, then having failed to
raise a crop (I have mentioned the great drought years) could yet pay
back the money. But no farming nation can suffer great crop losses
without being set back financially and starved to where it hurts. You've
got to figure God's laws into your human calculations.

"Bryan might as well try to dodge the hungry days by advocating the free
and unlimited coinage of tomato cans," is the way one of the fellows
put it; "then every man could borrow a dollar and buy a can of tomatoes.
After eating the tomatoes he could coin the can into a dollar and buy
another can of tomatoes. And so on until he got too old to eat, and
then he could use the last dollar from the tin can in paying back the
banker." Schemes like that are all right for orators and agitators who
make their living with words. But farmers and iron workers know what it
is that turns clods into corn and what makes the iron wheels that bear
it to market. It is muscle applied with the favor of God.

Without labor, no crops. Without rain, no crops. It was world-wide crop
failures that finally brought the lean years of the nineties. The
return of big crops was already reviving the sick world. It rejected the
radicals' "remedy" and next year it was well. Had we taken that wrong
medicine in the dark it would have killed us. Thirty years later Russia
let them shoot that medicine into her arm and it paralyzed her. The
rain falls upon her fields and the soil is rich, but it brings forth no
harvest and the people starve.

Russia has had famines before, but they were acts of God. The rain
failed and there was no harvest. Their present famine is an act of man.
Labor ceased. And the ensuing hunger was man's own fault. Nations that
think labor is a curse, and adopt schemes to avoid labor, must perish
for their folly.

In 1896 we came within an inch of adopting financial bolshevism. This
taught me that a people are poorly schooled who can not tell the good
from the bad. The wise heads knew what was good for the country. Hard
work and good crops would cure our ills. But millions voted for a poison
that would have destroyed us. From that time on I dreamed of a new kind
of school, not the kind we had that turned out men to grope blindly
between good and folly. But a school based on the fundamental facts of
life and labor, the need of food and housing, and the sweating skill
that brings man most of his blessings. A school from which no man could
come out ignora