t time
since the mutated seeds had blown over the saltband.

I must not give the impression that a wiping off of the Grass from the
accountbooks of humanity was universal and complete. The World Congress
periodically considered proposals for countermeasures. On the top of
Mount Whitney Miss Francis still labored. New assistants were flown to
her as the old ones wandered down the great rockslide from the old stone
weatherhouse off into the Grass during fits of despondency, went mad
from the realization that, except for problematical survivors on the
polar caps, they were alone in an abandoned hemisphere, or died of
simple homesickness. In the researchlaboratories of Consolidated
Pemmican formulas for utilizing the Grass were still tinkered with, and
the death of almost every publicspirited man of fortune revealed a will
containing bequests to aid those seeking means of controlling the weed.

_77._ It is not, afterall, a detached history of the past twentyone
years I am writing. Contemporaries are only too well aware of the facts
and posterity will find them dehydrated in textbooks. I started out to
tell of my own personal part in the coming of the Grass, not to take an
Olympian and aloof view of the passion of man.

The very mention of a personal part brings to mind a subject which might
be painful were I of a petty nature. There were people who, willfully
blind to the facts, held me responsible, in the face of all reason, for
the Grass itself. Although it is difficult to believe, there have been
many occasions when I have been denounced by demagogues and my blood
called for by vicious mobs.

But enough of morbid retrospection. I think I can say at this time there
was, with the exception of certain Indian nabobs, hardly a wealthy man
left in the world who did not owe in some way the retention of his
riches to me. I controlled more than half the steel industry; I owned
outright the majority stocks of the world oil cartel; coal, iron,
copper, tin and other mines either belonged directly to me or to
tributary companies in which I held large interests.

Along with the demagoguery of attributing the Grass to Albert Weener
there was the agitation for socialism and the expropriation of all
private property, the attempt to deprive men of the fruit of their
endeavor and reduce everyone to a regimented, miserable level. It is
hardly necessary to say that I spared no effort to combat the insidious
agents of the Fourth Intern