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EZRA POUND 165
every bureaucrat and liberal. The bureaucrat sees the state as
the god without whom he could not exist; the liberal sees the
state as the only force that can implement his otherwise unpalatable
desires. Even Trotsky pointed out that "Liberal principles can only
be enforced by the police power." But Pound neutralizes these concepts
with his axiom "The state as convenience." It is no accident
that this idea should reach his homeland some three decades after
he had advanced it, for he has often mentioned the thirty-year time
lag in this country before serious work is noticed.
The basis of Ezra's struggle against bureaucracy—his "treason"
if you will—is based on two fundamental concepts: "the state as
convenience" and the tax system as "legalized robbery". It is no
wonder that his captors put him in a madhouse for thirteen years.
No doubt, he would have been shot had they not feared that this
would only accelerate the circulation of his ideas. For they are his
ideas. I fail to discover in Plato or Pascal anything so obvious,
even though these abuses already existed, in a lesser degree, during
their lifetimes.
Ezra once said to me, "I did not understand, until I read Confucius,
the impact of one man upon another." He suggests that Confucius
is the philosophical base for many of his ideas, as explained
in the editorial in The Exile of Autumn, 1927:
"The dreary horror of American life can be traced to two damnable
roots, or perhaps it is only one root: 1. the loss of all distinction
between public and private affairs. 2. the tendency to mess
into other people's affairs before establishing order in one's own
affairs, and in one's thought. To which one might perhaps add the
lack in America of any habit of connecting or correlating any act
or thought to any main principle whatever, the ineffable rudderlessness
of that people. The principle of good is enunciated by
Confucius, it consists of establishing order within oneself. This
order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without special
effort. The principle of evil consists in messing into other people's
affairs. Against this principle of evil no adequate precaution is
taken by Christianity, Moslemism, Judaism, nor, as far as I know,
by any monotheistic religion. Many 'mystics' do not even aim at
the principle of good; they seek merely establishment of a parasitic
relationship with the unknown. The original Quakers may have had