e 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,