Riemann for Anti-Dummies: Part 4

when Kepler demonstrated the non-linear characteristic of the solar system, and consequentially, the entire physical universe, he set in motion a revolution in thinking, that to this day, is either hated or misunderstood, by scientists and laymen alike. Witness the discussion with a Baby Boomer mathematician who works for NASA, that took place at a recent chapter meeting. After a presentation on the congruence between LaRouche’s successful forecasting of the current systemic financial breakdown, and Gauss’ determination of the orbit of Ceres, the well-educated specialist asked, “Did Gauss know of the elliptical orbits? If so, then he must have had the inverse-square law.” When the historical illiteracy of his assertion was pointed out, the specialist replied, “Oh. I always thought the elliptical orbits were a consequence of the inverse square law. I never knew otherwise.”

Or, take the case of the slave of today’s popular opinion who confidently gauges his or her economic well-being from the standpoint of their own personal financial situation. Like the brother of the protagonist of Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom”, such fools are doomed to sink ever deeper into the abyss, hanging desperately onto the ship, when safety is easily won by leaving the temporary security of the ship’s greater bulk, for the seeming insecurity of a light barrel, which the whirlpool eagerly rejects.

Those who wish not to be counted among these legendary fools, find themselves compelled to actually comprehend Kepler’s great discovery.

It is commonly misunderstood, that Kepler’s discovery was the result of a numerical discrepancy between the observed positions of the planets, and the positions predicted by Ptolemy, Brahe, and Copernicus. While such discrepancies were certainly a marker that something was wrong in the state of astronomy, the paradox that provoked Kepler’s passion was not a numerical one. Rather, it was an epistemological one: If, God composed the solar system, so that action occurred in perfect circles, or inversely, in Gallileo’s straight lines, why then was the planets’ motion non-uniform? In other words, it was not a paradox in the domain of perception, but a paradox in the domain of Mind. The paradox arose from the irreconcilability of two ideas concerning the relationship between man and nature. On the one hand, the idea that physical action occurs according to perfect circles and straight lines, while seemingly more sensible to the naive mind, requires the universe to perform an irrational dance, in order to conform to its dictates. On the other hand, the concept that action in the physical universe was actually non-uniform, seemed to require man to embrace a less perfect geometry, but conformed more to planets’ actual motion. The former implicitly assumes that either man, nature, or both were irrational. The latter acknowledges, initially, a less precise geometrical construction , but in accepting a less simple mathematics, it hopes to gain a more perfect one.

Recall to mind again, the opening words of Kepler’s “New Astronomy”:

“The testimony of the ages confirms that the motions of the planets are orbicular. It is an immediate presumption of reason, reflected in experience, that their gyrations are perfect circles. For among figures it is circles, and among bodies the heavens, that are considered the most perfect. However, when experience is seen to teach something different to those who pay careful attention, namely, that the planets deviate from a simple circular path, it gives rise to a powerful sense of wonder, which at length drives men to look into causes.

“It is just this from which astronomy arose among men. Astronomy’s aim is considered to be to show why the star’ motions appear to be irregular on earth, despite their being exceedingly well ordered in heaven, and to investigate the circles wherein the stars may be moved, that their positions and appearances at any given time may thereby be predicted.”

The specific difficulty is this: Once, Kepler insisted that the Sun moved the planets by a force whose effect diminished with distance, the irregular speed of the planet could be known as the result of an eccentric orbit. This is because in an eccentric orbit, the distance between the planet and the Sun, is always changing, getting either longer or shorter. Thus, as the planet moves around the Sun, the effect of the Sun’s force is always diminishing or increasing, which slows the planet down, or speeds it up. (See the figures on pages 26, 27, and 33 of the Summer 1998 Fidelio.)

This is distinct from the characteristic of a circular orbit, in which the distance between the planet and the Sun is always constant, and so a planet moving in such an orbit, will move at a constant rate. (This required the imposition of irrational demigods to speed the planet up or slow it down as it moved in this circular path.)

The question which struck fear in the hearts and minds of Aristoteleans to this day was: “How could the planet know to stay on this eccentric orbit?”

Since in an eccentric orbit, the planets’ distance from the Sun is always changing, the planet is have to constantly re-define its path, in every interval of action no matter how small. There is no way for the planet to define this path from the standpoint of simple straight line action between the planet and the Sun. Rather, the planet’s orbit must be defined by something outside the orbit itself. That “something” is what Kepler referred to in his “Epilogue” as the relationship of the Sun to the each planet individually and the relationship of the Sun to all the planets, which is the same as the relationship of noos to dianoia.

But, how can this “something” be measured? For this, Kepler had to settle for what he acknowledged was an imperfect method.

As Kepler recounts in the “New Astronomy”:

“My first error was to suppose that the path of the planet is a perfect circle, a supposition that was all the more noxious a thief of time the more it was endowed with the authority of all philosophers, and the more convenient it was for metaphysics in particular. Accordingly, let the path of the planet be a perfect eccentric…”

“Since, therefore, the times of a planet over equal parts of the eccentric are to one another as the distances of those parts, and since the individual points of the entire semicircle of the eccentric are all at different distances, it was no easy task I set myself when I sought to find how the sums of the individual distances may be obtained. For unless we can find the sum of all of them (and the are infinite in number) we cannot say how much time has elapsed for any one of them. Thus the equation will not be known. For the whole sum of the distances is to the whole periodic time as any partial sum of the distances is to its corresponding time.” (Diagram 5.3 on page 27 of the Fidelio, illustrates Kepler’s problem.)

In other words, while the speeds and distances are constantly changing, Kepler looks to the “sum” of the distances, or the area swept out, which remains constant for equal intervals of time. [See figure.] Thus, with respect to the relationship of the Sun to the individual planets, the “something” expresses itself in this proportionality. However, Kepler ran into a serious problem here. For while if he knew two positions of the planet, he could determine the time it took the planet to move from one position to the other, by calculating the area swept out, he was unable to do the inverse. That is, calculate the positions of the planet, if given the time elapsed. (In terms of diagram 5.4, for example, Kepler could calculate the area swept out (time elapsed) between position P1 and P2, but he was unable to determine a position P3, such that the time elapsed (area swept out) from P1 to P2 is equal to that of P2 to P3. See Fidelio for a complete review of what has since become known as the “Kepler Problem”.)

This begins to answer the question, “How could the planet know to stay on this eccentric orbit?”, but, it begs the next question, “How does the planet know to stay on this eccentric, and not some other?”

For this Kepler turned to the relationship of the Sun to all the planets. All the eccentric orbits were constituted, Kepler found, so that the square of the periodic time was equal to the cube of the average distance to the Sun. (See chapter 7 of the Fidelio.)

Now we have two characteristics of this “something” else, that determines the planetary orbits. Each orbit, though always changing, has its own constant of area to time elapsed, and all the planets have the same constant of the square of the periodic time and the cube of the distance from the Sun. These combined with the ordering according to the five Platonic solids, and the harmonic intervals of the planet’s extreme velocities, characterizes that “something” by which the planet knows to stay in its non-constant orbit.

And that “something else”, is what Gauss and Riemann would later call a function.

Will Canada Join the Rail and Nuclear Renaissance?

will Canada join the growing chorus of nations which are denouncing the neo-liberal ideology of free trade and globalization, or will Canadians blindly follow the dictates of lunatic environmentalists such as David Suzuki and Al Gore?
Around the world nations are moving in a new direction: towards what is now being universally heralded as the

A Challenge to the British System: Why Canada Needs the Bering Strait Tunnel

The relationship of Canada to its railways has always been an existential one; this was true in 1849, the great launching point for 19th-Century Canadian railroading, as it is true today. There are even parallels between the two eras, such as the resistance to change that confronted Canada’s early patriots, as it confronts anyone today, who has a greater vision for Canada than the narrow strip and isolated patches of civilization, currently hugging the U.S. border. The future of Canada is the Northwest, with its untold resources and vast supplies of freshwater; it is one of the final terrestrial frontiers.

Canada is now faced with this era’s existential choice: either develop or collapse. As these words are written, the international financial system is breaking apart in a series of banking crises, which are only a slight foretaste of what imminently approaches. In the meantime, the condition of the country’s infrastructure grows increasingly wretched; our industries continue to disappear, our companies to be seized by thieving hedge and equity funds, while sovereignty seems no more than a quaint dream. Fortunately, however, Russia, taking up Lyndon LaRouche’s visionary Eurasian Land-Bridge proposal of the early 1990s, has offered, both to the United States and Canada, to trilaterally build a Bering Strait Tunnel in order to connect the Americas with the entire Eurasian landmass. The tunnel is, in actuality, part of a Russian offer of a new relationship between the two great powers, to lead the reorganization of the global economy. A new strategic alliance is in the offing, and the basis for solving the economic crisis is now at hand. A great moment has found us: Shall we rise to meet it, or fall victim to our propensity for national littleness? The government of Canada has answered: It claims not to know of Russia’s proposal. Thus it falls to the people to organize themselves and attain the objective, which their currently elected representatives are too cowardly or incompetent to dare.

Thomas Keefer, ‘Prophet of Progress’

When nations take it upon themselves to consider such weighty questions—questions which will undoubtedly affect the entirety of the human race and its posterity, it seems proper to reflect upon the less obvious reasons—at least for the current generation—for this project’s overwhelming importance. It would also be fitting to add to my own voice that of the man who, perhaps more than any other, was responsible for Canada’s first rapid expansion of railroads, an expansion that saved Canada from certain economic ruin beneath the yoke of British rule. The man was Thomas Coltrin Keefer, Canada’s “Prophet of Progress.”

Keefer was born in 1821, into a family of civil engineers, growing up immersed in the construction of one of the greatest infrastructure projects of the period, the Welland Canal, which circumvented the previously indomitable Niagara Falls. Keefer’s father was the first president of the Welland Canal Company, and a close friend of the driving force behind the project, the man who was also the mentor of young Keefer, William Hamilton Merritt. At 17, Keefer left home and spent two years, 1838-40, working on the Erie Canal, the preeminent American engineering school of its day, digesting American System methods and philosophy. Keefer then spent the 1840s working on the Welland Canal, as well as on other engineering jobs, until 1849, when Merritt, who had just attained one of the top posts in Canada’s colonial government, commissioned him to compose a pamphlet promoting railroad development in Canada, at a time when all of Canada had no more than 60 miles of railway. The pamphlet was entitled Philosophy of Railroads; and it was a direct attack, not only upon the domineering British System of free trade, but also that depraved and bestial conception of man so beloved of the British oligarchy, as well as their philosophers and economists.

The pamphlet’s success was immediate and astonishing. In less than a year Philosophy of Railroads was in its third printing, had been reprinted in scores of Canadian newspapers, and was circulating throughout the United States as well. By 1853, there was also a French edition. One contemporary biographer claimed that Keefer contributed more than any other to the building of railroads in Canada, even though he himself would never actually supervise one’s construction; rather, Keefer’s power was located in his capacity to convey ideas, and to overcome the colonial axioms within the people themselves, which prevented the adoption of American System policies in Canada. As a direct result of his political intervention and the work of Merritt in passing crucial railroad legislation, over the course of the 1850s, Canada’s patriotic circles would build several thousand miles of track, adopt American System protectionism, and lead an attempt during the U.S. Civil War to break Canada away from the British System.

Keefer would go on to play a leading role in the construction of water management systems in a number of cities, as well as to found the Canadian Society of Civil Engineering, serving as its first president. Moreover, he is the only Canadian to have also served as president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. In 1878, as his crowning achievement, Keefer was named the executive commissioner for Canada at the Paris Exhibition, assembling a greater show of domestically produced machine tools than any nation save Germany and the United States. He was one of the first Canadians to agitate for a continental railway; he also had an ecstatic vision for Canada’s economic future when, in 1898, he spoke of a future of high-speed, electrified trains, running silently between clean, well-lighted cities.

‘Philosophy of Railroads’

Now, to return to the issue at hand. As every true humanist and national patriot has understood, the issue of development is not merely one of balance sheets and cost-benefit analysis; nor is it simply about the expansion of trade and production; but rather, it is a question of the very nature of man: that we have the capacity not only to improve ourselves, but nature as well; that nations must be dedicated to the improvement of their people; that the Hobbesian nightmare of globalization is not inevitable; that we may forge instead that prescient vision of Franklin D. Roosevelt—a community of sovereign nation-states, working together for the welfare of all. For this reason, it is necessary to speak of the Bering Strait Tunnel not simply as an infrastructure project, but as an idea, as a transformative process with profound economic, cultural, and moral implications. Keefer himself often referred to the railroad as “the iron civilizer”; or as one of his biographers, H.V. Nelles, wrote, “as a train of consequences as opposed to a simple line of track,” that “the aim of Philosophy of Railroads was to establish a direct linkage between the railroad and the noblest ideals of the age, and to illuminate the process through which steam technology would necessarily advance the material improvement and the moral perfection of man.”

Today, we may not speak of “steam technology,” but we surely speak of nuclear fission, thermonuclear fusion, and magnetic-levitation trains. These represent, as Lyndon LaRouche has repeatedly pointed out, the metaphorical fire of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, for the giving of which to humankind the immortal Prometheus is eternally punished by the oligarchic Zeus. As Keefer argues, and as the testament of history proves, great projects have the effect of elevating an otherwise backward population out of their often self-imposed cultural darkness, such as the “Sleepy Hollow” that was early 19th-Century Canada (see below and Appendix). Speaking before the Montreal Mechanics Institute in 1853, he asked:

[I]s there not reason for belief that the regeneration of the dark corners of the Earth is to be accomplished … by a practical elevation of the people, to be brought about by a rapid development of commerce and the arts? Ignorance and prejudice will flee before advancing prosperity. Wherever a railway breaks in upon the gloom of a secluded district, new life and vigor are infused into the native torpor—the long desired market is obtained … the hitherto useless waterfall now turns the laboring wheel, now drives the merrier spindle, the cold and hungry are now clothed and nourished.

Keefer understood that without economic prosperity, peace and stability would be impossible: whether it was the development of North America then, or the prospects for peace today in the Middle East, the same principle applies. He observed that “the steamboat and the railroad … have diffused a degree of comfort and prosperity unprecedented in history. Every new manufacture, every new machine, every mile of railway built is not only of more practical benefit, but is a more efficient civilizer, a more speedy reformer, than years of declamation, agitation, or moral legislation.”

But what was it that Keefer and Merritt recognized in the culture that required their intervention? In Philosophy of Railroads, Keefer observes, of revolutionary projects and systems, that “their origin and maturity are the work of the well-informed few, whose foresight has been rewarded frequently before it has been acknowledged … who have contended with the chilling influences of popular apathy, ignorance, and incredulity.” Could Keefer not just as easily be speaking of the national malaise of today? The railway system of Canada was once a source of pride for Canadians—it was a demonstration of our command over nature. We had straddled the vast continental expanses with an iron belt of power; the railways were the sinews and the great commercial arteries of the nation. There was a time when Canada hummed with the excited energy of national expansion, there was nothing that could not be overcome; and yet today, beneath the tyranny of the Baby-Boomer generation’s anti-progress ideology, we no longer build, we no longer produce, we only desire to consume, at the expense of our future.

Keefer’s answer, which is the central feature of Philosophy of Railroads, is to paint a comic miniature of Canadian society, as true today as it was in his time: a little town called “Sleepy Hollow,” where nothing happens and there are no railroads to trouble the residents with “the hideous screech of the steam whistle”; where the people believe they have “attained the limit of improvement. If they have no waterpower … it is clear to their minds that they were never destined for manufacturing; … it is still more evident, from their position, they are not to become a commercial people and build up large cities; they, therefore, jog along with evident self-satisfaction—the venerable churchyard is filling up with tombstones—and the quiet residents arrive at the conclusion that they are a particularly favored people in having escaped the rage for improvement.” Of course all this changes when the railway comes to town, though first the people suffer from terrible visions of “bloody skirmishes” with railway workers, of “plundered poultry yards and abducted pigs,” of children ” ‘drawn and quartered’ on the rail by the terrible locomotive,” while the railway engineers and surveyors “are met with curses both loud and deep.”

These terrible visions come to an end, however, when the townspeople begin to realize the manifest benefits that the railroad brings with it: The population is enriched and elevated, for while “our little hamlet [is] undergoing such a wonderful transformation, the moral influence of the iron civilizer upon the old inhabitants is bringing a rapid ‘change over the spirit of their dreams.’ ” The citizens become worldlier, wealthier, more educated; their politics take on a national scope. Progress, “that invisible power which has waged successful war with the material elements, will assuredly overcome the prejudices of mental weakness or the designs of mental tyrants. It calls for no co-operation, it waits for no convenient season, but with a restless, rushing, roaring assiduity, it keeps up a constant and unavoidable spirit of enquiry or comparison; and while ministering to the material wants, and appealing to the covetousness of the multitude, impels them to a more intimate union with their fellow men.”

Keefer playfully finds a way to outflank the culture’s axioms. The individual can look at the silliness of the townspeople and their response to the “terrible locomotive,” and chuckle at finding that same silliness in him or herself; but Keefer does more than that, for he is not just concerned with poking fun at the population—he wishes to uplift the reader to a nobler conception of human potential, and to establish a mission of national progress. There is an urgency to his tone, when, at the close of the pamphlet, he writes,

We are placed beside a restless, early-rising, “go-ahead” people—a people who are following the sun westward…. We cannot hold back … we must use what we have or lose what we already possess—capital, commerce, friends and children will abandon us for better furnished lands unless we at once arouse from our lethargy; we can no longer afford to loiter away our winter months, or slumber through the morning hours…. But when once the barriers of indifference, prejudice and ignorance are broken down, no physical or financial obstacle can withstand the determined perseverance of intelligent, self-controlled industry.

We submit the foregoing view of the railway system and our position to it, to the generous and patriotic consideration of every intelligent merchant, manufacturer, farmer, and mechanic—to every Canadian, native or adopted—and ask them: Shall we have railroads in Canada?

Oligarchical Strategy

There is another point of consideration in the case for the Bering Strait Tunnel and great projects in general: the geopolitical and strategic implications, which are understood much more clearly today than in Keefer’s time, thanks to the tireless work of Lyndon LaRouche, the kernel of which is human creativity—the great fear of every imperial or oligarchical system. In his recent paper “Man & the Skies Above” (EIR, June 1, 2007), LaRouche writes:

The great paradox which oligarchism represents, is that the ability of the human species to maintain a level of population above that of the great apes, depends absolutely on those creative powers unique to the human individual mind through which scientific and related discoveries produce the means for increase in both the potential size of population, and its life-expectancy. If the population were permitted to share, freely, the knowledge and freedom to employ such knowledge corresponding to presently knowable scientific and related skills, where would there be inequality on which the oligarchical systems depend?

If the capabilities for scientific and related discoveries, which advance the standard of life and power over adversities, make societies stronger, per capita and per square kilometer of territory, why hold back scientific and technological progress? Why insist on wildly hedonistic, irrational entertainments, rather than Classical culture which enhances the individual’s power to think, and sweetens the social relations with other persons? Simply, because the power which such means promote among the generality of the population would bring an end to the system of oligarchy.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Herein lies the fundamental issue of the Bering Strait project; just as World Wars I and II were organized by the British oligarchy to destroy Russia and continental Europe (documented extensively by EIR), now today these same British networks, typified by BAE Systems, and their lackey, U.S. Vice President Cheney, are driving for expanded war throughout Eurasia.

Thus, the struggle for Eurasian development and a new international financial system, free of oligarchical control, is the latest phase in this Promethean contest for the minds of humankind: the very question of whether the citizens of the world will have the opportunity to participate in scientific and technological progress, whether they will have the opportunity to develop themselves and make positive contributions to the advancement of civilization. These are the issues of statecraft that drive men such as LaRouche to make the breakthroughs in science and economy that he has made, and then organize the population to see them implemented; these are the issues that drove Keefer and his collaborators to mobilize Canada around an idea of the future potential, of what were still a collection of impoverished British colonies, clinging to the verge of an awesome wilderness of 9 million square kilometers. For Keefer, as for LaRouche, the greatest gift that can be given a human being is access to his or her own immortality—something that globalization denies to the vast majority of human beings.

In the same 1853 speech, Keefer concluded with this idea of immortality, in the spirit of the “pursuit of happiness” clause of the U.S. Declaration of Independence:

[blockquote]I venture to believe that, as mechanics we may devote some moments to a consideration of the tendencies, the prospects, and the utility of the great enterprises, which give character to the age, and in the execution of which we are in a greater or lesser degree the agents—that this feeling of being useful in our day and generation will while away with a diminished degree of weariness the many hours of labor—that as you ply the busy hammer or wield the heavier sledge, some of you may dream that you are fast driving nails into the coffin of prejudice, of ignorance, of superstition and national animosities; that as you turn down the bearings or guide the unerring steel over all the 500 parts of a locomotive engine, fancy will picture you cutting deep, and smooth, and true, into obstacles which have so long separated one district, one family, one people, from another—and that you may exult in the reflection that those huge drivers will yet tread out the last smoldering embers of discord, that those swift revolving wheels—by practically annihilating time and space and by re-uniting the scattered members of many a happy family—will smooth the hitherto rugged path, fill up the dividing gulf, break through the intervening ridge, overcome or elude the ups and downs of life’s checkered journey, and speed the unwearied traveler upon his now rejoicing way.[/blockquote]

It is this joyful Promethean impulse which has built Canada into one of the most prosperous nations in the world, not the British imperial legacy. That Canada even exists today is in spite of Britain. Though restrained by British philosophical dogmas, such as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations or Theory of the Moral Sentiments, in which Smith claims that humans have no capacity to think beyond their sensual appetites, acting only in their immediate self-interest, and that the greater issues of the common good are to be left to the (hopefully) munificent designs of some unknowable deity—this nation has still managed to do many great things. The inspiration for those deeds came not from Britain, but from the U.S. republic and the republican tradition that found its beginnings in ancient Greece. Prometheus, the fire-giver, the ennobler of mankind, is the only true identity of Canada’s historical nation-builders.

It is this same latent impulse, which the Bering Strait Tunnel calls upon today. Entire peoples await the enlightening force of nuclear power, the rushing sound of the maglev, and the sight of bounteous fields, laden with well-watered crops, where desert once had reigned. Canada has a great role to play in this dawning era, if it so chooses. Canada’s mission and purpose is to be sought not only within the bounds of our own lands, but deep below the Arctic seas, across and beneath the Siberian steppe, and in the deserts of Asia and Africa. It begins with the Bering Strait. Thus, as Keefer once before, now again the Canadian LaRouche Youth Movement submits this treatise, to all manufacturers, farmers and people of commerce, Canadians born and newly landed, of all who would see a single nation, dignified and beneficent towards others, and we ask: Canada, shall we build the Bering Strait Tunnel?

APPENDIX

The Awakening of ‘Sleepy Hollow’

This is an excerpt from T.C. Keefer’s Philosophy of Railroads (1850).

Let us take a case of which Canada (we are proud and sad to say) presents more than one instance. A well cultivated district, in which all the lands are occupied (perhaps by the second generation) with or without waterpower, but situated twenty to fifty miles from the chief towns upon our great highway, the St. Lawrence, and without navigable water communication with it. The occupants are all thriving and independent farmers, the water power is employed only to an extent to meet their local wants, and the village is limited to the few mechanics, and the one store required for this rural district. The barter of the shopkeeper is restricted by the consumption of his customers, and he becomes the sole forwarder of the surplus product of the district. There is no stimulus for increased production—there are less facilities for it: the redundant population have all been accustomed to agriculture, and as the field for this is unrestricted, they move Westward to prevent a subdivision of the homesteads, and to become greater landowners than their fathers. There exists the well known scarcity of laborers for the harvest, because there is no employment for them during the remainder of the year; and they have not yet been led by necessity to that subdivision of labor and that variety of employment which are the results of an increasing and more confined population. Each farmer has his comfortable house, his well-stored barn, variety of stock, his meadows and his woodland; he cultivates only as much as he finds convenient, and his slight surplus is exchanged for his modest wants. Distance, the expense of transportation, and the absence of that energy which debt or contract with busier men should produce, have prevented any efforts to supply the commercial towns on the part of the contented denizens of our “Sleepy Hollow.” To themselves, to the superficial observer, their district has attained the limit of improvement. If they have no water power, or one limited to the supply of the needful grist or saw mill, it is clear to their minds that they were never destined for manufacturing people; and if they have abundant water power, their local market would not support one manufactory, while land carriage, want of people, money, and more than all information, precludes the idea of their manufacturing for a distant market. It is still more evident, from their position, they are not to become a commercial people and build up large cities; they, therefore, jog along with evident self-satisfaction—the venerable churchyard is slowly filling up with tombstones—and the quiet residents arrive at the conclusion that they are a peculiarly favored people in having escaped the rage for improvement. They are grateful that their farms have not been disfigured by canals or railroads, or the spirits of their sires troubled with the hideous screech of the steam whistle.

We will now suppose (we would we could more than suppose), that two of our cities should be moved to unite by the iron bond of a Railway, which in its course will traverse the district just described. Excitement prevails in the “Hollow”; sleep has deserted her peculiar people—the livelong night is passed in mutual contemplation of farms “cut up” or covered over—visions of bloody skirmishes between “Far downs” and Corkonians—of rifled gardens and orchards, of plundered poultry yards and abducted pigs. The probable mother of a possible child bewails her future offspring “drawn and quartered” on the rail by the terrible locomotive, and a whole hecatomb of cattle, pigs and sheep, are devoted by imagination to this insatiate Juggernaut. The Engineers who come to spy out the land are met with curses both loud and deep—the laws of property are discussed—the delinquent Member for the County denounced—until a handsome Rodman, by well-timed admiration of Eliza Ann, the rural spokesman’s daughter, succeeds in obtaining comfortable quarters for his party, with board, lodging, and washing, at 12s. 6d. per week. The work has commenced; the farmer is offered better prices for his hay and grain than he ever before received—even milk and vegetables—things he never dreamed of selling—are now sought for; his teams, instead of eating up his substance as formerly in winter, are constantly employed, and his sons are profitably engaged in “getting out timber” for the contractors; he grows a much larger quantity of oats and potatoes than before—and when the workmen have left, he finds to his astonishment that his old friend the storekeeper is prepared to take all he can spare, to send by the Railroad “down to town.”

And now some of the “city folks” come out and take up a water privilege, or erect steam power, and commence manufacturing. Iron is bought, cut into nails, screws and hinges. Cotton is spun and wove, and all the variety of manufactures introduced, because here motive power, rents and food are cheaper, and labor more easily controlled than in the cities, while transportation and distance have by the Railroad been reduced to a minimum. A town has been built and peopled by the operatives—land rises rapidly in value—the neglected swamp is cleared and the timber is converted into all sorts of wooden “notions”—tons of vegetables, grains, or grasses, are grown where none grew before—the patient click of the loom, the rushing of the shuttle, the busy hum of the spindle, the thundering of the trip-hammer, and the roaring of steam, are mingled in one continuous sound of active industry. While the physical features of our little hamlet are undergoing such a wonderful transformation, the moral influence of the “iron civilizer” upon the old inhabitants is bringing a rapid “change over the spirit of their dreams.” The young men and the maidens, the old men and the matrons, daily collect around the cars: they wonder where so many well-dressed and rich-looking people come from and are going to, &c.—what queer machines those are which they see passing backwards and forwards. They have perhaps an old neighbor whose son had long since wandered off, and now they see him returned, a first class passenger with all the prestige of broadcloth, gold chains, rings, gloves, and a traveled reputation: the damsels rapidly impress upon “the mind’s eye” the shapes of bonnets, visites, &c., of that superior class of beings who are flying (like angels) over the country, and drink in, with wide-mouthed admiration, the transcendent splendor and indescribable beauty of “that ‘ere shawl.” All are interested, all are benefited, cuique suum. Is he a farmer? He has a practical illustration of the superior cheapness of transportation by increasing the load, notwithstanding the great cost of the cuttings, embankments, tunnels, bridges, engines, cars, and stations, carrying his produce for less sum than his personal expenses and the feeding of his horses would amount to. Is he a blacksmith? He determines his son shall no longer shoe horses, but build engines. Is he a carpenter? He is proud of his occupation as he surveys the new bridge built over the old creek. Even the village tailor gathers “a wrinkle,” as he criticizes the latest effort of Buckmaster or Gibb, whilst the unconscious advertiser is swallowing his coffee. Thus curiosity and emulation are excited and the results are discernable in a general predilection for improved “modes.” A spirit is engendered which is not confined to dress or equipage, but is rapidly extended to agriculture, roads, and instructive societies, and finally exerts its most powerful influence where it is most needed—in the improved character it gives to the exercise of the franchise. This right is now enjoyed by too large a class, whose chief contact with public affairs has been limited to an occasional chat with ambitious retailers of dry goods, groceries, hardware, and political mysteries—or to a semi-annual sitting in a jury box, unconsciously absorbing all the virtuous indignation of some nisi prius wrangler, whose “familiar face” is shortly after presented to them at the hustings, generously proffering to defend or advocate anything for four dollars per diem and a prospective Judgeship. He is opposed, perhaps, by the public-spirited shopkeeper, who, with mortgages, long credits, tea and tobacco—aided by a “last call” to all doubtful supporters—incites the noble yeomanry to assert their rights as “free and independent electors.” If the “natives” can overcome these prejudices of local associations, or if the lawyer’s “collections” and “notes” are sufficiently diffuse, ten change to one the greatest talker is elected, and an improved judicature, instead of an improved country, is the result.

Nothing would be a more powerful antidote to this state of primitive, but not innocuous simplicity, than the transit of Railways through our agricultural districts. The civilizing tendency of the locomotive is one of the modern anomalies, which however inexplicable it may appear to some, is yet so fortunately patent to all, that it is admitted as readily as the action of steam, though the substance be invisible and its secret ways be unknown to man. Poverty, indifference, the bigotry or jealousy of religious denominations, local dissentions or political demagoguism may stifle or neutralize the influence of the best intended efforts of an educational system; but that invisible power which has waged successful war with the material elements, will assuredly overcome the prejudices of mental weakness or the designs of mental tyrants. It calls for no co-operation, it waits for no convenient season, but with restless, rushing, roaring assiduity, it keeps up a constant and unavoidable spirit of enquiry or comparison; and while ministering to the material wants, and appealing to the covetousness of the multitude, it unconsciously, irresistibly, impels them to a more intimate union with their fellow men.

Go West Young Man! Questions Relative to American and Canadian History

[available in a pdf dossier here]

[Following my internal memo on THE TRAGIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE QUEBEC ACT OF 1774, sent to you on 7/4/2007, I am putting out some questions for public discussion to the Montreal LYM in order to suggest guidelines for a joint Canadian-American history project in line with LaRouche’s mission of {America’s Manifest Destiny}. This report was written before the author had the opportunity to read the book of Henri Gosselin, {George Washington’s French-Canadian Spy.}]

The Significance of the Quebec Act for the US and Canada.

In 1776, at the time when in the American colonies, the greatest liberation movement in all of history was asserting itself, as the “{Beacon of Hope and the Temple of Liberty}” for all of mankind, a wall of British oligarchical lies, known as the Quebec Act of 1774, was erected around a “{neighboring Province}” in order to prevent the United States from being born. For the American Continental Congress, the Quebec Act became the most important reason for pushing the 13 colonies of America to unite and to “{dissolve their political bands}” with Britain on July 4, 1776.

The irony of this Quebec Act is that it was not designed for improving the lives of Canadians, but for the purpose of destroying Americans and their constitutional principles. This Intolerable Act, as it was called in America, was concocted by the British East India Company, otherwise known as the Lords of Trade and Plantations, for extending invasively the territorial boundaries of the Province of Quebec deep inside of the American territory, south to the Ohio River and West to the Mississippi River, by means of the Gentleman Adventurer’s Hudson’s Bay Company, in order to prevent the Americans from reaching westward toward the Pacific Ocean, thereby, putting an end to the unique experiment of American exceptionalism, that is, George Washington’s {Manifest Destiny}. From that strategic standpoint, both North and South America were to be secured and isolated from the infection of British oligarchism that had taken root in Canada. It was within the context of that exceptional moment of history that the Quebec Act was also meant to prevent the French Canadians from joining the American Revolution. Moreover, this infectious disease known as the Quebec Act was to hang like a Damocles’ sword over the Americas from that day forward.

Since the Quebec Act is still, to this day, the founding document that established British Canada as a colony, the following thoughts are therefore aimed at provoking public discussion that will help define political guidelines for taking appropriate actions in changing this continuously intolerable and fraudulent state of affairs inside of Canada, and to see how that nation-state can become a fruitful participant in the Grand Design of the LaRouche Bering Strait tunnel proposal linking up the Americas with Eurasia.

If 1776 reflected a great moment of history that was missed by a little people in Canada, let it be understood that the current opportunity of the LaRouche Grand Design, today, is a similar moment of history. So, the question is: will the Canadian people seize the opportunity of joining this second American Revolution?

Here, however, a note of caution is required. These questions are not aimed at raising a public debate over the Constitutionality of Canada at this time. It would have been better to initiate that dialogue, a few years ago, when the Vancouver proposal for a constitutional consensus amendment formula was introduced. But it is too late for that now. However, there is a preliminary step which can be taken before a full debate over the Constitutional reform of Canada may be undertaken. The focus for raising these questions must be the mission of planetary self-development for the next fifty years, along the lines of LaRouche’s Eurasian Landbridge and the Bering Strait. This requires absolutely that Canadian citizens and Canadian political leaders resolve in their own minds the crucial anomalies posed by the Quebec Act. Without solving these fundamental questions, there is no chance that Canada could appropriately tackle the challenge of the next fifty years and more, in collaboration with the four primary powers, namely, the United States, Russia, China, and India. Therefore the time has come to get rid of the fallacious British oligarchical thinking that has been preventing the nation of Canada and the rest of the world from developing.

America’s Manifest Destiny.

In the retrospective search for attempting to explain the causes for the deeply rooted discontent between the English and French in Canada, invariably, one has to come to grips with the nature of the Quebec Act of 1774 that created the modern form of Canada in the first place. So, investigating the historical specificities that derived from this legislation is the prerequisite historical work that can help explain what caused the present state of political and cultural crisis in Canada. This work will also help us discover the alternate policies that will restore Canada as a more truthful sovereign nation-state for future generations. Therefore, the first and most important aspect to be considered lies in the fact that this intolerable Quebec Act did not succeed in destroying Americans but has been destroying Canadians for over 200 years. In other words, to this day, this founding legislation has not been serving its intended purpose. This is not a matter to be taken lightly and with fleeting discussions; this is a matter of life and death for a people and its posterity.

The truth of this matter is so crucial that it was deemed necessary to be included explicitly in the American Declaration of Independence itself. The signers of the Declaration denounced this Quebec Act:“{For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.}”

There are two points to be considered here. One is with regard to Americans and the other is with respect to Canadians.

To Americans, the Quebec Act was considered to be the most dangerous of all five Intolerable Acts legislated by the British Parliament between 1763 and 1774. The Quebec Act created, in North America, the precedent that actually banned the idea of self-government and erected a barrier against the George Washington project of {Manifest destiny,} that is, the project for the development of western territories all the way to the Pacific Ocean. This {Manifest Destiny} idea was precisely the original root-idea that gave birth to the LaRouche’s Bering Strait project, linking the entire world with anti-oligarchical republics around the principle of basic human rights and self-development of constitutionally sovereign nation-states and grounded in the principle of the benefit of the other of the Peace of Westphalia.

Figure. 1. Painting by John Gast entitled {American Progress} (Around 1872). Gast used Columbia as the personification of the United States to represent the {Manifest Destiny} of America leading civilization westward.

As LaRouche demonstrated, the idea of {Manifest Destiny} actually originated in ancient Greece, with Solon of Athens, was later restored with the Renaissance of Nicholas of Cusa and was defined in America by the founder of New England, John Winthrop. The founding father who most embodied the idea of {Manifest Destiny} was Silas Deane. However, the idea became the official American policy doctrine under John Quincy Adams and was established as the basis for a community of principle in his Monroe Doctrine. This policy is always standing today and must pursued with renewed vigor.[1]

The term “destiny” attached to this policy was coined originally by John Quincy Adams in a letter written from Russia to his father John Adams, and in which he stated: “{The whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine providence to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs. For the common happiness of them all, for their peace and prosperity, I believe it indispensable that they should be associated in one federal Union.}”[2]

The idea was meant to cut off the newly created republic from the poison of oligarchism coming from the East and to push the development of American republicanism westward. Bring civilization to the West. “{The struggle was always–colonize westward}, noted Lyndon LaRouche. “{Bring the best people from Europe, the best common people who believed in this idea; bring them to this land, develop this land, move westward, open the way to the west, keep moving westward.}”[3]

This is why, in their {Declarations and Resolves of Oct. 14, 1774}, the American Continental Congress of Philadelphia recognized that the Quebec Act was a direct assault against the idea of {Manifest Destiny}. They identified the Quebec Act as being “{unjust, and cruel, as well as unconstitutional, and most dangerous and destructive of American rights.}” I will recall, here, only a few of the most vocal American leaders who denounced the Quebec Act for the fallacy of composition that it is and for the danger it represented against the American progress of civilization westward.

On October 21, 1774, John Jay, the first Chief Justice from New York, drafted a letter to the People of Great Britain, in which he denounced the Quebec Act as follows:”{In the session of parliament last mentioned, an act was passed, for changing the government of Quebec, by which act the Roman Catholic religion, instead of being tolerated, as stipulated by the treaty of peace, is established; and the people there deprived of a right to an assembly, trials by jury and the English laws in civil cases abolished, and instead thereof, the French laws established, in direct violation of his Majesty’s promise by his royal proclamation, under the faith of which many English subjects settled in that province: and the limits of that province are extended so as to comprehend those vast regions, that lie adjoining to the northerly and westerly boundaries of these colonies.}”[4]

On the same day (October 21, 1774), Patrick Henry of Virginia drafted the following address to the king: “{Judge Royal Sir what must be our feelings when we see our fellow subjects of that Town & Colony suffering a Severity of punishment of which the British History gives no Example, & the Annals of Tyranny can scarcely equal? And when we see in the Fate of this our sister Colony that which awaits us, we are filled with the most terrible apprehensions–Apprehensions which are heightened & increased almost to Despair, when we turn our Attention to the Quebec Act.}”

It was Silas “Ticonderoga” Deane, Chairman of the Committee on Safety for the colony of Connecticut, who sounded the alarm about the explicit danger to {Manifest Destiny}, by sending a letter to Samuel Adams, Chairman of the same committee for Massachusetts, warning him of the dangers respecting western territories. Deane called for immediate migration of large numbers of Europeans (up to a million settlers) to stake their claims in these territories. He considered that “{This, or some such plan, will most effectually defeat the design of the Quebec Bill, which if not broke thro’ & defeated in some shape or other, will be the most fatally mischievous to the British Colonies of any Bill ever framed by the Ministry, or that may possibly ever enter into their Hearts To conceive of}.” In fact, the Quebec Act had stripped Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Virginia of their lawful claims to western lands. Like Silas Deane, the Virginian, Richard Henry Lee, considered the Quebec Act as the “{worst grievance}” of all intolerable acts against America.

On November 13, 1774, Silas Dean explained why the Quebec Act represented such a great danger to the grand design of {Manifest Destiny}:

“{The extending & fixing Settlements of Protestants Westward will not only bring about this wished-for event, but will be in future Days Our greatest Strength & Security. Another Tier as I may say of Colonies settled back of Us will be, an inexhaustible resource to Us, &c render Us humanely speaking invincible though the united Powers of the whole World should attack Us. Look at a Map, & see, the situation of the Countries between 40.° & 45.° through the Continent. This is the New England Inheritance, as fairly secured for them, by their Ancestors, as any one Acre they Now possess, and once well settled with Our People, & their descendants, will give Law, not to North & South America alone, but to the World if they please.

“This will, & must be the most independent Country on the Globe, inland Seas or Lakes, and Rivers extending quite across the Continent in those parallels, and the Western extremity lands Us at the very Door, of the Treasures of the East, and The South. If the Contemplation of these future events give Us pleasure every effort of Ours to ripen them if successful, in degree realizes them. This can hardly be called the pleasure of the imagination only, but rather the pleasure of anticipating great, & important realities, & such as are hastening on, & in the arrival of which, the happiness of Mankind is most deeply interested}.”[6]

Figure 2. Map of colonial America representing how under the Quebec Act 1774 the British had claims west of he American colonies.[5]

The American Congress Invitation to French-Canadians.

For the benefit of Canadians, however, the most important American intervention against the Quebec Act came on October 26, 1774, from Richard Henry Lee, a Senator from Virginia, who drafted for the Continental Congress a 12-page letter {To the Inhabitants of Quebec,} calling on the French-Canadians to repudiate the Act and join the American Revolution.

“[…]{The injuries of Boston have roused and associated every colony, from Nova-Scotia to Georgia. Your province is the only link wanting, to complete the bright and strong chain of union. Nature has joined your country to theirs. Do you join your political interests? For their own sakes, they never will desert or betray you. Be assured, that the happiness of a people inevitably depends on their liberty, and their spirit to assert it. The value and extent of the advantages tendered to you are immense. Heaven grant you may not discover them to be blessings after they have bid you an eternal adieu.”

“We are too well acquainted with the liberality of sentiment distinguishing your nation to imagine, that difference of religion will prejudice you against a hearty amity with us. You know that the transcendent nature of freedom elevates those who unite in her cause above all such low-minded infirmities. The Swiss Cantons furnish a memorable proof of this truth. Their union is composed of Roman Catholic and Protestant States, living in the utmost concord and peace with one another and thereby enabled, ever since they bravely vindicated their freedom, to defy and defeat every tyrant that has invaded them. […]}”

After describing to the French-Canadians the American “{invaluable rights}”; 1) the right to share in one’s own government; 2) the right to a trial by jury; 3) the right of liberty of the person with a writ of Habeas Corpus; 4) the right of holding lands by the tenure of easy rent; and 5) the right of freedom of the press, the letter made an amazing critique of the Quebec Act by identifying its shortcomings, point by point. The complete version of the letter {To the inhabitants of Quebec} accompanies this text in attachment.

“{These are the invaluable rights that form a considerable part of our mild system of government; that, sending its equitable energy through all ranks and classes of men, defends the poor from the rich, the weak from the powerful, the industrious from the rapacious, the peaceable from the violent, the tenants from the lords, and all from their superiors.

“These are the rights without which a people cannot be free and happy, and under the protecting and encouraging influence of which these colonies have hitherto so amazingly flourished and increased.

“These are the rights a profligate Ministry are now striving by force of arms to ravish from us, and which we are with one mind resolved never to resign but with our lives.

“These are the rights you are entitled to and ought at this moment in perfection to exercise. And what is offered to you by the late Act of Parliament in their place? Liberty of conscience in your religion? No. God gave it to you; and the temporal powers with which you have been and are connected, firmly stipulated for your enjoyment of it. If laws, divine and human, could secure it against the despotic caprices of wicked men, it was secured before.

“Are the French laws in civil cases restored? It seems so. But observe the cautious kindness of the Ministers, who pretend to be your benefactors. The words of the statute are-that those “laws shall be the rule, until they shall be varied or altered by any ordinances of the Governor and Council.” Is the “certainty and lenity of the criminal law of England, and its benefits and advantages,” commended in the said statute, and said to “have been sensibly felt by you,” secured to you and your descendants? No. They too are subjected to arbitrary “alterations” by the Governor and Council; and a power is expressly reserved of appointing “such courts of criminal, civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, as shall be thought proper.” Such is the precarious tenure of mere will by which you hold your lives and religion.

“The Crown and its Ministers are empowered, as far as they could be by Parliament, to establish even the Inquisition itself among you. Have you an Assembly composed of worthy men, elected by yourselves and in whom you can confide, to make laws for you, to watch over your welfare, and to direct in what quantity and in what manner your money shall be taken from you? No. The Power of making laws for you is lodged in the governor and council, all of them dependent upon and removable at the pleasure of a Minister.

“Besides, another late statute, made without your consent, has subjected you to the impositions of Excise, the horror of all free states, thus wresting your property from you by the most odious of taxes and laying open to insolent tax-gatherers, houses, the scenes of domestic peace and comfort and called the castles of English subjects in the books of their law. And in the very act for altering your government, and intended to flatter you, you are not authorized to “assess levy, or apply any rates and taxes, but for the inferior purposes of making roads, and erecting and repairing public buildings, or for other local conveniences, within your respective towns and districts.” Why this degrading distinction? Ought not the property, honestly acquired by Canadians, to be held as sacred as that of Englishmen? Have not Canadians sense enough to attend to any other public affairs than gathering stones from one place and piling them up in another?

“Unhappy people! who are not only injured, but insulted. Nay more! With such a superlative contempt of your understanding and spirit has an insolent Ministry presumed to think of you, our respectable fellow-subjects, according to the information we have received, as firmly to persuade themselves that your gratitude for the injuries and insults they have recently offered to you will engage you to take up arms and render yourselves the ridicule and detestation of the world, by becoming tools in their hands, to assist them in taking that freedom from us which they have treacherously denied to you; the unavoidable consequence of which attempt, if successful, would be the extinction of all hopes of you or your posterity being ever restored to freedom. For idiocy itself cannot believe that, when their drudgery is performed, they will treat you with less cruelty than they have us who are of the same blood with themselves.

“What would your countryman, the immortal Montesquieu, have said to such a plan of domination as has been framed for you? Hear his words, with an intenseness of thought suited to the importance of the subject.— ‘In a free state, every man, who is supposed a free agent, ought to be concerned in his own government: Therefore the legislative should reside in the whole body of the people, or their representatives.’—The political liberty of the subject is a tranquility of mind, arising from the opinion each person has of his safety. In order to have this liberty, it is requisite the government be so constituted, as that one man need not be afraid of another. When the power of making laws, and the power of executing them, are united in the same person, or in the same body of Magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same Monarch or Senate, should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.

“The power of judging should be exercised by persons taken from the body of the people, at certain times of the year, and pursuant to a form and manner prescribed by law. There is no liberty, if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers.” […]

“We do not ask you, by this address, to commence acts of hostility against the government of our common Sovereign. We only invite you to consult your own glory and welfare, and not to suffer yourselves to be inveigled or intimidated by infamous ministers so far as to become the instruments of their cruelty and despotism, but to unite with us in one social compact, formed on the generous principles of equal liberty and cemented by such an exchange of beneficial and endearing offices as to render it perpetual. In order to complete this highly desirable union, we submit it to your consideration whether it may not be expedient for you to meet together in your several towns and districts and elect Deputies, who afterwards meeting in a provincial Congress, may chose Delegates to represent your province in the continental Congress to be held at Philadelphia on the tenth day of May, 1775.}”[7]

The point to be made here, for Canadians, is that the entire sequence of historical events, which have shaped the national character of Canada for the last 233 years, including most prominently the conflicts between the French and English parts of its population, have been caused by the fallacy of this fraudulent Act of Quebec as explained by the members of the American Continental Congress. This means that the very history of Canada cannot be understood without explicit reference to the American Declaration of Independence prepared and established by such a Continental Congress and without investigating its historical specificity with respect to Canada. This must be done simply because the {Arbitrary government}, created by that Quebec Act, had been designed, in reality, under the guise of flattery. How can the people of a nation live under such false pretense of its founding moment and continue living the same lie after two centuries, year in and year out, without ever looking for ways and means to properly correct that long standing mistake?

Now, unless the Americans were wrong in their declarative judgment of 1776, this also means that, for Canadians, the Act of Quebec must also be adjudicated as intolerable to themselves, as against their own self-interest, and that the matter must be dealt with, consequently, in light of the very same principles that the British had trampled on two hundred years ago. Indeed, if the signers of the American Declaration of Independence saw fit to explicitly identify that neighbouring “{Arbitrary government},” as evil and despicable to human freedom, its correction must therefore be viewed by Canadians from the vantage point of the very same principles of {life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness}, that such an Act had been aimed at eradicating also in Canada during the last two centuries.

So, in the spirit of the American {Manifest Destiny}, the time has come for Canadians to break with the chains of oligarchism within your own minds. Let’s get to work! Go West young man!

[1] John Quincy Adams described in a most beautiful manner the purpose of his policy of Manifest Destiny with respect to the American Declaration of Independence. He wrote:

“In a conflict [of] seven years, the history of the war by which you maintained that Declaration, became the history of the civilized world…It was the first solemn declaration by a nation of the only legitimate foundation of civil government. It was the cornerstone of a new fabric, destined to cover the surface of the globe. It demolished at a stroke, the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest. It swept away all of the rubbish of accumulated centuries of servitude. From the day of this Declaration, the people of North America were no longer the fragment of a distant empire, imploring justice and mercy from an inexorable master in another hemisphere. They were a nation, asserting as of right, and maintaining by war, its own existence. A nation was born in a day…It stands, and must forever stand, alone, a beacon on the summit of the mountain, to which all the inhabitants of the earth may turn their eyes for a genial and saving light…a light of salvation and redemption to the oppressed.” (Quoted without source by Nancy Spannaus, Adams’ Community Of Principle: The Monroe Doctrine, EIR, November 16, 2007, p. 68.)

[2] Letter from J.Q. Adams to J. Adams, St. Petersburg, August 31, 1811, in {Writings}, IV, p. 209. Italics added by Samuel Flagg Bemis, {John Quincy Adams, and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy}, New York Alfred A. Knopf, 1949, p. 182.

[3] Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr, {The issue of America’s Manifest Destiny for today}, EIR, January 28, 2000.

[4] John Jay, {Journal of Continental Congress}, October 21, 1774.

[5] The Times Atlas of World History.

[6] Letters of Delegates to Congress: Volume 1, August 1774 – August 1775, Silas Deane to Samuel Adams, p. 262.

[7] Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1774. {To the inhabitants of Quebec}.

The World’s Political Map Changes: Mendeleyev Would Have Agreed

[available in a pdf dossier here]

[important title=”Note”]This article was delivered on April 24, by Dr. Jonathan Tennenbaum, to the Moscow conference on “A Transcontinental Eurasia-America Transport Link via the Bering Strait,” and will appear in Russian and English in a forthcoming issue of FORUM International. The meeting was sponsored by the Russian Academy of Sciences Council for the Study of Productive Forces (SOPS), in conjunction with the Russian Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, the Russian Ministry of Transport, Russian Railroads, and regional governments in Siberia and the Far East.[/important]

The intention to create a trans-Siberian rail system, implicitly extended, across the Bering Strait, to North America, dates implicitly from the visit of Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev to the 1876 U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The defeat of Lord Palmerston’s scheme for destroying the United States, by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s leadership, spread the influence of what was called The American System of political-economy into Russia, as also the Germany reforms under Bismarck, the industrialization of Japan, and elsewhere. These global, so-called geopolitical developments of the post-1865-1876 interval, have been the focal issue of all of the spread of great wars throughout the world from the British orchestration of the first war of Japan against China, in 1894-95, until the 1945 death of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt.

Throughout the ebbs and flows of global economic and geo-political history, up the present day, the realization of Mendeleyev’s intentions for the development of Russia remains a crucial feature of that continuing history of the post-1865-1876 world to the present moment. The revival of the intention launched by him, now, is presently renewed as a crucial quality of included feature of crucial importance for the world as a whole today.

The same impulse toward new world wars persists in new guises today. At the present moment, the world is gripped by what threatens to be, very soon, the greatest global monetary-financial collapse in the entirety of modern history to date. The spread of warfare and related conflict out of Southwest Asia is nothing other than a reflection of the same, continuing, so-called geo-political impulse which has prompted all of the world’s major wars since the 1763 Treaty of Paris, but, more emphatically, the rise of the U.S.A.’s 1865-76 challenge to the Anglo-Dutch Liberal monetary-system.

This onrushing collapse of the world’s presently hyper-inflated, disintegrating world monetary-financial system, requires early concerted emergency action by responsible leading nations. A sudden change in U.S. political trends, back to the traditions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, is urgently needed for this purpose. Such a change in U.S. policy must be realized through emergency cooperation which would be led by a concert of leading world powers. These must include the U.S.A., Russia, China, and India, as the rallying-point for a new, spreading partnership among perfectly sovereign nation-state economies.

In such cooperation, the development of a great network of modern successors to old forms of rail transport, must be spread across continental Eurasia, and across the Bering Strait into the Americas. The economically efficient development of presently barren and otherwise forbidding regions in entry into the urgently needed future development of the planet as a whole.

Such a plan was already crafted, during 1990-1992, under the direction of my wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who remains the principal political and cultural leader among my associates in Europe and beyond. This perspective must now be revived to become a global actuality.

Technologically, the leading thrust of scientific development is located in the succession of the work of such exemplary figures as Mendeleyev and Academician V.I. Vernadsky, and the work of the relevant, but too little heralded leader in the same field, the American pioneer William Draper Harkins.

This requires the creation of long-term diplomatic agreements among nations, creating a new system of relatively fixed-exchange-rate treaty-agreements, at very low prime interest-rates, over forward-looking intervals of between a quarter to half century. These present periods covering the economic-financial half-life-span of principal long-term investments in the development of that basic economic infrastructure which the needs of the present and coming generations of the peoples of these natures require.

We have thus entered a time, measured by the clock of nuclear-fission and thermonuclear power’s development, when the long history of the domination over the land-masses of the planet by actually or implicitly imperial maritime powers, is no longer an acceptable practical proposition. Instead, the science-driven, capital-intensive mode of development of the basic economic infrastructure and standard of living of the populations, will dominate any successful form of civilized development of relations among the sovereign nations of the planet. To this end, the tundras and deserts of our planet must be conquered by the forces of science-driven technological development of the increased productive powers of labor. Development must now proceed from the Arctic rim, southwards, toward Antarctica.

The bridging of the Bering Strait becomes, thus, now, the navel of a new birth of a new world economy.

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