been done.

Begin with the first proof: what happens to the man who stands in the way. A book that must be fed must also remove the man who would refuse to feed it, and our own record shows it doing so first in England. A Crown was driven into debt by fires the lenders fed, and its king would not trade supply for a fiscal constitution the City could hold. He tried to live of his own in peace, which put him in the way of seating the book, and he died on a scaffold. The lords and gentlemen who stood with him were destroyed with him, in the civil war or in the fines, sequestrations, and impoverishment that came after. With them went all who remained who could stand against the book, and did. Within half a century the book was seated, and from then on every man who ruled, whether crown, lord, or member of Parliament, held his seat as the book's debtor or did not hold it. The man was removed first; the people he stood for were next. They were harvested at home, sent out to build and hold the empire, and are now being replaced in their own lands. Look at England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland today, and at Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the leading colonies our people built from them: the same walk, run to the same end, on each and every one of them, to this day.

Now our own country. In January of 1835 Jackson paid off the national debt entirely. It is the only time in the history of the United States that the book has stood at zero. Twenty-two days later a man stepped out at the Capitol and fired two pistols at him, and both misfired. The shooter was judged insane. His stated grievance was that Jackson's war on the Bank had kept him from money he believed he was owed. That is the record, and it does not prove that anyone sent him nor that he wasn’t so sent. In those same years Jackson refused to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States, the bank that lived by the national debt. In England, the king who stood against the book paid with his head. In America, the president who paid the book off and broke its bank was shot at. Whenever a man tries to end the book, the class that lives by it answers him. The answer is not always a pistol, but it always comes from the same ladder of answers, climbing from the lawful to the lethal.

Rome's Praetorians perfected that order of force long before Charles or Jackson. They were to Rome what the Financialists are to us: the power behind the throne, who made and unmade emperors and kept generals, magistrates, and senators obedient by violence. The order runs like this. First comes the law: the court orders the taking, and the police carry it out. Everyone has seen that step. If an officer refuses to carry it out, he is removed. If removing him does not settle it, he is killed, so that the state's force stays turned on its own people and never on the book. If a country's own police and soldiers still refuse, the country is invaded, openly or covertly. That order did not end with Rome. It is in use today, and it is hard to see because the class that owns the debt also controls much of what is written about the debt, and about everything else. So look for the pattern, not for named culprits. The pattern shows where that force falls. It falls on the few who stand in the way, as it fell on Jackson and others after, and on the whole people behind and before them, walked from owners, to renters, to barely there at all. Look for it, because force that is seen can be refused. That is why, to keep a whole people spending themselves for centuries, the class must also keep them from seeing what is being done to them.

The blade and the poisoned cup alone cannot do that work, and even deception practiced on a massive scale across centuries wears thin. What does the work is a cover, built in three layers that act as one. The first layer is the center itself, the state whose powers of war and peace, money and law, were early turned to the book. With every stage of the walk it grows thicker and faster. It grows thicker with more laws, more agencies, more rules, and more instruments of debt, each written on top of the last. It grows faster as all of it changes more quickly than any man can follow, until even a learned man cannot trace how he is being taken without decades of work and long thought. The second layer teaches the people to welcome what they cannot trace. The same standing war that harvests them without pause, through the tax code, the fee, the interest rate, the schoolroom, the pulpit, and the press, tells them in the same breath that all this thickness is progress. The third layer is the glow: the illusion of a golden age, a theater of prosperity paid for with the book's own borrowed money, staged to hold off the fight at home while the parish filled with faces that build it and can’t sustain thins. All three now run through the machine. It automates the complexity, the teaching, and the glow, and feeds them into our hands in new form every millisecond of the day, on the screen each of us carries. It is the automation of the complexity, the teaching, and the glow, fed into our hands in new form every millisecond of the day, on the screen each of us carries. A cover worked by such a machine cannot be refused, because it cannot be seen for what it is. That cover over the mind is an enclosure of its own, and it will have its own essay. It does not replace the blade. It hides which hand is holding it.

And because the blade is still there beneath the cover, the cover can be answered without ever being read. No people can keep pace with what the machine pours into their hands every millisecond of the day, and they do not need to. Beneath every figure, statute, and story, the last reality is the blade: violence used to prevent a taking, or violence used to complete one. That is why the only counter left against the cover is the cry already named: Come and take it. Reading the machine does not stop it, and even understanding the taking in full does not stop it; only holding the ground does. So the choice is plain. Hold the ground together and make the collector come for it in person, or chase the noise and be replaced by consuming renters. The citizens of Rome faced that same choice and chose the noise, and with them the line begins.

Rome ran the whole walk. A capable people raised a republic. A book and an empire were seated on that people under the principate, and the Praetorians were the camp of that book, so the tribute would run to them. When an emperor stood in the way of that tribute, the camp removed him. Pertinax set out in 193 to restore the treasury and bring the guard to heel, and the Praetorians killed him eighty-seven days into his reign, then sold the empire at auction to the highest bidder. Charles on the scaffold and Jackson under the pistols were the same answer, given on later landings, and they were not the last. The citizen stock was sent to hold and to improve the rim. When the projection of that power grew strained, and the book was already large enough to live on grain and tax if bodies could be found, the rim was poured into the core—provincials, freedmen, a dole in place of a household. The sword that had held the pasture was turned inward, and the citizen acre filled with renters.

Then came the leaving, late in the empire. The core was spent and the citizen stock replaced, but the book was still hungry, and the class that lives by the book was already gone from the husk. What could be carried went two ways: the remaining administration of the empire east, to the Bosporus, and the camp, the book, and the titles to the lagoons. The walls that remained were left to be sacked. That was not a people holding. That was the class taking the next seat.

On the lagoons the camp sat down again with the book and the book of titles it had carried out of Rome. Venice was not a new people but the Praetorians reconstituted, and they had an old account to settle. Byzantium had broken the camp and refused its book. It had taken the wealthiest lands of the old empire, and the titles to them, into its own hands, and it would not allow a new book to be seated on them. It could do this because the eastern city still stood on two seas, its walls facing out, its coin holding, its taxes still running, and in it lived what remained of the Roman people and the Roman surplus after the west had been spent. Standing on its own ground and its own surplus, it collected tribute like any state, but it would not bind the unborn to a paper that could not die. That refusal, and those lands, are why the camp spent four hundred years on the lagoons preparing to take the city, and why, when one man finally finished the work, he finished it there.

Enrico Dandolo was old and nearly blind when he took the ducal seat, and he struck a hard silver coin that showed him standing with the city's saint, receiving the banner. When a Crusade gathered to recover a holy city, he bound it with debt and turned it on Constantinople. In 1204 the gates were forced, and what could be carried was carried. The bronze horses left the hippodrome for Venice, to stand later on the façade of San Marco, and relics, plate, and silk, the movable wealth of an empire that had taken centuries to gather, went into the lagoons with them. What could not be carried was taken on paper. In the division of the empire Venice claimed "a quarter and half of a quarter" of it. The titles of the eastern lands, the collateral of the old Roman surplus, became the leverageable property of Venice, and Venetian paper and Venetian trade sat where Rome's successor had sat. Dandolo died in the city he had taken and was buried in the church of the Holy Wisdom. The four hundred years were paid, and the book had changed hosts in the open, under a cross. It was the first time the Praetorians, restored as Financialists, took a people's titles and made them their own collateral, and it would not be the last. They would repeat the pattern as the book moved back across Europe to the British Isles and beyond.

After Venice the book did not stay in the lagoons. Wars were fostered across the former Roman world, and beyond it, to impoverish princes and peoples until the old titles could be rebuilt and the acre taken back. The vector was the Vatican and the banks that stood with it: claims seated on parchment the camp had never let die, enforced now as debt. The funded book then found its Italian houses and its monti, Venice's own among the first, each one perpetual and transferable, its principal never to be retired. Amsterdam translated the method north: a merchant republic, a public bank, a chartered company that was pasture and paper in one body. The rare people of the United Provinces were bound and sent to the rim. They won their eighty years' war against Spain, and paid for the victory in sons. The golden age that followed was the glow over that cost, raised on the same paper that was spending them. When that people and that pasture were spent, the book did not die. It looked for the next host, and the City received it, carried there in 1688 by a Dutch prince on the English throne. The golden age is remembered and the spending is not, because by then the book had moved on to a new heritage stock. Our English stock became the rare people the paper would harvest for the next three centuries, and in 1790 and 1791 the Treasury received it in turn. A landing changes the people, but the clock runs on the book, and so the American book was seated a century into the English clock.

From that English seating the British Empire was built by war, and each war raised the book as it widened the rim. The wars against France that followed 1688 carried the funded debt from its first millions into the tens of millions. The Seven Years' War won Canada and Bengal. Its bill was laid on the American colonies, and that bill drove them to revolt. The wars against Napoleon left the book at more than twice the nation's yearly product. Then the smaller wars followed, one after another, each for a concession, a market, or a mine: the Opium Wars to keep the China trade open, the wars in India and Africa, the Boer War for the gold of the Rand. In every one of them our stock supplied the sons, and the parish paid the bill. What came home was tribute and concession, cheap goods and remitted profit, collection in reverse, while the book it was drawn against grew larger with every campaign. After 1898 the American form of the same instrument took the named possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific. After 1945 it no longer needed them. The whole pasture became an open door, the dollar its fence, the base its bailiff. That informal rim of dollar and bases, not only the islands on a map, must be counted, or the claim that the flood comes from a former empire fails on its face. When the yield ran out, and the capacities of our people to raise it were spent, the pasture was released.

By the time the pasture was released, the people who had built and held it were spent at home as well as abroad. The sons already named went first: those lost in the wars, and those spent abroad in the services and the firm, who came home broken, or late, or bound to the book by its pension. The empire took as many again at home, in the mills, the mines, the shipyards, and the munitions works that fed the wars and filled the markets abroad: sons worn out at the forge, daughters at the loom and the shell line, children put to the spindle and the coal face before they were grown. They were the ones who would have filled the next cradles, and the cradles stood empty in the old country and in the leading colonies alike. The book did not shrink to fit the smaller people it had left. It filled the empty places with the peoples of the pasture itself, brought home from the rim to the core. That is the second instrument.

All of this was covered by America as it had been covered by England, in the way the stock was used. For three centuries the English had been the people the book spent. Now the Americans were: their sons holding the rim abroad, their daughters and children feeding the works at home, and the language of progress and duty keeping anyone from counting the cost. The flood that followed was not an insertion thrown in and finished. It was the standing war wearing the dress of hospitality, never meant to end, and it came in two waves, each argued in the name of something other than the book. The first was argued as the economy, which is the book by another name. In the first decades of the twentieth century labour was said to be needed to keep the engines of progress running: to man the factories and staff the offices while America's heritage sons fought abroad. That draw came from a Europe that still had stock to spare, people who could, for a time, extend at least some historic trust around them. They came through gates that still faced, in some measure, out, and they entered a parish that still had a native middle class to join and stand beside. That was the first wave.

The second wave has a year and a gate, and it was argued as mercy. In 1965 the Hart–Celler Act opened the American door as the empire began to collapse under its own hollowed weight, and the renters of the rim, with the managers to run them, were brought into the core as a humanitarian duty. They could be brought in because everything that had been built, and everything that would be, was already in the book or being drawn into it, away from the heritage peoples who had built, expanded, and held it for centuries. They came to live in what the book already held, and to pay its service. The old preference for the stock that had built the parish was struck out, and the new preference was the world. At the southern river and at the airports the line changed kind. What came after was not the cousin from a county that still knew the same hymns. It was the remainder of rims already harvested, people mapped, bound, and stripped out there and now fetched to fill the places in here. 

The filling is chosen, and its size is the size of the rents. What the new stock is brought in for is not mysterious: a taxable base, a cheaper wage, new borrowers, and bodies on the rolls so the deputy has someone to find. What it costs the people still inside the wall is the wage held down, the parish thinned, and numbers no county can absorb and remain a people. Once through the gate, the newcomers live on the ground without owning it and without the power to deny it to anyone. And the center now arms them. After 1973 the standing force became a volunteer force, and citizenship is offered for service. In several states the law now lets men who are not citizens at all serve as sworn, armed police officers, and foreign-born judges, naturalized, sit on the bench over them. Arms held for the center's pay, and a robe held for the center's writ, are not possession by arms. They are the deputy: the renter in uniform and the renter on the bench, standing between the book and the heritage people who might still refuse it.

The managers who came with them do the same work in the firm and in the government. They arrive as the new middle class, drawn from the contracting empire, and not all of them are citizens. In the firm they are proven hands to run the companies and the debts those companies will never retire, and to keep product flowing to the renters already brought in, so the exchanges stay high. In the agencies and offices of the state and the county, and in the contractors that do the government's work, they run the collection itself. What they manage, in both, is a slum of aging plant, aging housing, aging offices, and aging law, all of it built by the stock that is dwindling. Their craft is not creation but the husbandry of what remains, and the only way that caste can live as a middle class at all is by extracting the most it can from the heritage households that are left, until even that runs out. That is the lower grade at work. A people who arrive without the property, the trust, and the institutions of self-government our people built yield the book less, and management of aging assets is that lower yield in office: more hands on the sluice, and less surplus left to stand.

And there is no one left to bring in after them. The only rare peoples left with the capacity ours once had, to take ground, build it up, and hold it by their own strength and arms, are the Russians and the Chinese, and neither will take the book. Russia orders itself around its resources and China around its production, and neither allows a book to be seated against it, whether domestic or foreign. They cannot be taken by force as Constantinople was taken, nor by subterfuge and deception as England and America were. That is why so much effort has gone into bringing us to world war with both. No unharvested peoples remain to be drawn from the rim. The reservoir empties, and the book has no next host of the old kind. So the class evolves the collection rather than close the book. Force holds what the trust of the heritage stock once held by consent. The money itself is made of the debt, so that the note a man carries is a claim on him. That class can live on a falling yield for a long while, and it will run the collection down to the last household that can pay, and then past it.

None of this binds a core that will hold. Cores that still hold refuse the fetch, and two holdings show what such a core can do, and what it has not yet done. In 1066 a foreign military caste took England and held it as occupiers, with castles on the English acre, a tongue that was not the parish's, and a law that made the Englishman a man under a stranger in his own field. The heritage stock did not throw them out. It stayed, and it outlasted them. When Normandy was lost in 1204, the same year the lagoons took Constantinople, the caste was cut off from the ground that had made it foreign, and it had to live as English or lose its hold. It could, because the two differed in tongue, not in blood. Normans and English alike came from the same older north-west European Germanic stock, with thousands of years behind them, and each could extend to the other the trust only kin can give. The parish's language came back into the courts and its law back into the land, and the Normans were so few that their blood has all but vanished from the descendants of those who endured. What they left was titles, not people. The limit is the next landing: those English became the host of 1688.

The second holding is the contrast. The Normans were kin, and the English outlasted them by staying. Spain was not, so the Dutch drove it off. From 1568 to 1648 the producing people of the Low Countries fought the Spanish occupation that had come to tax them, and their stand met the whole measure: collective, costlier to Spain than any taking could repay, and handed down from father to son until the occupier was gone. But both sides fought on borrowed money, and the lenders were one class. Genoa's houses carried Spain's war, and the new houses of Amsterdam, heirs to the lagoons, carried the Dutch one. The Dutch spent their sons to win, and the debt of their victory became the book seated on them. The same was done in England, where the City lent the war that killed the king, and here, where the Revolution was fought on French and Dutch loans and its debt funded in 1790 as the American book. So the holdings prove that a people can deny an occupier, by outlasting him or by driving him off. None has yet denied the paper, the debt the lenders run up on both sides of the fight and leave the winners to carry. What is asked of the American remainder has never been done: to hold its ground by that same measure without taking on the debt, and to refuse to carry the book at all.

The holdings settle one thing: a people can throw off an occupier, and has done it. What they leave open is harder. Can this remainder refuse the paper itself, without seating another book in order to do it? The people brought in will never answer that question for us. They live by the book: their keep, their wage, and their place on the acre all come from it, and they will never be allowed to own as the builders owned. Some of them already wear the deputy's uniform, and some sit as the judge who backs that uniform against the native. Only the stock that built the parish can refuse the collector, because only that stock still remembers how to hold ground without him. We are few now, far too few to field armies, and we don't need them. The book isn't collected by armies. It is collected by habit and by writ, from households that pay because everyone around them pays, and it cannot put a soldier in every kitchen. When a people refuses together, and hands that refusal down to its sons, the taking costs more than it yields, and that is enough to end it. The cry for it was raised at Gonzales, over a single cannon. The empire is already gone. The home ground is not, but no one ever held ground by talking about it, and no one ever held it by voting alone.

So the first thing a people must do, if it will not go on feeding a growing book, is stop believing in the book's count of acres, houses, and names, and stop defending it. It has to draw its wall where it can actually stand, and give up the false wall that was built facing inward on its own people. Then what was flooded in is removed, and the ground goes back into the hands of the stock that can hold it. None of this is a program dreamed up at the end of an essay. It is what every core that has ever held did first. A smaller people is a wound only to those who need the rents to keep rising. On our line Venice passed the book on, and so did the Dutch, and so did the English after them. Others have refused it in this very century: Russia threw off the book the 1990s had seated on it, and China never let one be seated. It can be done. It has not yet been done by our own people, and that is what is now being asked of us.

This is the quarrel at home, and it is as old as the republic. Hamilton saw plainly that a book meant to grow forever cannot be carried by a people that is not restocked, and in the Report on Manufactures he said so in his own hand, arguing for fetching workmen from abroad to build the manufactures a war footing required. His logic holds only if the book must grow. The Jeffersonians never denied that a war runs up a bill. They denied that the bill should outlive the men who ran it up, and so they denied the need to restock anyone to pay it. That is the whole quarrel this number has walked. Hamilton would keep the book alive by bringing in a second possessor. The other side would let the book die rather than replace the people who wrote it. And Jefferson's side is not a lost cause. A people that owes no one needs no one fetched to pay for it. It can be smaller than the one the book built and still be enough: enough to hold its own ground, to defend its borders, and to hand both to its sons. That future is still open to the stock that remains.

None of this is fate, however much it is dressed to look like it. The flood seems inevitable only because the core has been nearly hollowed out, its gates turned inward, and its book forbidden to shrink. Those are the book's conditions, not a law that governs peoples. Two futures remain. In one, the core follows the empire down, and the ledger fills with renters until the host fails. In the other, what remains of our people takes up the same stand that has thrown off occupiers before, and this time turns it against the paper.

Which of those futures comes will be written where this essay began, on the square. The stone there still takes names, and the ledger still takes titles. What the ledger records next will be one of two things: renters fetched to service a book they did not write, or a people that kept its ground because it would not keep the book. The outcome is not yet written.

Which it will be turns on the people who wrote the book in the first place. It could be written only by a rare people, one that can raise a surplus, keep trust among its own, take ground, and hold it long enough for paper to be seated on what it built. No such people can be ordered into being. The flood was fetched to stand in for ours, and it is of lower grade. The only other peoples of that rarity hold their own ground and refuse the book. Why such a people is rare, and why no center can manufacture one, is the question of the next number.

— — —

The New Sovereigntists will continue.

No. 5 will take up the rarity of trust.