nineties. The year before there had been a financial crash.
Nobody seemed to know what was the matter at the time, but it has
since been learned that the hard times were the fruit of crop
failures, if one 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.