One memorable afternoon in the year of 1919, a heavily-built man of medium height, with the most remarkably intelligent eyes in a human being, walked into the office of the editor of "The New Age", in London, and placed the manuscript of a book before him.
They discussed the subject contained in the manuscript for some hours, and that night, when the late A. R. Orage — for that was the editor's name — was leaving his office, he observed to his secretary:
"I've just spent two hours with the most extraordinary intellect I've ever met. The things he has told me have rattled the foundations of most of my economic conclusions.
"I am taking home tonight the manuscript of a book he left with me, and in the morning I will be able to tell you whether I have discovered an economic genius or an economic fool."
Dawn found Orage still poring over the manuscript, with the conviction steadily mounting in his mind, that it was the work of an outstanding genius that would alter the entire foundations of human life,
The manuscript was "Economic Democracy", and its author Major C. H. DOUGLAS, a Scottish engineer with a distinguished record.
Orage — himself the most eminent economist of that period — studied the views of Major Douglas for twelve months, and analyzed them from every angle. Having convinced himself of their soundness and practicability, he joined forces with Douglas and set upon the task of having them adopted.
Alas! The world is not easily shifted from its anchorage, and financial interests became so hostile and alarmed that desperate measures were resorted to to silence Social Credit ideas.
(The Institute of Bankers allocated five million pounds to combat this challenge to the financial Monopoly. The large Press Associations were expressly instructed not to mention the name of Douglas in the public press. No metropolitan paper, in England or the United States, was allowed to give publicity either to correspondence or to contributions bearing on the subject. — See "Warning Democracy", p. 138.)
But Douglas and Orage carried on. They interviewed Government official bankers and economists, but found in all of them a stiffnecked refusal even to consider any departure from financial traditions.
Such people set their teeth against change — which, of course, is typical of the reception given to every new idea that has transformed the world.
Jesus, who gave the world a new code of ethics, was crucified.
Langley, the first man to actually build a machine fitted with an internal combustion engine, was regarded as a lunatic, and so much ridicule was heaped upon him that he is said to have committed suicide.
Thimonier, the inventor of the sewing-machine, was nearly thrashed to death by a Paris mob who resented his labor-saving device.
Marconi was regarded as a fanatic, because he persisted with his "crazy" notion of transmitting sound through the air.
That is a way the world was. The men that it stones today are the men whom it honours tomorrow.
The entire world will yet honour Douglas, because his ideas will take the people of every race and clime out of the shabby, down-at-heal civilization it has known so long, and light the way to an entirely new civilization, where human life will be lived on a level that has hitherto merely been the dream of imaginative writers.
C. BARCLAY SMITH
(The New Zealand Social Crediter, 7-1-52).
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