Chapter XI, Excerpt 2 of 3
The Meaning of the Magna Carta

It is an infallible sign that the political authority is already exercising too much power through the manipulation of finance, whether by exorbitant taxation, uncontrolled expenditure unlimited borrowing, or currency depreciation. The Charter contains a promise from the king that if any man died in debt to money lenders “and if that debt falls into our hands, we will not take anything except the chattel contained in the bond.”

With a wisdom in advance of the age, it did not propose penalization of “the Jews” or financiers, but restriction on the authority of the crown. The industrial-commercial group must have been strongly influential in framing the Magna Carta, though not named as formal parties. “All merchants shall have safety and security in coming into England . . . and in staying and traveling through England.” The kinetic energy was allowed to make the long circuit. England was on the way to world power.

Wrong with this scheme was in the strictly feudal order. Serfs and other workers on the land constituted the factor of mass, and the function of mass was asserted passively, by inertia, through the inherent limitation feudalism imposed on production. The defect was the absence of the mass inertia veto, as a national function, both in fact and in law. The whole land-title system would have had to be altered, to provide individual holdings. Such a thing cannot be done overnight.