.

ABSTRACT. Recent recognition of time horizon as a variable in human cerebration opens a window on the question of how worthwhile social reform might be expedited. The careers of three prophets in this millennium -- Bartolome de Las Casas, John Eliot and Jonathan Edwards -- support the premise that unusually long time horizons needed for prophecy create an inherent differential between the prophet's horizon and the time frame of his contemporaries. The resulting discalibration is an impediment to communication. Rudimentary measurement of the time horizons of modern-day proponents of land value taxation, followers of Henry George, indicated horizons longer than the current social time frame. It follows that some calibration of that difference is advisable. Adjustments in an individual's own time horizon are apt to be more productive than efforts to shift the time frame as a whole.

INTRODUCTION

WHILE SOME INTERVAL between the conception of a means of social advancement and its full realization is inevitable, there have been innumerable instances in which that interval may be seen as unfruitful and a waste of human opportunity. Some of the resistance which has retarded the implementation of land value taxation since its proposal by Henry George in Progress and Poverty 100 years ago is here proposed as an example of that social loss.

The writer has suggested a simple syllogism as a means of clarifying a root cause of such unproductive intervals and, in what follows, will test its premises and propose therefrom a practical conclusion (1).

LAS CASAS AND INDIAN SLAVERY

SOCIAL REFORMERS, whose temporal horizons are wider than the current time frame, have found temporal discalibration a major impediment to their efforts, and have thereby failed to address present reality. This is the major premise of my investigation.

Bartolome de Las Casas (1474-1566), John Eliot (1604-90) and Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) are three social prophets who took "utopian" positions on issues which remain vital questions in America today. All three were Christian divines, the first a Roman Catholic priest and bishop, the other two Congregational ministers in New England. Las Casas and Eliot fought long and hard in behalf of racial equality and the universality of man, taking positions now seen as valid. Edwards was openly opposed to land speculators and other such sinners among the Connecticut "river gods," who, he warned, "shamefully defile their hands to gain a few pounds, are not ashamed to hip and bite others, grind the faces of the poor, and screw upon their neighbors; and will take advantage of their authority or commission to line their own pockets with what is fraudulently taken or withheld from others" (2).

Each of them failed in his lifetime because his Utopian ideas were determined by "the wish-image of an imagined future," so were "as yet incapable of realization" (3). They failed because they were unable to persuade enough of their contemporaries that the ideas were currently relevant.

Las Casas (4), who was an early participant in practices he later opposed, having been granted an encomienda in 1513 which he relinquished a year later, is recognized as the first to expose the oppression of the Indian by the European and to call for its abolition. He wrote frequently and argued often throughout a long life, and was able to win over to his point of view first the Archbishop of Toledo and later King Charles V. He came nearest success in 1544 when King Charles signed the so-called New Laws, whereby "the encomienda was not to be considered a hereditary grant; instead, the owners had to set free their Indians after the span of a single generation." Las Casas was sent to America to enforce the New Laws, but found it in practice impossible to do so. He had convinced the king, by dealing with the king's individual time horizon, but could not change the time frame of those who ruled the vast territory of the Spanish colonies in America.

Las Casas's five-day debate with Sepulveda before .the Council of Val-ladolid, beginning in 1550, has been called "one of the important events in the history of racial thought" (5). Neither side won, and discriminatory practices continued. While the debate centered on theological ideas, it had a temporal framework. Las Casas, whose own deepest motivation may have been compassion, built his case on a future concern. He warned the Spanish court against the misfortune which must inevitably befall that then-powerful nation when she became the object of God's punishment. Those opposed to him were more immediately motivated: "The reason why the Christians have killed and destroyed such an infinite number of souls is that they have been moved by their wish for gold and their desire to enrich themselves in a very short time" (6).

The debate at Valladolid and Las Casas's writings reverberated throughout Europe. The people of England, who then had no colonial interests to lend weight to present concerns, took the longer view until such time as immediate interest came into direct confrontation with future concern. A succinct statement of the temporal balance is to be found in the introduction by Louis Rumaches to his anthology on racial thought (7):

The attitudes of most Englishmen, however, were probably quite similar to that of Queen Elizabeth when she heard of Sir John Hawkins's first slavery venture in 1562-63. Her first comment was that "it was detestable and would call down vengeance from heaven upon the undertakers." [Note the resemblance to Las Casas's hypothesis for the future.] But when Hawkins came to see her and showed her his profit sheet, "not only did she forgive him but she became a shareholder in his second slaving voyage."

ELIOT AND INDIAN SUPPRESSION

THE INTELLECTUAL VIGOR of John Eliot (8), who has been called the "Apostle to the Indians," is remarkable. When he came to America from England in 1631 he chose to be pastor of a new church at Roxbury, rather than accept a lesser role at the church in Boston, because he wanted to be nearer to the Indians. He was 42 years old when he decided the English language was not adequate for his mission and, refuting then-popular arguments that the Indians had no language, set out to learn the Algonquian tongue. He learned the vocabulary, worked out the greatly different syntax and grammar, and established rules by which it could be written. Eliot then proceeded to translate both Old and New Testaments into Algonquian (9). His work was so effective that, it has been estimated, Eliot had converted nearly one third of the New England Indians to Christianity by the outbreak of the King Philip's War.

John Eliot's efforts came to the test in the summer of 1675 when "the Honorable Council sitting at Boston" was trying to decide how to handle the "Praying Indians" while at the same time waging war against the more adamant tribes under the leadership of King Philip. Eliot had the help and support of Daniel Gookin, Gentleman (10). Eliot's antagonist in the Council debates was Captain Samuel Mosely, brother-in-law of Governor John Leverett, who was a man of action. He had raised a quick fortune as a privateer against the Spanish in the West Indies. "Mosely's success in capturing the pirates had made him one of the most popular men in the Colony" (11). His evident ability to handle the immediate threat of hostile Indians proved more persuasive than Eliot's long-time concerns. Some of the "Praying Indians," at Mosely's request, were treated much the same way Japanese-born Americans were treated in 1942, incarceration being on Deer Island. "More than 500 men, women and children were on the island during the winter of 1675-76, one of the longest and coldest winters in Colonial history. Despite the efforts of Eliot and Gookin, a large number of the ill-clothed, ill-housed, and ill-fed Indians died before Spring finally arrived" (12). Many more of them were sold into slavery.

Mosely's short-term advice seemed justified the next August when King Philip was ambushed and shot, his body quartered and his head sent to Plymouth where it adorned a pole for 20 years. The Indian resistance collapsed (13).

The temporal nature of Eliot's position is to be seen in the opening sentences of his protest addressed to the "Honorable Council sitting at Boston this 13th 6th 1675-: The humble petition of John Eliot showeth that the terror of selling away such Indians into the islands for perpetual slavery, who shall yield themselves up to your mercy, is like to be an effectual prolongation of the war. Such an exasperation of them as it may produce we know not what evil consequences upon all the land" (14). Mosely knew exactly what evil consequences would result if the "Praying Indians" were to revert to an earlier nature, and the Council's decision followed the old adage: "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know."

Eliot's colleague, Daniel Gookin, Gentleman, has left us some insight into the minister's deepest motivation (15):

In this work did this good man industriously travail sundry years, without any external encouragement, from men I mean, as to the receiving any salary or reward. Indeed, verbal encouragements, and the presence of divers persons at his lectures, he wanted not. The truth is, Mr. Eliot engaged in this work of preaching unto the Indians upon a very pure and sincere account . . . the motives that induced him thereunto . . . were principally these three. First, the glory of God . . . Second, his compassion and ardent affection to them . . . Thirdly, to communicate the gospel unto the native Indians.

They are moral concerns, linked directly to the relationship of the transient to the eternal, as all the higher religions have been. It would not be difficult to support the argument that nowhere in man's nature is his time horizon longer than in his religious search. William A. Clebsch has seen fit to "explain how religion stirred successive aspirations of the American dream, aspirations which when transformed into achievements belonged no longer to the saints but to the citizens" (16). It is not strange, from this viewpoint, that Henry George turned in the closing chapters of Progress and Poverty to the eternal: "The hope that rises is the heart of all religions" (17).

EDWARDS' CONTEMPORARY APPROACH

JONATHAN EDWARDS (18), who had a clearer working knowledge of land speculation than either of his fellow prophets, brings us closer to an understanding of the fine points of temporal discalibration. He was, like the others, concerned with the welfare of the society in which he lived, and moved by some future calamity which would befall it unless the needed reforms were made. He saw that such a calamity for society would be dire for any individual, since no man is an island entire unto himself. He differed from the others, however, in that he was more conscious of that truth. While Eliot knew not what might happen, Edwards knew exactly and spelled it out. What's more, he took the case to the people. "It was Edwards' great perception," says Perry Miller, "that the get-rich-quick schemes of his contemporaries were wrong not from the point of view of the eternal values but from that of the public welfare" (19). He brought the Utopian concepts of morality nearer to present reality, but not quite near enough for his own good. The public welfare, of course, even when brought to the present, is one rational step removed for any particular individual from his own personal benefit. It is simply another aspect of one's environment.

Edwards was precocious as a child. He astonished his elders with the clear, cold perception of a scientific essay on spiders. As he matured, that analytic power opened up for him a full grasp of the truths Isaac Newton had broken through to only a few years before. Discovering John Locke's essay on Understanding as a sophomore at Yale, he found a "far higher pleasure in the perusal of its pages, 'than the most greedy miser finds, when gathering up handfuls of gold from some newly discovered treasure' " (20). He followed his grandfather, the Rev. Solomon Stoddard, into the Congregational ministry. When Stoddard died, Edwards, then still only 26 years old, succeeded him as minister of the church at Northampton, Mass.

That pulpit, and his powers of logic, made him the religious leader of all New England west of Boston, an area whose settlers had begun to prosper so that "inevitably they became more and more concerned with earthly things -- rum, land, furs" (21). As the valley's conscience, Edwards caught "the vision of a future that could be brought into being through the harmonious cooperation of all men. . . . What he asked, in sum, was that the people of God in America understand both the privileges and the promise of their dawning age of maturity" (22).

He took his case to the people in terms, not of his time horizon but of theirs, and the result was a phenomenon still known as the "Great Awakening," but still not fully understood. It was so effective that it split the religious community, but in so doing it gave the "river gods" who were his antagonists the means by which to bring him down. Perry Miller has given us a vivid picture of a most dramatic confrontation in the intellectual history of America (23).

When (in 1748) the fight had only begun, his patron and friend, his one bulwark in the civil society, Colonel John Stoddard, chief of the militia and warden of the marches, died. There was now no civil power that could protect him against the hatred of the 'river gods.' ... As was the custom in New England, the minister gave a funeral sermon; Edwards preached over the corpse of the town's greatest citizen . . . Those who were now certain, with Colonel Stoddard in the ground, that they could get Edwards' scalp were in the audience.

It was in this dramatic setting that Edwards flung his powerful adversaries his own definition of leadership -- the natural ability to discern "those things wherein the public welfare or calamity consists." It took them two more years to get his scalp, but they got it, and once again it had been shown that when future concerns -- even those near at hand, and imminent-are pitted against present satisfaction, the future loses.

Edwards continued to write, and his works are still seen as among the greatest in American literature (24). Thus he outlives the "river gods," but the facts of his lifetime verify this paper's major premise.

THE REFORMERS WERE FUTURE-ORIENTED

THE CURRENT ADVOCATES of LVT have temporal horizons wider than the current time frame. This is the minor premise of my investigation.

The 1977 Joint Georgist Conference at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, held the first week in July, was an opportunity to test the premise, it being a gathering of about 100 individuals representing themselves or one or more of four groups: The Robert Schalkenbach Foundation; Land, Equality and Freedom (LEAF); the Henry George Foundation; and the Henry George Schools.

A major difficulty was the lack of available tests or measures of individual time horizon, about which "little is yet known." The writer therefore devised a quiz, using a dozen multiple choice questions picked to provide some insight into the grasp of time, realizing that any use of it would be as much a test of the quiz as of the subject group (25). It was administered to 64 of those present on July 2, 1977.

The same test was given within a few weeks to two other groups, chosen as "controls." Employees of the MFE Corporation of Salem, New Hampshire, including 176 men and women at all levels of personnel from production through management, were given the test as the first control group. Students of the Salem Branch of New Hampshire College, a business school in which most of those enrolled were taking evening classes in an effort to improve their abilities to provide for their future, was the second control group. They were chosen not so much as representatives of the current time frame, but for any difference that might show up as a basis for their willingness to sacrifice present time and effort in the hope of future personal advancement. A total of 128 students completed the test.

The LVT group scored significantly higher in all except three questions than either of the control groups, and on five questions the LVT group scored 33 percent or more higher than the control group closest to it (26). The three groups were clustered on two of the three questions which did not support the premise, suggesting an ambiguity in those questions -- not surprising since the quiz itself was a first faltering effort to meet a need not yet generally seen. The third of the questions which did not support the premise gave perplexing results. Both groups with some "future" bias scored lower than the group which might have been expected to most nearly approximate the normal time frame, with the LVT group falling in the middle.

While the test itself is not reliable enough to be considered definitive, the pattern of the results gives the minor premise some degree of validation.

FUNDAMENTAL REFORM NEEDS TEMPORAL CALIBRATION

THEREFORE THE ADVOCATES of LVT are hampered by a need for temporal calibration. This is the deduction I drew from the evidence, such as it is.

Charles Gallon Darwin, grandson of the man who wrote The Origin of Species, believes "man is and will always continue to be essentially a wild and not a tame animal" (27). He adds that genetic evidence shows it takes a million years to make a new wild species. If he is correct, the rate of "natural drift" whereby any valid concept moves from Utopian to realistic would be difficult to discern if it were to depend entirely on a change in the species. Mannheim believes, and the sociology of knowledge is predicated upon some inevitable change which the Utopians wish for and the ideologists resist (28). The lags that have been examined have ranged from 150 years to 450 years, and are discernible, which would suggest that rate of natural drift is a result of some change of which the existing species is capable.

Let us suggest, for purposes of this structure, that the change is an accumulative widening of time frame which originates in the power of reason and accumulates through language and the written record (29). We are not born with understanding, but are able to gain it more readily by means of language (alphabetical and numerical, whereby we start where our predecessors left off) than by the individual power of reason alone. Walter Lippman has called this accumulation of understanding "The Public Philosophy," and warned that during this century it has moved toward "eclipse" (30). The first deduction to be drawn for advocates of LVT is that anything which can be done to protect the natural drift against reversal or eclipse is essential. It raises the question, however, of how much can be done by any individual, there being a degree of arrogance in the thought of closing the gap between concept and realization by altering anything so comprehensive as the rate of natural drift.

If this model is valid, and if the realization of social reform can be expedited by a calibration between the time horizon of the prophet and the time frame of the social unit he wants to reform, then the course of action becomes obvious. The time frame of a social unit is cumbersome and beyond any individual's immediate control. Time horizon, being one's own, is the variable that lies within one's own control. Calibration of time horizon to meet the time frame of one's community becomes a matter of willingness -- or deference.

The only social reform for which the opposite might be true -- for which the calibration should be in the time frame with which the prophet finds himself surrounded, rather than in the prophet's own time horizon-is that very widening of the time frame as a reform in itself (31).

Jonathan Edwards helps draw the fine points of temporal calibration because he was able to do some of both. He was certainly determined to widen the time frame of New England, but he set us an example by talking to the people in language they could understand, taking Locke's ideas on sensation as his clue, and delivering such sermons as Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (32). He aroused the land speculators and his other adversaries, but by reaching the people who had until then been quiet followers, he set "a blaze that consumed the theological universe of the 17th century, and left the American wilderness to rake the embers for a new concept of meaning." And from those embers they raked independence and written constitutions, leading to government by will of the majority, and thereby giving us an unprecedented mechanism for accomplishing a social reform.

It is not enough for the advocates of LVT to prove and reprove the validity of their concept in abstract terms, such as justice and fair play, or even compassion, as Las Casas and Eliot were forced to do. They must, instead, lay stress on the near-term gratification available to a clear majority of the decision-making voters in 1) money, as lower taxes, 2) economic opportunity, as readily available low cost land for homesites, or the opportunity to produce which makes liberty a real (as opposed to a nominal) concept, and 3) security, through an economic system capable of dealing with inflation and unemployment.

Temporal calibration, by the adjustment of one's time horizon for purposes of improved communications, or even for purposes of bringing about social reform, does not imply the abandonment of that longer time horizon which makes either concept or early support possible. One does not, simply by stressing the short term advantages, diminish such inherent long-term or moral gains as justice, economic liberty and the security of a society in which no one need be poor. It is simply that the short term advantages are "easier to sell."

Study after study has shown, in city after city, that a shift from improvements to land in the property tax base will result in immediate tax savings to a great majority of home-owners. The proposal, which may actually have been Utopian 100 years ago, has been made realistic by events of the past century.

All this urges, of course, nothing that is not already done by an increasing number of literate, effective advocates of land value taxation (33), except that more of it be done. The apparent quickening of the pace toward realization may turn out in the long run to be the real verification of this paper's syllogism (34).

REFERENCES AND FOOTNOTES

1. This paper concludes a report of an investigation begun with "The Time Horizon of Planned Social Change: I. Why Utopian Movements Always Promise Amelioration in the Future," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 39, No. 1 (January, 1980), pp. 65-77.

2. The quotation from Jonthan Edwards' funeral sermon for Colonel Stoddard is to be found in Perry Miller, "Edwards and the Great Awakening," Errand Into The Wilderness (New York, Harper and Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1964), p. 165.

3. See L. E. Hill and R. L. Rouse, "The Sociology of Knowledge and the History of Economic Thought," American Journal oj Economics and Sociology, Vol. 36, No. 3 (July 1977), pp. 299-309.

4. Lewis Hanke, Bartolomt de Las Casas (Philadelphia, 1952) is a recognized biography. Manuel Giminez Fernandes published two volumes on Las Casas in 1953 and 1960 but the work was not completed. Louis Ruchames offers a bibliography in note 14 to his introduction (p. 17) to Louis Ruchames, ed., Racial Thought in America (New York: Grossett & Dunlap, 1970, first published by the University of Massachusetts Press at Amherst, Massachusetts). Las Casas was sound enough so that Samuel Eliot Morison was led to say in Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1942, p. 51) that his Historia de las Indias was "the one book on the discovery of America that I should wish to preserve if all others were destroyed."

5. Ruchames, op. tit., p. 5, says the principal question for the debate was whether the Aristotelian theory, that some men are slaves by nature, could be applied to the Indians. He quotes Hanke to establish that "during the 17th century, the Aristotelian view of race 'reigned almost supreme in Europe and America.1" Aristotle and Sepulveda were both advocates of what was then still the realistic view on race, despite the fact they were separated by 18 centuries. Thomas More approved slavery in his Utopia (1516).

6. Ola Elizabeth Winslow, John Eliot: Apostle to the Indians (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968), pp. 72-79; Ruchames, op. cit., p. 5; Las Casas, "A Brief Report of the Destruction of the Indians" (1542), p. 36.

7. Ruchames, op. cit., p. 6.

8. Winslow, op. cit., is an excellent biography. Ruchames, op. cit., p. 33, lists several other sources, beginning with Convers Francis, Life of John Eliot, the Apostle to the Indians (Boston and London, 1836).

9. Eliot's work with the Algonquian language helps to open up a new concept of American history which would have helped him greatly, had he been handed the other pieces in a puzzle. Barry Fell, Amerka B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World (New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1976, pp. 27 and 277-85), has traced strong etymological ties between words Eliot learned from the Indians in the mid-17th century and Celtic Ogham words which were previously known only in Europe. Place names still used in New England, with Algonquian roots (Monadnock, Merrimack, Massabesic, for example) are descriptively similar to Ogham words recorded and defined by Celtic monks in the 12th century, preserving their then-ancient meanings. The Book of Ballymote in which those definitions are still to be found at the Library of the Irish Academy at Dublin, Fell says, was gathering dust when Eliot was learning the vocabulary on a different continent. Fell adds (p. 278), "The various Algonquian tongues, especially those of the northern tribes, are rich in vocabulary connected with writing and writing implements and materials. These words are dissimilar to French and English words for writing, but sometimes quite similar to Egyptian words for these ideas. An extensive list of words of this category appears in the oldest Wabanaki dictionary, that prepared in Maine by Father Sebastian Rasles (whose missionary work began in 1690). The original manuscript of Rasles' Dictionnaire is preserved in the Harvard College Library, its opening passage showing that he began to compile it in 1691; he was still working on it when he was killed by British soldiers in 1724, during the attack on Oldtown, Maine." Had Eliot known what he was uncovering, he would have had greatly strengthened current arguments for his Utopian idea that the Indians were "human being (s) created in God's image, but 'lost.'"

10. The unusual width of Daniel Gookin's time horizon may be judged by the opening chapter of his "Historical Collections of the Indians in New England," Massachusetts Historial Society Collections, 1st series, I, 181. It was republished by Towtaid as a single work in 1970.

11. Leo Bonfanti, Biographies and Legends of the New England Indians (Wakefield, Mass.: Pride Publications, 4 vols. 1968-72), Vol. Ill, p. 41.

12. Ibid., p. 46.

13. Bonfanti, op. cit., Vol. IV, p. 62, says, "Although ... the Praying Indians of Massachusetts were allowed to return to their villages after the war, their descendants were unable to enjoy the fruits of their unholy alliance with the Colonists. The Praying Indians became victims of their neighbors' greed and intolerance. In time, they became so poverty-stricken that they were forced to subsist on a much lower economic level than the poorest of their neighbors. Even then, there were a number of Colonists who wanted their lands, and the Praying Indians were eventually forced to give them up. Some fled to the Maine Indians for protection, others anglicized their names and gradually became faceless members of the various English communities throughout New England, thereby losing their identity as Indians, and helping to complete the total destruction of the southern New England Indian Nations." The whole episode, covering almost three centuries, is a substantial addition to the vast human suffering which is this paper's first concern.

14. Ruchames, op. cit., p. 33.

15. Daniel Gookin in Towtaid republication 1970, pp. 47-8.

16. William A. Clebsch, From Sacred to Profane America: The Role of Religion in American History (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 2.

17. Henry George, Progress and Poverty (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1962), p. 564.

18. The initial biographer was Sereno E. Dwight, The Life of President Edwards, in The Works of President Edwards (10 vols. New York, 1829). Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1949, in The American Men of Letters series.) Other biographies include: Ola Elizabeth Winslow (1940, repr. 1973); David Levin (1969); E. M. Griffin (1971).

19. Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness, p. 165.

20. Paul Ramsey, ed., Jonathan Edwards' Freedom of the Will (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957, as Volume One of The Works of Jonathan Edwards), p. 47. Ramsey quotes Dwight, The Life of President Edwards, I, 30.

21. Miller, Errand, p. 159.

22. Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), p. 155.

23. Miner, Errand, p. 163.

24. Miller, Jonathan Edwards, p. 41, calls Edwards' Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, "the most profound exploration of the religious psychology in all American literature." Ramsey says in his introduction to Edwards' Freedomof the Will, p. 2, "This book alone is sufficient to establish its author as the greatest philosopher-theologian yet to grace the American scene."

25. For details of the test, see the final footnote.

26. For the results of the tests, see the final footnote.

27. Charles Galton Darwin, The Next Million Years (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1953).

28. Hill and Rouse, loc. Cit.

29. A widening time frame, leading to an increased human capacity for postponing gratification, is clearly a factor in the development of an agricultural economy, where crops must be tended, dairy herds must be replenished and (before the advent of commerical fertilizers) fields must be left fallow. Capitalism, based on savings or stored up labor, would have been impossible for a society governed by its "momentary passions, and immediate interests." C. Lowell Harriss explains in "Henry George, His Enduring Contribution to Progress," Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Monograph #77-12, p. 48, that, "Capital consists of more than labor and matter in their customary senses. There are also 1) abstinence and 2) waiting . . . capital formation requires that human beings abstain from some of the consumption their income will permit."

30. The longer time frame of those leaders Banfield might describe as "upper class" is the strength of the Republican form of government so many of the Founding Fathers wanted. The shorter time frame of those in the lower classes, conversely, is the weakness of the democracy they feared. The exchange of letters between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson regarding the "natural aristocracy" in 1813 (See Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 2 vols., Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1959, Vol. II, pp. 351-88) is enhanced by Banfield's temporal measure of class. Adams and Jefferson went only so far as to agree that "virtue and talent" were characteristics of the natural aristocracy. Time horizon might be a more accurate measure. The present drift toward egalitarianism would, in this sense, help to explain the current eclipse of the public philosophy noted by Lippmann, and the four-year horizons of recent American presidents.

31. Henry George and the other three prophets dealt with in this paper all must be credited with having helped to widen the time frame of their contemporaries to some extent. And George's two campaigns for the New York City mayorality may be seen as a calibration of his own time horizon to match that of the electorate. In fact, Albert Jay Nock in his essay, Henry George (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1939) faults George for making that calibration, arguing that the final years of his life might have been more productive in the long run had they been spent as philosopher rather than as politician.

32. Called the Enfield sermon because it was delivered in the church at Enfield, Connecticut, it was an outstanding example of the "revival sermons" which were so effective. Perry Miller describes the results (Errand, p. 155): "The people yelled and shrieked, they rolled in the aisles, they crowded 'up to the pulpit and begged him to stop, they cried for mercy."

33. P. I. Prentice, "Self-Interest Questions about Property Tax Reform," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 35, No. 4 (October, 1976); C. Lowell Harriss, "Property Tax Reform: More Progress, Less Poverty," in Innovations in Tax Policy and Other Essays (Hartford, Conn.: John C. Lincoln Institute, 1972), pp. 170-96; Steven B. Cord, ed., Incentive Taxation, Indiana, Pa., newsletter published eight times a year since 1973.

34. The questionnaire used in the writer's Time Frame Study Quiz, and a two-page table summarizing the results, are available as a document distributed by the National Auxiliary Publications Service under a program of the American Society for Information Science in which this Journal participates. To obtain this material order NAPS Document No: 03641 from ASIS/NAPS, c/o Microfiche Publications, P.O. Box 3513, Grand Central Station, New York, N.Y. 10017, U.S.A. Make checks payable to "Microfiche Publications." Remit in advance US$3.00 for fiche, US$5.00 for photocopies; outside the U. S. and Canada, add for postage US$1.00 for fiche, US$3.00 for photocopy.


RETURN TO PART ONE