CHAPTER XXIX. A SICK, EMACIATED SOCIAL SYSTEM

The hard times I have been describing were in the early nineties. The

year before there had been a financial crash. Nobody seemed to know what

was the matter at the time, but it has since been learned that the hard

times were the fruit of crop failures, if one can call failure fruit.

All over the world bad years had destroyed the harvests. This great loss

of foodstuffs was exactly the same as if armies in war had ravaged

the fields. Farmers had to borrow money to buy food. They had no other

buying power. So trade languished, credit was strained, and finally

came the financial collapse. It happened after the good crop years were

returning. That's why the people could not understand it. Farmers were

raising crops again, but labor was idle and could not buy bread.

The lesson is this, when commerce is starved down to a certain point, it

goes to pieces. Then when the food comes it can not assimilate it. It is

like a man who has been without food for thirty days. His muscles have

disappeared, his organs have shrunk, he can not walk; he is only skin

and bones. The disappearance of the muscles is like the disappearance

of labor's jobs in hard times. The shrinkage of the vital organs is like

the shrinkage of capital and values. When the starved man is faced with

food he can not set in and eat a regular dinner. He must be fed on a

teaspoonful of soup, and it is many months before his muscles come back,

his organs regain their normal size and he is a well-fed man again. So

it is with the industrial state. It can be starved by crop failures,

by war waste or by labor slacking on the job. Anything that lessens the

output of field and factory, whether it be heaven's drought or man's

loafing, starves the economic state and starves all men in it. If crop

failure should last long enough, as it does in China, millions of men

would die. If war lasts long enough, as it did in Austria, millions of

citizens must starve. If labor should try slacking, as it did in Russia,

the economic state would starve to death and the workers die with it.

Men who have been through strikes and lockouts until they have been

reduced to rags and hunger place no trust in the Russian theory that men

can quit work and loaf their way to wealth. We loafed our way to hunger,

misery and peonage. We saw that the whole world would come to our fate,

if all should follow our example. Luckily we won our point, so we went

back to work and helped feed the starved social state, and in a few

years America was rich again. And America continued rich and fat until

the World War wastage shrank her to skin and bones again. Much of her

muscle has disappeared (1921: five million workers are idle) and she

must be nursed back by big crops, and big output by labor before she

will be strong enough to reabsorb into her system every muscle in

America.

That's my belief. That's my gospel. I did not make this gospel. It is

God's law and we can not alter it. If I were asked to write the BIBLE

OF LABOR, this chapter would be the law and the prophets. And from these

truths I would advise each man to write his own Ten Commandments.