ational. Fortunately for the preservation of
the free enterprise system, I had tools ready to hand.

The overrunning of the United States wiped out the gangs which operated
so freely there, but remnants made their escape, taking with them to the
older continents their philosophy of life and property. Gathering native
recruits, they began following the familiar patterns and would in time
no doubt have divided the world into countless minute baronies.

However, I was able to subsidize and reason with enough of their leaders
to persuade them that their livelihood and very existence rested on a
basis of private property and that their great danger came not from each
other, but from the advocates of socialism. They saw the point, and
though they did not cease from warring on each other, or mulcting the
general public, they were ruthless in exterminating the socialists and
they left the goods and adjuncts of Consolidated Pemmican and Allied
Industries scrupulously unmolested.

Strange as it sounds, it was not my part in protecting the world from
the philosophy of equality, nor my ramified properties, which gave me
my unique position. Unbelievably, because the change had occurred so
gradually, industry, though still a vital factor, no longer played the
dominant role in the world, but had given the position back to an
earlier occupant. Food was once more paramount in global economy. Loss
of the Americas had cut the supply in half without reducing the
population correspondingly. The Socialist Union remained selfsufficient
and uninterested, while Australia, New Zealand and the cultivated
portions of Africa strove to feed the millions of Europeans and Asiatics
whose lands could not grow enough for their own use. The slightest
falling off of the harvest produced famine.

At this point Consolidated Pemmican practically took over the entire
business of agriculture. Utilizing byproducts, and crops otherwise not
worth gathering, waste materials, and growths inedible without
processing, with plants strung out all over the four continents and with
tremendously reduced shipping costs because of the small compass in
which so much food could be contained, we were able to let our customers
earn their daily concentrates by gathering the raw materials which went
into them. I was not only the wealthiest, most powerful man in the
world, but its savior and providence as well.

With the new feeling of security bathing the world, tension dissol