LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

Possibly not quite the present day view. But NO view of tomorrow’s
trade routes is a going to put England plumb in their middle. Brother:
whaaar do you land?
Ezra Pound askin’.
#63 (February 23, 1943) U.S.(C10)
COMPLEXITY
You have to have more than ONE idea in your head to understand
anything. You have to have possibly one idea and a mass of concrete
data either conducin’ to your general idea, or opposin’ it.
And I try occasionally to get you to think of one, the other or both. It
may be confusin’. Get you to think of an economic system, or a
MERCANTILE system, or a monetary system. That is, of an
organization of facts. Brooks Adams wrote a good deal about a
mercantile system. Called it an economic system sometimes. Anyhow,
am I clear if I say he wrote about TRADE routes? Raw materials pass
over a trade route TO a point where they are wanted. Sometimes to a
place where they pass into manufacture, then to a place where the
finished stuff is wanted for consumption. The seats of manufacturin’
shift. Obviously convenient if they are or can be shifted to the sources of
the raw materials, not always handy, but whether the stuff moves raw or
in finished products, the merchandise tends to seek, as they say, the most
expeditious trade route.
On one turnpike four horses could draw three thousand pounds 18 miles
a day. On the Erie canal four horses could draw 200 thousand pounds 24
miles in one day. Hence the prosperity of Manhattan. That is a simple
and homely case out of Woodward, “A New American History.” Brooks
Adams took a wider sweep. Sargon, Alexander, the silver of Quedi, the
Foires de Champagne, Flemish cities, working out a general law for the
vortex of trade and dominion. Might call it the material base for an