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Science and Christian Healing.
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49
In 1775, when the intolerable could no longer be tolerated, the Continental Congress proclaimed the American Independence, which promptly resulted in a war in which Britain tried desperately over a span of six years to recapture its colonial control, but lost on the battle field. The turning point in the war came in 1778 when France entered into an alliance with the newly formed American States. By 1781 Britain was defeated. The victory brought peace, however, England won its own kind of victory over the new nation, of a type that is fundamentally more potent than a direct military victory. As part of the peace treaty that was signed in Paris in 1783, in which England conceded to the rebellious colonies in North America their independence, a special package was conveyed to the North American states and to France, as a gift as it were. This special package was a free-trade policy that was craftily included into the peace accord by the British under the direction of the second Earl of Shelburne who had contracted one of the intellectuals in his employ, a certain Adam Smith, to devise a means for bankrupting the economies of France and the newly formed United States of America.
As it was, Adam Smith had served his masters well. The bankruptcies occurred promptly as requested. In 1789, six years the 'free trade' policy was enacted, the economies of France and the United States were on their knees. The U.S. was drowning in a huge national debt that seemed totally unrepayable. However, the spirit of independence and revolution, that still dominated the minds of men, turned the crushing oligarchic defeat of the economy of the nation into a victory that put the country onto a footing from which it would rise to become the richest nation on earth. The driving spirit for sovereign independence that had begun in 1773 with the Boston Tea party and had blossomed through a revolution, a war, and a crushing economic defeat, had found its reflection in the educational sector where the nation set off a virtual reformation. The revolutionary leaders of the time realized that the success of the nation required a vast diffusion of knowledge. Public education became a priority issue, including public financing for higher learning. By 1791 the nation would reap its first benefit from the increasing focus on spiritual values, such as intelligence, the pursuit of knowledge, of scientific logic, etc. Under the George Washington administration, Alexander Hamilton created the world's first large scale sovereign federal financial system that was designed to take the financing of the nation's development out of the hands of private banking speculators and manipulators, and issue development credits for manufacturing, etc, through a national federal bank. In one brilliant stroke the public's credit was restored. The effect was so dramatic, that in the wave the the developing industrialization mountains of once seemingly worthless securities were turned again into fluid capital for reinvestment into the development of the nation. With stable credit and interest rates assured, the development was so overwhelming that the huge federal debt from the free trade years became actually repayable with little pain to the nation. As one person described the end result: "The national debt became a national blessing."*(Encyclopedia Britannica 1972, Vol.22 p.624)
This was the kind of spiritual rebirth that was taking place throughout the entire northern region in theses year. The colonial serfdom and oligarchic financial domination was replaced with a wind of freedom, coupled with the creation of infrastructures in culture, science, and technologies. Mary Baker Eddy was born at the height of this upwelling cultural revolution in North America, a revolution which in time produced a complete shift in the status of humanity that was felt around the globe.
In real terms, the American Revolution was not a revolution at all. There had long been a tradition of local self-government, as much as this was possible under colonial rule, with a background focus on classical education which had not been defeated in the colonial days under the rule of the English crown. This background of a strong tradition in humanist education may have laid the seeds for the revolution to follow. The final turning point, naturally, was political, arising from the sudden and fundamental alteration of the charter between England and the colonies in the wake of the subversive Venetian takeover of the British monarchy and the government of England around the time of King George I.
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