payment for the torture her winters had
inflicted. By this treaty she gave them everything she had and promised
to be good.

We are the inheritors of the good things of that peace treaty. We were
born rich; we revel in the "reparations" that our fathers wrung from a
conquered Nature. But Nature, like Germany, is not really whipped. If we
relax, she will default on her payments. As long as Nature is not really
whipped, her treaty is a scrap of paper. Nature, right now, is preparing
for a come-back. She will not arm openly, for we would then arm to meet
her. She is planning to attack us by a method that is new. She will
weaken us by propaganda, and when we are helpless she will march over us
at will.

Who then are the propagandists that Nature is using to undermine the
race that conquered her? Communists, slackers, sick men and fools.
The man who says let us "quit work and divide our cake and eat it" is
opening the way for Nature to strike suddenly with a famine. The man who
advocates "one big strike" to destroy our capital is the secret agent of
starvation. Nature when up in arms can sweep men off like flies. She has
always done it and she always will, unless man uses his intelligence and
his cooperation to fight the evils in Nature and not to fight his fellow
men.

"Capitalism," as the communists call it, is an imperfect system. But
it is the only system that has banished famine. Under communism and
feudalism there was hunger. Under capitalism the world has been able to
feed twice as many mouths as could be fed before.

Capitalism found a world of wood and iron ore, and made it into a world
of steel. How? It puddled the pig-iron until the dross was out, and the
pure metal was bessemered into steel. Now the task is to purify men
as we have purified metals. Men have dross in their nature. They
break under civilization's load. A steel world is hopeless if men are
pig-iron. There is greed and envy and malice in all of us. But also
there is the real metal of brotherhood. Our task is to puddle out
the impurities so that the true iron can be strong enough to hold our
civilization up forever.

I have been a puddler of iron and I would be a puddler of men. Out of
the best part of the iron I helped build a stronger world. Out of the
best part of man's metal let us build a better society.

I have no new cure for the ills of humanity.

Life is a struggle, and rest is in the grave.

All nature is in commotion; there is wi