The New Sovereigntists: No. 5
On the Rarity of Trust
The people are the institution
Against the Financialist Architecture
We are looking for an institutional regime that produces trust. We should be looking for the people who already had it.
No institutional regime can produce trust, for such is but an artificial construct created by men with the sole purpose of managing their affairs. Hall, kingdom, republic, church, regulator, court, school, bank, corporation, economy, alliance: all these and more are, as a regime, but managerial institutions, established to serve either rulers or the clan and the tribe. As it relates to most peoples of the world throughout human history, an institutional regime is an instrument of control erected by rulers in order to manage their possessions, the people. Among some rare peoples, an institutional regime and its many managerial institutions are established in order to manage the affairs of the people while maintaining a balance of power between great and small. In the former, the real institution is the rulers, whereas in the latter, the real institution is the people themselves. We, the heritage clans and tribes of Northwest European stock, are collectively such a people, having emerged across thousands of years as an institution. For it is our common histories and our vast dealings with one another across millennia that have shaped us into a people of cohesion, into an institution of high trust rather than of absolute control. All the managerial institutions of the institutional regime we today mistake for the institution can continue for a time without us, staffed by those of other lands, of peoples with little to no trust between them. But they will do so only for a time, because as the trust that once moved them to serve is withdrawn, these structures devolve from management to control.
Without the clan and tribe that raised them, managerial institutions and entire institutional regimes cannot long survive as they were built and sustained across time. For what cannot be raised by a charter, or issued by a treasury, or laid on by a church, or forced at the point of a judge’s gavel or a gun is the trust without which no dealing can happen. The dealing is a man of our stock keeping his word with one who is not his direct kin, bound by no formal rule but by the norms and customs of what one simply does not do, which neither of them could fully define and neither owns, with no deputy in the room, each man’s sword never touched. The dealing is what makes things, and every one of the structures we have come to believe are institutions of trust was made by it. But trust comes first. It is a habit of high trust, earned and jealously guarded, that comes from interdependency across great stretches of time, and it can only be found in interlinked clans and tribes and their nearest blood relations. Together they are the only real institution, and history has repeatedly shown that they cannot be simulated by a replacement. History also shows that when such a people’s trust reaches across enough clans and tribes, and holds across enough generations, the institution they are grows into a civilization. Most societies held together by force come apart before they can attain that level, and only a few, where geography and circumstance let them endure long enough, go on to become civilizations, forced upon a people by the few who held what all depended on. A civilization of the other kind, made through trust among the Commons, is not its halls, its laws, or its works, which are only what it has made, but the people themselves as an institution, and few peoples ever become one.
Peoples from low-trust and no-trust societies from all around the world have been brought in among us without our asking or desire, and ever more of them now staff the very institutions we erected to manage our affairs. And collectively, at every level, all these institutions are turning to control rather than support.
Know that this essay on our civilizational peoples is not intended to be a pedigree of pride, but an account of what the habit of high trust is, why it is rare, how it is handed down, and why a people set down upon what a heritage people has built cannot be made to trust through the institutional regime.
The Enemy That Shaped Us
Every people is shaped by what kills it most across the greatest stretch of time their ancestors lived. For our people, through all but the last one or two centuries, that was not another man. It was the winter, and the years when weather or plague took the crop, the stock, and the hands that worked them. Violence among ourselves came second, whether inside a house, between clans, or between whole tribes, and violence from outside came third, whether a guest people turned to occupation or a conqueror came openly. The order is the whole matter, and the first enemy stood above the other two by orders of magnitude. None of this means we did not war with one another and with others, because we did, across the whole of that time. But even at war the harvest and the winter came first. Every quarrel was fought with the harvest still to bring in and the winter store still to keep, because the hard year would kill the victor along with the vanquished if both had spent what they needed to outlast it.
In lands other than our own, more southern lands, the first enemy is generally another man, and he takes one of two forms. In lands of plenty, every man is a threat to another, and most often the nearest threat is of the same house, because no one is closer or has readier access than kin. Such a man can be fought, temporarily persuaded, bought off, or intimidated, and so life there is lived every man for himself, mostly. Nothing in that life asks a man to keep faith past the season, so no long collaboration or alliance is needed, and none grows. In lands of scarcity, the first enemy is the man who holds what is scarce. Along the great rivers of the dry lands, the Nile of Egypt and the Tigris and Euphrates of Sumer, he is the man with the force to hold the floods and the channels, because whoever holds the water holds the people who depend on it. In lands of plenty, then, a man keeps faith no further than his own blood, and often not that far, and so the institutions he builds are made to control his kin. In lands of scarcity, the man who holds the water becomes a master and establishes institutions of control over all, and there a man keeps faith no further than the master’s sword can reach. In either form, institutions are raised not out of trust but for want of it, as instruments of control. That is how most peoples have lived. A few were shaped otherwise. China and Persia, fertile lands and productive peoples, were shaped not by the man within but by the man without, the nomad of the steppe who came again and again, without end, to take their surplus. Ours were made by a different first enemy still.
Where the first enemy was the winter, survival depended on trust, extended across as broad a range of clans and tribes as possible. Few peoples have lived with the winter as their first enemy, and so the habit of trust it produced is rare. The Russians are among those few, though they bore the winter with the added burden of siege from every side. Unlike a man, the winter could not be fought, killed, conquered, persuaded, bought off, or intimidated. It could only be prepared for collectively across the seasons and outlasted, with what a house and hall could put up, or with what another house and hall held and would share, because the hard year did not fall on every valley alike: one year our crop failed or we were raided, and another’s store carried us, and in another year it was the reverse.
Yes, the man a clan or a tribe away remained a danger, and so did the man within one’s own clan. Murder and killing rose here as they did anywhere, not less often than in lands of plenty, but with far more dire consequences, and so a man’s survival here depended more on preserving his neighbor than on guarding against him. This held true for all the clans and tribes of our ancestors, and it is why high orders of trust among them were required: a man killed in a quarrel, or in punishment for one, was a pair of hands lost to the preparation for the next winter and the next fight, and a feud left running left both houses to face that winter diminished or alone. So such a people developed norms and customs governing interpersonal relations, and punishments for what reduced the very real trust all depended upon, punishments that neither ended a clan or tribe nor took from it any of its more capable members, even when they had transgressed against a brother, their clan, or their tribe. Those customs also, of necessity, left open a hard-earned path to redemption, by which broken trust could be restored and a son or daughter returned to the standing of the trusted and honored.
This people, our ancestors, under this ever-present, seasonal enemy, established ways that allowed it to give its word past kin, across distance, and months and years ahead, and to enforce the keeping of that word without managerial institutions, because the house and hall that did not keep it were left alone in the next hard year, or destroyed, such that their people did not see the one after. Thousands of winters did that sorting, and what they left was the institution of trust that is yet our people, trust vastly higher than among nearly all other peoples who are or have ever been. Out of that interdependency, over those many winters and the seasons between, the rigorous guarding of trust became a habit.
Among our ancestors, trust was a man’s word, a clan’s word, a tribe’s word, held true. A word given was a word honored. That word could be given and trusted because the man a tribe away, though not kin, was not foreign, for the ground and its winters that selected us are older than any of the managerial institutions we still name, the halls, kingdoms, and republics we have raised over ourselves. It was once a single land, running unbroken from the Scandinavian peninsula through Jutland and the Netherlands to what are now western Germany, Belgium, and northwestern France, and across what is now the North Sea to Britain, from its far north to its southern coast. Ireland and the other isles nearby lay within sight across narrow water, easily reached, and were of the same peoples. Then the water took the middle and left the British Isles on one side and the rest on the other. Our people began on that land, and on both sides of what the water took we stand there still. We are one blood across that ground, and the genetics, our languages, and our customs show it, going back thousands of years. The man a tribe away, or ten or twenty tribes away, was of that blood, and his people had come through the same winters, so he kept the same customs: of honoring his word and of trust, of the accepted punishments for abusing them, and of the ways we organized to enforce them among ourselves and others. He reckoned a debt as we did, weighed a word as we did, and knew without being told what was owed and what breaking it would cost. One blood and one struggle across that ground gave one measure of what was due of a man across it, and that common measure is what let the power of the word travel where no kinsman stood behind it.
That common measure did not keep itself. Our ancestors carried it out through structures of their own, older than any king, and these were the people as the institution at work. The free men of a district met in assembly, the thing, as the Norse called it, the moot, as the Anglo-Saxons did, or the dadl, as the Britons did, the same word the Irish still keep in their Dáil, and there they heard disputes, found the law among themselves, set the price of blood and the punishment for transgression, and agreed the common work of the year: what was to be stored, who was to stand watch, and when the folk would move against an enemy. Nor were we without rulers. We raised strong and broadly capable men from among us who managed the affairs within the folk, saw that the word was kept and transgressions punished, marshaled us against intruders, and led us on raids against others, honestly for reasons not all good. The longhouses and great halls held and secured the store and gave it out, and the oaths we made to one another were sworn there. All men, elevated or common, were bound by the same word, and those who ruled did so with the assent of the assembly, not over it. These were the first managerial institutions, the hall, the lord, the law-speaker, and the court of the assembly, raised by the people, staffed from among them, and answerable to them: of the people, and not a thing apart from them.
Through these structures the folk widened, and the Isles show how. Over the long record, band after band came across the water: the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, then the Danes, and last the Normans, coming onto Britons, Scots, Irish, Welsh, and Cornish who were in the mixing before them.[1] Each came by force or soon turned to it, and each came in fewer numbers than the one before. Yet each was a first cousin, often a stranger but a stranger of the same blood and heritage, who already priced blood, found law in assembly, and carried the measure, and so each could be taken inside the community whose word could be trusted. In time, those who came either truly joined, becoming one with the folk, or disappeared, as the Romans and, in the end, the Normans did, leaving virtually no trace in the genetic record. Each joining forced the folk to widen again or fail, and each widening raised its trust to a higher order, one that had to hold across more houses, under new pressure and far greater complexity. The structures that carried that trust grew with it, the moot into the shire court and the war-band into the host of a principality and a kingdom, and the assemblies of the folk into the councils of the realm, the Witan of the English and the Althing of Iceland. For through it all, the winter yet reigned supreme as the foremost enemy of all, and the trust it demanded remained the people’s own. The halls, courts, principalities, and kingdoms raised through those joinings were built upon that trust, and they were the forerunners of the managerial institutions we mistake today for the institution itself, which is the people. And because that trust was the people’s own, the folk could widen only as far as the measure and the blood relations ran, and no farther, a truth that lends no warrant to the joinings forced upon us today of peoples who share neither our blood nor our heritage.
What that folk carried has to be marked off from the two things men usually mean by trust, which are the two things the other orderings leave a man, or the word will be taken to mean them. The first is kin-trust, and it is common. It is the faith of blood and clan, and of a hall to its chief, and it is as far as trust goes where the other ordering rules, when it goes that far at all, because it holds only among a man's own or under the drawn sword. The second is forced compliance, and Rome is the demonstration of it. By Rome is meant the system, which was laid on the Roman people before it was laid on anyone else. That system never engendered trust. It simulated trust, and the simulation was always brought about by the sword and the knife in the dark. The rare habit is neither of these. It is impersonal deferred honor inside a widened folk: impersonal because it ran past the house and the clan, deferred because it ran across the seasons, and widened because it ran as far as the shared blood and custom ran, and no farther.
That limit did not close us to those beyond it. Our people have always kept the law of the guest, and kept it as sacred: the first night a stranger, the second night a guest, the third night one of the household, for whom the host now answered at law. A guest who abused that law, who stole from the house that sheltered him, struck within it, or betrayed the host who answered for him, was put outside the law altogether. He was outlawed, stripped of every protection, his life forfeit to any man who met him, and his name made a byword; the Norse called such a man a níðingr, and the English a nithing, the lowest thing a man could be. The law bound host and guest alike. Why did such ways develop among our ancestors? Because in the preparation for winter, the gain of one capable man or the loss of one could decide whether a house, a clan, or even a tribe came through the cycle of the seasons or failed in it. That is how high an order of trust we developed early, and how jealously we guarded it.
Guarding it so jealously, we did not receive every guest alike, though all were bound under the penalty of custom and law; a guest was received in one of two ways. A guest of the broader blood, a stranger who carried the measure, was given courtesy and a measured trust, though never the full trust we kept for our own, for even a guest of the blood, trusted fully, could turn from guest to conqueror, as the bands that crossed the water so often did. A guest not of the blood was given no trust at all, yet he received the same courtesy we give our own, because that is our instinct, as courtesy does not begin a quarrel that need not be fought and could cost us more than our surplus can bear the next winter. We learned long ago, and painfully, the cost of the guest brought in who is not of the blood: once received, such a guest has most often pushed out the people who received him, not always by war, but by settling, buying, and outnumbering them. It is a lesson we see taught again in our own day, in our own lands. We still extend courtesy to any man, as became our nature in those same winters, but we have forgotten that our trust was to be measured, given only to the man of the blood, and given in full to none outside our own. We have also lost the memory that when our trust or the privileges of a guest are betrayed, every protection that came with them goes with them.
That is the inherent habit of our people, then: full trust among ourselves, given, kept, and guarded across house, clan, and tribe; a measured trust toward the guest of the blood; and toward the guest not of the blood, courtesy without trust. We did not choose this habit, and no one brought it into being with intention. Our customs taught every child what a man does, but those same children were born into houses that had for generations upon generations come through the winters because they kept their word in their trusted dealings; the houses that did not had long since frozen or starved out. No teaching has produced the habit anywhere that this long environmental sorting did not take place. Trust of this kind is solely the product of harsh, prolonged selection, not of a teaching arising from prior reasoning but of the only real selection, which is direct lived experience.
The Handing Down
What the selection made, the house carried. A man of this habit handed his children two things, competence and restraint. The competence was in stewardship and in the sword, for in the house neither could exist without the other. The restraint was the check he kept on his own baser nature: he did not take when taking was easy, did not strike when striking was easy, and kept his word even when breaking it would have paid. He expected the same to be handed down in houses he could not see. These two things, handed down in his own house and expected in every other, are what is ultimately required of a people who can be trusted. All of this was done in the house, long before any school, state, church, or market had the child, and it began before the child was born, with the choosing of who would marry into the house, father its children, and be trusted with its land, its stores, and its defense. On that choice rested everything the house would hand down, and the house made it carefully, because the ground had long since killed the household that stood alone. That choosing was a practice, not a sentiment, and it was not the men who made it.
Within the house, no matter how great or small, the choosing fell to the women, and for good reason. So very many men died, in feud and in war, to the weather and to the incidents of hard work, that the land, the stores, and the wealth that lasted from one generation to the next were mostly held by women. Matriarchs learned early to seek out the capable man: one who could keep himself and his word, hold land and house, and pass on what was given without wasting it. That was the same capacity the winter selected for and the clan raised its lord for, and the same two things every father was bound to hand down. The matriarch brought such men into the house and the clan, bound each to it with a wife and children, and set him over the assets of the house to manage and to grow. A man found worthy of her house was granted land, and often title and rank, which gave him standing in the clan and the tribe, and he held all of it only so long as he kept faith with the house that had brought him in; if he betrayed it, he lost it all. Unnr the Deep-Minded, in the Laxdæla saga, placed the marriages of her house and, at her grandson’s wedding, gave him the farm, so that the line continued through matches she had placed, and the office she held is older than the saga that records it. And as she chose who came into the house for good, she kept its door as well: it was the lady of the house who received the guest, bore him the cup, and judged whether he was of the blood, so that the law of the guest was kept first by her.
The women, in turn, relied upon these men to enforce the trust on which every house, clan, tribe, and union of tribes depended, and in time every principality, kingdom, and state: to keep the peace within, to punish the transgressor, and to stand between their people and its enemies, at the cost of their own lives when it came to that, as it so often did. The women chose and the men enforced, and between them the houses, clans, and tribes kept their word and kept faith with one another, and so came through winter after winter and grew, where houses without such trust froze or starved. Her judgment was held true by the first enemy itself: a house that chose badly did not come through, and every house saw it. Each generation repeated the choosing, and each repetition selected again for the same capacity, until the habit was as much a part of the people as their tongue. The houses so chosen were the houses whose word could be trusted in the dealing, and across thousands of years, on this ground and then across the water, they made of us an institutional people, a civilization. That civilization is not an institutional regime we built and then filled. It is this choosing and this keeping, carried in particular places, by particular houses, and by no program. The keepers of the one true institution, the people, were the matriarchs.
What the choosing carried was custom, and custom is carried, not conferred. The trust it bred did more than bring us through the winters; in time it gave over a surplus, and with the surplus the norms that once carried a house through one winter came to carry a folk through generations, until they formed a body of practice too great for any house, clan, or tribe to hold alone. So it was carried in the tongue, and the tongue was learned at the mother’s knee, in the stories of the men around the fire, and in the lessons daughters learned from their mothers and sons from their fathers, long before any school had the child, so that the first words a child learned already held what trust required. Our shared family of languages is loaded with it. In English, true, truth, trust, and troth grew from one root that meant faithful, so that to be true was to keep faith, and to betroth was to pledge it. Free and friend grew from a root that meant beloved, the man of one’s own people, and frith was the peace kept among them. A man wedded by giving a pledge, borrowed against a surety, and swore his oath before witnesses, and the man who broke faith was an outlaw and a nithing, words that carried their punishment within them. The Irish spoke of the ruler’s truth, by which a king who kept faith brought good harvests and a king who broke it brought want, and the Norse and Brittonic tongues carry the same weight in words of their own. None of this was a lesson taught. It was the speech itself, laid down in the house and around the fire and heard in every dealing, so that the whole of our language came to code the full complexity of trust among our people: what was owed, what it was worth, what breaking it would cost, and how and where trust ran and how and where it did not, all before a child could reason. The tongue did not make the habit. It recorded it, and it carried it.
What our tongues coded, our oldest stories coded too, and these were the stories we told our children by the fire, in the same words that held our trust. They were told on both sides of the water that took the middle, and in them it is the goddesses who hold the matriarch’s office, at the hearth and in war. Frigg guarded her house with oaths. Vár heard every pledge made between a man and a woman and punished whoever broke it. Syn kept the door of the hall and stood defender at the assembly. The Morrígan, Freyja, and the choosers of the slain chose the men who would build, rule, and fight, and rewarded the fallen who had kept their vows. The wars in these stories are fought over trust broken. The gods broke their oath to the builder of their wall, and from that breaking the poem traces their ruin. Conchobar broke his safe-conduct to the sons of Usnech, and Ulster was torn in two. Atli slew his guests, and Gudrun slew him.
No less so, the men in these stories, gods and kings alike, stand or fall by the same measure. Among the gods, Forseti sat in his hall of gold and silver and settled every quarrel brought before him, so that all who came there went away reconciled, and the stories held even the highest to account, for of Odin himself the old poem says that he swore a ring-oath and broke it, and asks how his word can ever be trusted again. The kings were held more closely still, because in these stories the king and the land are a single sacred trust, and the land answers for what the king does. When the Tuatha Dé Danann set Bres over themselves, a king half of Fomorian blood who laid tribute on his own people and failed the guest at his own table, they put him down; and it was Lugh, turned away at the door of Tara until he had shown what he could bring, who led them against the Fomorians to be rid of that tribute. When Lugaid gave a false judgment, he lost Tara, and when Cormac gave the true one, the harvests came back. Arthur held the land whole while he kept faith with his people, and lost it when he turned to his own affairs, left it in Mordred’s keeping, and was betrayed from within to his doom. And in Beowulf, the good king is the ring-giver who holds his people close, while Heremod, who slew his own companions at table, died joyless and alone. A child who heard these stories knew, before he could reason, what was required of a man, what a king owed his people, what a guest owed his host, and what became of any man who broke faith.
So the habit lived in a people who had become an institution, with shared languages, customs, and norms, rules and laws both spoken and unspoken, the structures and practices of house, clan, and tribe, shared myths and legends, overlapping histories, and generations upon generations of intermixing among their own, all of it shaped by the ever-present enemy that was the winter. Summed together, these made a people not merely possessed of trust but bound by it, as few peoples who have ever lived have been bound. Yet none of these things made the trust. The tongue that coded it, the myths that taught it, and the customs, codes, and structures that formalized it all emerged from a people who had already established high trust, and all that it required, long before any of them was raised, and they were raised to extend a trust that already existed into a world of ever greater complexity. Strip every one of them away, and among these people the ancient institution they are sustains itself.
It sustained itself because the people did for themselves everything an institution is raised to do. They held the measure, and the measure was kept in every man and woman rather than in any office. No sheriff was needed to shut the door on the nithing, because every door shut on him; the oath-breaker found no hall that would seat him and no house that would give him a daughter. What they held, they handed down without a school, for the mothers chose who would father the next generation and reared what came of it, and the child learned the measure in the mother tongue at the hearth long before he could name it. So raised, he carried it into dealings where no code could follow, where there was no witness and no deputy in the room, only two people and the measure between them, and where custom ran out, the law was not invented but found, as Forseti found it, in what the people already knew to be right. The hall, the assembly, and the court served only because the trust placed in those who filled them ran in the people first. Filled by men of another making, the same hall would have kept its shape and lost its purpose, turning from support to control. That is what it means for the people to be the institution: it is not a thing they built and stand inside, but what they are.
What it outlasted proves it: famine, war and feud, plague and disease, long cold spells and the little ice ages, and four centuries of Rome in Britain and the empire that came after. The plainest proof is the crossing, and every crossing since. Our people left the ground and every building on it, crossed the water, and, starting again from little and often from almost nothing, raised their halls and squares, their assemblies and courts, again on the far shore. The structures had been left behind; the institution crossed in the people, carried in the choosing and the rearing, and there the winter was the first enemy once more, and the habit answered as it had been made to answer. Wherever it answered, it raised a surplus, and the most important surplus it raised was a thriving Commons: houses that held their own acre and their own store, the margin that let them keep their word and still be wrong once. That surplus is the yield of the habit, which is why no treasury can issue it.
What the Surplus Raised
The hall, the assembly, the court, and the rest were raised out of that surplus, and for other work than making trust. A surplus asks for more self-restraint, not less, because there is more to quarrel over and more for the baser nature to want to take, and every gain in it raised, in direct measure, the threat from those who would take rather than make it, within the folk and beyond it. These were our second and third enemies, the fury among ourselves and the taker from outside, and as the surplus grew, they grew with it. So we spent some of that surplus elevating lords to manage us, and we elevated them from the strong and broadly capable men we had always had: trustworthy men, raised and steeped in the intricacies of trust between men of the sword, who might be required to turn those swords against one another or against those beyond the folk. The lords in turn elevated kings to manage them, to arbitrate between the lords and to face outward, each king with real power but never enough to rule the lords should they unite against him. Between them they managed strife among ourselves and strife from outside, and whatever could lead to either, with the hard year always first in mind. The surplus was not theirs. It came of our ordering ourselves, and what fell to them was its protection. Lord and king alike were checked, and the winter set the check, because the surplus was no hoard to be seized but a yield the houses had to raise again each year against the cold, and a lord who stripped them was soon pulled from his hall by the Commons, as a king who did so was pulled from his throne by the Commons and the lords together. Nor could any ruler here hold the water, because it came down as rain and not by a single river and its channels that he could hold, so what our rulers held was men, and men also raised and steeped in the sophistication of being and belonging that trust requires, who would fight to keep and widen what they had made. That gave our Commons, the free men of the land in their assemblies, and our rulers a relation that few other peoples have known. As the surplus grew, that relation was revisioned and reformalized again and again into a more comprehensive one, found in assembly, at once more equal and more ranked, and codified in the balance of power that is the law, to which lord and king alike were answerable. A trust born of sovereignty hard earned and long maintained was never ceded in the elevation of rulers from among us.
The winter gave us one thing more, which was time. For months of every year the land was shut and we were shut in with it, and men shut in with a surplus to live on, leaders to keep the peace, an order that held, and a hard year always ahead will try things. So we innovated, first to make the surplus, then to keep it, and then to grow it. Some of that innovation was in tools and craft, but more of it was in ourselves, in how we ordered our dealings, in how we adapted our norms and customs to what each new gain demanded, and in how we held one another to them, by law and assembly where it had to be formal and by the house, the hall, and the word of neighbors where it did not. Beneath all of it, what we innovated most was the ordering of our trust, and what we sought in each higher order of it was to need the sword less among ourselves. We could never be rid of the sword and never will be, since swords must be retained at every level of a people at all times, but we ordered ourselves so that they need not be drawn, kept in the sheath by the trust each of us held with every other, unlike the peoples of more southern and temperate lands, whose first enemy was another man and among whom at least a knife was always drawn. With each generation we reduced our need of them further, both to bind ourselves more closely together and to see that the trust was never betrayed to our doom, until we reached a level of order and identity, and of handing both down, that few peoples have ever reached. All of it, the long months of winter shut in close together, the innovating as a people, and the building and bettering of our trust until it, and not the sword alone, determined what we were, culminated across millennia in our becoming something more, something immensely rare in all of human history. That something saw us emerge as a truly civilizational people.
The Counterfeit
Yet everything the surplus raised, the halls, the courts, the offices, and the margin in every house, could be filled or drawn upon by men who had no part in raising it. An institutional people carries its trust in itself. It hands that trust down in the house and keeps it in every dealing, and the structures it raises to manage its affairs serve it only because that trust already runs in the men who fill them. Through most all of our history, that is how our structures were filled. Fill them instead with those not of our ancient heritage, men of lower-trust and no-trust peoples, and the structures keep their shape while the trust that moved them drains away. What takes its place is a counterfeit of trust, fostered through the very structures that once served, and because it is a counterfeit it has to be maintained, and the only thing that can maintain it is force, applied in ever greater measure as the Commons withdraw the trust those structures once ran on. That is why an institutional regime can only simulate trust. Rome is the fullest example of this, and Rome is not gone, for it lives on, subtly hidden, in the Holy Roman Empire that is today’s Financialist regime, which controls nearly all the world. What it hides today, it once carried in the open. A Roman magistrate went nowhere without his lictors, who carried before him the fasces, the bundled rods for beating and the axe for killing, and every contract, law, lawyer, and court in the Roman world stood in that shadow. A man gave his word in the forms of the law because the rods and the axe stood behind the forms, and so a word taken by force could pass for a word given, to the man who gave it as much as to the man who took it. Those forms looked like ours, which is why they are still mistaken for ours, but what held them was the sword in the open and the knife in the dark, never the word itself. When the legions left Britain, the sword went with them, and within a lifetime the Roman towns stood empty, the coin stopped, and the Roman law was gone from the land, because nothing in the Roman forms had ever held a man to anything without the sword. Our people, who had outlasted four centuries of it, kept their word as they always had. Force can simulate trust, but it cannot make it, and the simulation lasts only as long as the force is paid for and present.
Who pays for the force, and whose hands hold it, is then everything. Among our own people the sword was retained at every level, as it must be, and yet it stayed in the people's own hands, because the trust native to us made it right to leave it there. A people who honor their dealings with one another can go armed among one another, and ours always have, each man's sword under his own restraint, borne in defense of what was his and his people's, and bound and paid for by nothing but the trust they kept. That trust, kept among a people by their own men with swords, is the only real currency a people has, for a people's capacity with the sword is what keeps every other thing it holds its own. Lose that capacity, and a people no longer owns itself; it is owned. That is why absolute rule and a disarmed folk have always appeared together: the arms are locked away in an arsenal, and one man is obeyed. Tacitus saw it among a people the sea sheltered,[2] and the lands of our people are seeing it now, in the old lands and wherever our people went abroad, where the push to lock away the people's arms has grown in step with the bringing in of peoples not of our heritage, among whom the trust that made our arms safe was never native.
Where the sword is not taken from the people outright, it can still pass out of their hands or out of their restraint, and force comes to stand where trust stood in three other ways. The first is from within, when the sword slips the people's restraint and becomes the knife in the dark, the weapon of the fury among ourselves, as when a Roman emperor set out to restore the treasury and bring his guard to heel, and the guard killed him inside three months and sold the throne to the highest bidder. The second is from without, when the swords are borne by men who do not carry our habit and answer to their own, the third enemy standing armed inside the walls, serving whoever pays and turning on whoever does not. And the last, which holds all the rest in place, is the pay itself. Once the swords are taken from the people, only the state is left armed, and the state pays for its swords by taking on debt, a debt the disarmed people are then forced to service without end by the very swords their payments keep. Those swords are borne more and more by foreigners and by men of no high trust, and they are turned against the people of the habit, so that a people who once kept their word by their own swords now pay for the swords that hold them. These are the hired sword, the men a regime employs to force compliance, and wherever they stand, the forms keep their names, the court still sits and the guard still stands, but compliance has taken the place of the word, and the creditor has become the master.
Force is the first counterfeit of trust, and the creditor’s instrument is the second. The debt even borrows trust’s own names, for credit is the old word for belief, and the debt of a nation is called its public faith. It is force at one remove, which takes by the ledger and calls in the sword when the ledger is refused, and what it counterfeits is the only real currency a people has: the capacity and the willingness to take up the sword in defense of self and other against tyranny of any kind, and against any taking of more than a people rightly offers to sustain the habit. Where the people’s own swords once stood behind their word, the debt sets the state’s swords, bought on credit, behind the ledger. Trust between men costs nothing each time it is used, while trust in the debt pays a toll to its holders every time. Its form is a book that never closes, a funded debt carried on the ledger without end, and such a book cannot be seated on empty ground, or on a people who keep faith only inside the clan and under the drawn sword. It can be seated only on a people who honor their dealings past kin, and only for as long as they still do. The harvest, the drawing off of a people’s surplus by those who hold the claims, does not begin with a tax. It begins when those men are believed to be indispensable by a people who already produce, even though it was the habit that raised the surplus the debt is seated on, and never the debt that raised the habit on which the surplus depends. All the man whose income is the claim can do is draw off what the habit yields while passing himself off as indispensable to its making, and to the trust it required.
The harvest comes in two forms, the debt and the depression, the one slow and the other sudden, and both are taken at the point of the state’s swords. The debt draws the surplus off year upon year, and those swords are turned more and more to forcing its service; the depression takes in a season the houses, the acres, and the stores the debt had not yet reached, and the same swords enforce the confiscations. Both feed upon a people of high trust as a virus feeds upon a living host, and in time the managerial institutions and their swords come to be seen as necessary to the surplus itself. That too is counterfeit, for they only take, while giving the illusion that what little surplus remains to us after their taking is the value they provide. The pretense holds, and the harvest with it, because the habit of trust is given to the managerial institutions even when those institutions bear swords against the people who raised them, and it holds until the ruse is drawn out into the open. That is when the flooding comes, by those of little or no trust, to mask the ruse and to justify ever greater use of the state’s swords against all, while the taking only increases to cover the cost of the increased use of swords. All the while the creditor through the state gives to the outsider, and that is the purpose he serves: his untrustworthiness is held up as the reason for the swords and the debts that pay for them, even as the swords and the untrustable alike are pointed against us.
The more the lands are flooded, the more trust is given out of necessity, for a people who can no longer trust the stranger at the door must lean on the institutions and the swords of the state to stand between them and the stranger, though they are the same swords that keep the people disarmed or proportionally disarmed. A people disarmed, a state powerfully armed, and a flood of those incapable of the trust the heritage people built across thousands of years: these three together bind a heritage people to the very debts that arm the state over them. And the takings can never stop, because the claim is the holder’s income, and a claim arranged never to be paid off must be serviced by men not yet born. So the debt is made perpetual, and beside it the state fosters, by the flood it keeps flowing, an ever greater collapse in trust, for the less a people can trust one another, the more readily the swords of the state are supported against those of the habit, until a people who have lost the capacity to turn their own swords against the managerial institutions of simulated trust find the perpetual debt sovereign over them, and over their unborn.
While our people were not yet disarmed in either of the two ways a people can be, of their swords or of the willingness to take them up in defense of their own word, what they handed to the unborn, above all else, was the habit itself, so diligently come to and so jealously kept, and they handed it down as a gift, long before there was any name for doing so. A barrow was raised for a house, so that the dead of the line would be held in one ground. A circle was banked and ditched, and its stones were set to a measure agreed with men who were not in the yard, some of them not yet alive. The generation that dug the ditch would not see the work completed, and it dug anyway. No contract can bind a party who does not exist, so the people bound themselves, by the expectation that their children would know why the ditch was cut and would not pull the stones down to build a shed. In that ditch, the word once kept from autumn to the thaw was kept across generations, to the grandchildren and beyond. That handing down is what the counterfeit has taken. The surplus that once went into the barrow and the circle, and into the margin each house left its children, now goes to the managerial institutions, pledged across generations yet to come, to pay for the very swords and outsiders the creditors set against us in our own lands. If the children enter what was left them as owners, the trust held. If they enter it as payers, they were handed a debt and told it was a gift.
The Limit
What the counterfeit cannot do is make the habit, and that limit has to be stated plainly, because the whole replacement of our people rests on hiding it. A people, it is said, can be moved out of a society that keeps faith only inside the clan and set among the managerial institutions of a people who keep the word past kin, and those institutions will teach them the trust they lack. The school will make them citizens, the court will make them honest, the market will teach them to keep a contract, and the charter will make them free. It is false, and it has never been true even in the lands they come from, where the sword of the state and the creditor are absolute and those same forms have taught no one to keep faith past the clan. The habit is carried, not conferred, and it has never once been conferred. What made it was thousands of winters taking the houses that broke their word, and no school can do what those winters did. Nor does the ground teach it. The ground only ever selected, and now that the winter is no longer the first enemy of anyone standing on it, residence confers nothing, and generations spent in the public square, in its markets, courts, and votes, confer nothing. The guest does not arrive empty, either. He arrives already carrying the custom of his own houses, made by the first enemy of his own lands, and rightly made for those who lived under it. Set the forms built by one people among a people who did not build them, and the forms remain while the trust does not, and what holds them up then is force.
Nor can these institutions make even our own take up the habit where it is not in their nature, and we have always known it, for that is why we raised some of them: to lock away those of our own who refused to honor it. To think that many tens of millions can be brought into our lands from peoples who never had the habit in all their long history in their own lands, and that they will take it up here, when a sizable portion of our own will not, is absolute lunacy, for no amount of force turned against those without the habit will impel them to take it up. The idea is allowed to stand only by the swords of the state and the creditor, turned ever more against those who do carry it, who have ever more of their surplus taken to pay for it all, until they too, in vast numbers, become dependents of the state.
So the limit the counterfeit runs into lies in the people, not in the institutions. Force and the debt live only on a specific people who still carry the habit, and what carries it is not a set of structures only a unique people have raised; it is this heritage people alone, chosen and reared in these houses, on this ground and then across the water, for as long as the record runs. Those who were not chosen and reared in that way can live among us, use what we built, and be managed under the same swords by forms we still remember how to run, but they cannot become us, no matter the lies spun to say otherwise.
It is said in answer that our people have been thinned many times before and have always filled again, so why not now? We have been thinned, and badly. Famine and plague emptied the houses, and our own fury, the second enemy, cut us again and again, the Saxon and later the Norman conquests among it, but the Saxon and the Norman were our own kin.[3] Later, across the sea in the Americas, the Irish, Scandinavians, Germans, and Italians came in great numbers, the Irish our own and the Scandinavians and Germans our kin, the last a people we had contested with and grown close beside for thousands of years. Each time, the gap was filled by our own or by those nearest us, because the choosing and the rearing never stopped, and no one was set in the gap from outside the peoples who had grown up beside us. What is done now is different in kind, for it sets the stranger in the gap, and the stranger set there is the third enemy.
When this people is spent, the institution is spent with it, and the counterfeit too, for there is nothing left for force to simulate or for the debt to draw off. The courthouse can still be staffed, but the habit will be gone, and there is no second copy of it waiting on another shore. Only a few other peoples can take ground, build on it, and hold it by their own habit and strength of arms, and the Russians and the Chinese alone are such peoples, each highly homogeneous within, each capable after its own kind. But they are not our kind, and not even such peoples could be brought in to stand here in our place. Why a people brought onto these shores cannot become the institution is the question of No. 6 in this series, on the impossibility of imported substitution. What remains for this essay is to show how our own people are being spent, and where that spending began.
The House Ceded
It began in the house, because the house is where the habit was handed down and where the handing was first given away. The Church did not make the habit. It was Rome returning in another form, and the centuries after the legions left Britain were spent holding it off. It took what was standing and laid a cult on top of our ancient ways of communion: of one with another at the hearth and in the hall, of the people with the land that fed them, and of both with the divine. Long after the Church came, kings were still passing laws against the old observances at the well, the stone, and the tree, Wihtred of Kent around 695 and Cnut more than three centuries later, and no king keeps outlawing what his people have stopped doing. Centuries after Cnut, the witch hunts were turned on those who still kept something of those ways. Yet the Church could only lay its ways down over ours, never put ours out. They were kept in the house, the same house that handed down the habit, and even now, long after the Church has gone from most of our lives, they still come round every year: the fire and the evergreen at midwinter that we call Christmas, the night at summer's end when the dead draw near that we call Halloween, and the spring feast that still bears the name of Eostre. A habit made by a church would have thinned as the church thinned, and this one did not. The histories say otherwise only because the Church almost alone kept them, and kept them toward itself.
What the house kept, it kept in its feasts and its hearths. What it gave the Church, it lost, and it gave two things it should never have given. The first was the match: the choosing of who would marry into the house, father its children, and be trusted with its land, which the matriarch had kept since before memory. It went by degrees. The old ways of sealing a match at the hearth were forbidden with the rest, and the vows moved to the church door. The Church then claimed marriage as its own sacrament, required the banns to be read in its parish, and drew its own lines of whom one might and might not marry, reaching through so many degrees of kinship that the old matches among the near houses of a clan were broken. What had been the matriarch’s judgment became the priest’s blessing and the Church’s rule. The second was the telling. The matriarch had told our old ways at the hearth and at the crib, over the chores of every day, in the shack and the keep alike, and those tellings bound each child to the habit before he could name it. The pulpit and the catechism took up the telling, and though the feasts came through, the stories that gave them their meaning were lost to most houses. And when the Church in its turn lost its hold on our lives, neither the match nor the telling came back to the house; both were left with no keeper at all.
Into that gap stepped the apps for the match, and the school and the screen for the telling, and none of them can do what the matriarch did, because everything she did rested on one thing none of them will ever have: she knew her people. Because she knew them, she could make the match. She and the matriarch of another house, each knowing her own, knew who to bind to whom, and how, and how to make it last, for they knew their people far better than those people knew themselves. And because she knew them, she could teach them. She told each child the old ways as that child needed them and could bear them, knowing him better than any teacher can know a student, however much training the teacher is given in how to know one. The algorithm that now proposes the match and the school that now does the telling are counterfeits of that knowing, gross simulations of the many ways a unique people passed the habit forward through kin and blood, and no sorting of preferences and no training in method can make up for what they lack. Nor do those who build them know what they are simulating, for far too many come from the very low-trust and no-trust peoples this essay has described, or were schooled in the sterile fashion of modern education, hostile to the habit, and raised without a matriarch in their own lives.
This is how a people is spent. Not by famine, plague, or the sword, which thinned us many times while the gap was always filled by our own, but by ceding the one thing the counterfeit can never make, the handing down. The counterfeit could no more take it by force than make it, for no sword can make a mother choose well or a child listen; it could only be given it, and it was given, first to the Church and then to the government that stood in the Church’s place, by a people that no longer understood what it was. Each keeper in turn failed at what only the house could do, and with the path from house to church to government spent, the match is left ever more to the algorithm, coded by those not of our kin and blood, and the algorithm is already proven to fail as well. A people whose match is made that way, and whose children are told their ways by strangers, still has its houses, its feasts, and its name, but the habit is no longer passed down, and each generation carries less of it into the dealing than the one before. Nor is the thinning only within. Our lands and our managerial institutions are flooded from without by those who never carried the habit, and the same algorithms now empower them to simulate it and pass as people of it. The managerial institutions have taken up the algorithm as their own instrument, for it is the counterfeit of trust in its most finished form: it now decides who is hired, who is lent to, who is admitted, and who is believed, and in deciding so it seats the stranger in the offices and the credit of a people whose trust he never shared. The algorithms promise to sort for trust, but they can sort only for its appearance, because the habit is found only in the rare peoples who established it with one another across thousands of years, and no measure of a stranger can find in him what his people never carried.
The Cement
What the algorithm has become to the match, issued law has become to the law itself: a simulation that wears the forms of what it replaced. Our law was never a thing apart from the habit; it emerged from it as the natural law of a people, found among the folk rather than issued over them, and so crossed the water in the people as the habit itself did. The grand jury, under which no free man could be put to answer for a grave crime until his own neighbors had found that he should be, entered the American charter whole, and when the quarrel with the Crown began in 1774 Jefferson wrote as a subject seeking redress within the ancient constitution, which was this found law. Because the law came from the habit, it sought to restore the peace rather than spend the man: when one killed another, the folk did not kill him in turn and lose a second pair of hands before the winter, but the assembly set the price of blood he owed the kin of the slain, and when he paid it the feud ended and he was taken back into the peace. That road back remained open only to the man who, though he had broken the law, still kept the habit and honored the spirit and the ancient patterns of both—and the same held for a community, a territory, and even a state. The one that would not walk it was put outside the law altogether. For centuries our people coded the habit into that law and fought to keep it there—at Runnymede in 1215, in the Petition of Right in 1628, in the settlement of 1689, and in the war that followed Jefferson’s quarrel—each time forcing rulers back under the law the folk had found. That same law has since been separated from the habit piece by piece, by those who have for centuries been thinning us and replacing us with those not of our kin and blood, until it has become a thing with no trust in it at all, keeping the old names while turning into an instrument against the very people whose habit it once carried, held up, as every simulation is, by the sword and the debt.
Law emptied of the habit was then used to set the debt above the people as their sovereign. On this side of the water it began when Hamilton set the debt into the found order and called it the cement of our union, and his instruments carried it out: a funded debt, a privileged bank of issue beside it, the assumption of the states’ war debts onto the national book, and the doctrine of implied powers by which the charter was said to carry powers it never names. The courts finished the work. In McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819 the Supreme Court upheld the bank on implied powers alone and held that no state might tax it, because the power to tax involves the power to destroy, and so the creditor’s instrument was set beyond the reach of the people’s own assemblies. In 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment wrote that the validity of the public debt shall not be questioned. In Juilliard v. Greenman in 1884 the Court held that the power to make paper a legal tender for every debt was an attribute of sovereignty itself. And in 1935, when Congress voided the gold clauses men had written into their own contracts, the Court upheld it in Norman v. Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and in Perry v. United States held that the government had broken its own word to those who held its bonds and yet owed them nothing for the breaking. So the debt was made sovereign: it could not be questioned or taxed, it could void a man’s own contract, and the government that issued it could break its word without remedy, while every one of those rulings wore the names of the found law it was replacing.
Hamilton was only the first of many. The laying of the debt over this people went on for more than a century after his death, carried by bankers, financiers, legislators, and judges across generations, until in 1913 a central bank of issue was set over the whole country and, in the same year, a federal tax on incomes that in time reached every working man's wages. Every part of it was worked through the habit. A people who keep their word pay what they are told they owe, and so they serviced a debt they never signed as though they had given their word to it. They took the paper of the bank as they would have taken a neighbor's word, because they had always lived among men whose word was good. And the tax on their earnings rested on each man's own return of what he had earned, a thing that could be asked only of a people who would answer truly, and it was laid on them in the name of the nation, so that the loyalty they owed their own people was turned to the center that harvested them. Through that center the surplus was drawn out of the houses that raised it, and with it the margin, each house's own acre and store, that had let it keep its word. And when a man who kept the habit saw what was being done in his name and refused it, or in time only questioned it, he found the structures his people had raised turned against him. The managerial institutions that keep the books of the debt and the tax are filled ever more by those not of our kin and blood, who never carried the habit and owe it nothing, and they sort him by the same algorithms that now sort the match and the hire, marking him as a risk to be audited, denied credit, or watched, while behind them stands the sword of the state to take his wages, his acre, and in the end his liberty. A ruler elevated by the Commons could be pulled down by them, but this center was built beyond their reach, answering first to those who held its paper. What the debt cemented was never the people, who were joined by the habit long before any of these men were born, but only the men gathered around that center, the banks, the dealers, the funds, and the payrolls, all paid from the same claim and held together only while the payments flow. Retire the debt, and what stands revealed is not a union held together by what it owes, but a camp of men who have been living off a people whose union never depended on them.
Another order was on offer from the first, and Jefferson set it out because he knew the people the debt was being laid upon. In 1774 he had likened their crossing to that of their Saxon ancestors, who left the woods of northern Europe and carried their law with them, and in 1776 he asked that Hengist and Horsa—the Saxon chiefs from whom, he said, we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed—be set on the seal of the new nation. Hamilton and those around him held that a union needed a cement and a government needed energy, and that the debt and the bank would supply both. Jefferson saw that the people already had both, and had had them for many centuries. The habit was the cement, the only real one, binding houses that had never met and never would, and the energy was in every man who kept his word with no deputy in the room, and in the townships where the free men met and ordered their own affairs, the moot come across the water. When honest men feared that a republic could not be strong, he answered on taking office that it was the strongest government on earth, the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law and meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. That is the habit, described by a man who lived among those who carried it. Such a people needed little ruling, and so he asked only for a wise and frugal government that would restrain men from injuring one another, leave them otherwise free, and not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. He saw, too, that everything the other camp was rolling out could be laid only on such a people, because only such a people would honor it, and that once laid it would feed on the very good faith that let it be laid and set itself in the habit’s place, and quickly. Banking establishments, he wrote, are more dangerous than standing armies, and the spending of money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale. So he did not answer the debt with a second cement of his own. He sought instead to leave the real one alive, which is the only way any order can engender trust, and what this essay began by saying we should be looking for. That order lost. The men who laid the debt over this people won, and a people bound to a debt it never signed cannot deal; it can only comply.
Where We Stand
That is where we stand. For nearly four centuries, in England and in every member state the English have since created, the habit has been drawn on, simulated, and turned against the very people who carry it. It began with the English Civil War, when a standing army paid by new taxes and by borrowing was first raised among our people and turned upon them, the hired sword and the debt together, and even the settlement of 1689, which forced the Crown back under the law, opened the way within five years to a funded debt and a bank of issue. The effort to break the trust among us has only grown as the flood has grown, for a regime that means to rule by the hired sword cannot abide a people whose word still binds them to one another rather than to it. History has run this trial before, in Rome and under the Ottomans, and it is being run again in all the lands of our kin and blood. It has never once worked. When the heritage people are spent, the forms they raised do not carry the newcomers into the habit but are worn down to what the newcomers brought with them: kin, favor, leverage, and the blade. Yet what has been broken so far is the exercise of the habit, not the capacity for it. With the surplus taken and the land already claimed, a man may still carry the habit in full and yet be unable to act on it. He cannot keep a costly word, absorb a loss, or stand with his own without risking ruin. That is different from a people who no longer carry the habit at all.
This is a far broader struggle than that of any one land, and it is not ours alone. The Russians and the Chinese have each fought it after their own kind and, within two decades, have prevailed, emerging again as restored civilizations by keeping their own people within. Our broader kin and blood, across all the lands that are ours, have yet to. Scattered and thinned as we are, our ancient institution still exists, and counted together across all our lands, we are still a dominant force, but we will prevail as they have only if we remember what we are: the only real institution, made so not by any hall, charter, or treasury, but by the habit, the high trust we came to across thousands of years together and handed down in our houses. Every earlier rejoining was made by that remembering, house by house, and so must the next.
It is in the house that we must remember, because it was in the house that we forgot, and we forgot at the door. Of all the matriarch’s offices, the door was the one she kept longest. The Church took the blessing of the match and the pulpit took the telling, but the lady of the house still received the guest and judged whether he was of the blood, and so long as the winter reigned, it held her judgment true. Then the choosing of our women bore its fullest fruit. They had chosen their men so well, and for so long, that those men raised a surplus great enough, with industry and with supply chains reaching across the world, to end the winter’s reign as the first enemy, and with the winter gone, nothing remained to show what the choosing and the door had been for. Within a few generations the understanding of that most ancient office was lost, and with it the law of the guest: that a measured trust is not full trust, and that courtesy is not trust at all. The door so long kept was opened wide, and in the name of kindness the house was told to make room. Through it have come hordes of unwanted guests who know nothing of our law of the guest and care nothing for it. With the winter’s reign ended, the second and third enemies, the fury among ourselves and the taker from outside, have come to dominate, and the third has taken the winter’s place as the first. Unlike the winter, it does not pass with the season. It stays, and it settles, buys, and outnumbers, as such guests always have, and so the oldest question is put to us again in a new form: which houses will still choose, and still keep the door.
The restoration, if it comes, will not come by a better institutional regime or by a new cement. It will come in the houses: a people still choosing and still rearing, the matriarchs of our own kin and blood keeping the door again and measuring trust as our ancestors measured it, and enough of the surplus kept in the house that a man can afford to keep his word. No other matriarchs can do this for us, for if those of other peoples and lands were capable of it, they would have raised and held the habit in their own lands. That order of the house is the one Jefferson and his camp sought to sustain, for they knew our people and the habit better than those who sought energy and cement in the artificial, in simulations that consumed surplus and man alike. It leaves the real cement alive, and it is the only order that ever has. Their order lost, but the cement it sought to sustain did not die with it. It is carried still in the remnant, in houses scattered across all our lands, and no program has ever been capable of replicating or of eradicating it. So the old stories say. Arthur did not die; he was borne away to Avalon by Morgan and the queens with her, to be healed, and there he sleeps until his people’s need calls him back, as our cousin peoples tell of their own sleepers, Holger Danske beneath Kronborg, Barbarossa in the Kyffhäuser, and Fionn and the Fianna in the cave. In the oldest telling it was women who bore him away to be healed, as in our oldest stories it was the goddesses who chose the men who would build, rule, and fight, and it will be our women who make his people ready for his return, for a sleeper wakes only to a people fit to follow him, and such a people has always been made in the house. When the matriarchs of our kin and blood reclaim their ancient office, choosing again who comes into the house and keeping its door, our own sleeping Arthur will wake, and the sleepers of our cousin peoples with him, and what was scattered will be gathered again in the houses that still choose.
The New Sovereigntists will continue.
No. 6 will take up the impossibility of imported substitution.
[1] The Normans were the last great mixing and the thin end of that gradient, the last return that held. They were led by Scandinavians and were mostly Scandinavian themselves, first cousins like every return before them. They took the managerial institutions, laid a court tongue on top, brought a management that forced an order which made us stronger, and left little in the blood. English kept its Germanic grammar and its common words under the French of court and law, and most of the blood changed tongue inside the family, so the habit did not arrive with any tongue. Later houses from the same sea, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian, came as first cousins already carrying the practice, and they came in no great host, so the Normans remain the last great mixing. The Dutch carried the habit and made the stand against the occupier who had come to take the tax, but there were never going to be enough of them to stand all the stands it takes to become a civilization. They were set upon by every force of Rome, direct and indirect, and had the whole of the counterfeit planted among them long before they could emerge as more than a great people, and lacking the repeated rejoining, they did not become a civilization of this scale. The Frank sat down in Rome's institutions and came close, but not on par.
[2] Tacitus saw the assembly of the folk in arms, though he saw it late. Larger matters stayed with the folk in arms, kings were chosen for birth and their power was not unbounded, and generals were chosen for valor, so the folk in arms is the higher order the lords elevated a king to lead. Within the same family of peoples he also saw the opposite arrangement, among a people the sea sheltered: there one man was obeyed, and the arms were locked in an arsenal kept by a slave.
[3] The famines that opened the fourteenth century were the lean time in which the surplus is shared or the household fails, and the Black Death that closed it emptied the houses. We fought furiously among ourselves before the plague and after it, and again when the cult itself was the quarrel. The harrying of the North cut the people and left the north empty; it was kin-strife turned on the store itself, against the first priority. The Danelaw was a joining and a cutting at once.
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