Vagabond Editorials

(Continued that would eat up what the seven fat years had created, and he advised Pharaoh to appoint a wise rnan to take charge of the situation and make due preparation during the fat years for the needs of the lean years. Being a smart man, Pharaoh gave Joseph the job. During the seven fat years Joseph seized one-fifth of all that the land produced, and hoarded it in huge granaries and warehouses. And when the seven years of famine came, so well had Joseph husbanded the resources of the country, that he had enough food and supplies on hand to supply the entire nationand other people as well-through the seven years of famine.

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It would be a pretty story if we could let it go at that. But unfortunately Joseph and his Master preyed on the people as those who get a corner on necessities always do. First they sold the people supplies until their money was gone. Then they made them trade in their cattle and horses and other possessions for food. Then came their lands and their homes and other possessions. And finally he made them sell themselves to Pharaoh in exchange for food. Some little profiteer, this Joseph was ! When the seven lean years ended Pharaoh owned all the money, all the land, all the stock, and all the people.

Boy, what Joseph would have done to the stock market if he had returned to the earth again seven years preceding this present panic! He could have started in l9?2 with a ten dollar bill; bought and pyramided for seven years; then began selling short in the fall of 1929 ! And he'd have the entire country today right where he and Pharaoh had Egypt when THAT depression ended!

Yes, we've been having depressions as far back as history reaches; but there never was but one Joseph. Close students of history tell us that humanity has been going through depressions and panics since time began. The Chinese, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the people of medieval Europe, all knew these visitations. Yet even in retrospect, with all the facts before us, all the wise men of the earth disagree as to what causes panics, and therefore we go from one of these bedevilments to another, blissfully ignorant of what made the others, and so totally unprepared to anticipate and guard against the next.

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Many historians believe that the fall of the Roman Empire was the result of a long-continued depression in the third century of the Christian era. Other historians sug- from Page 7) gest that the two hundred years of the crusades of the middle ages were brought aLout by periods of depression. Soldiering was the great profession of those days, and finding both over-production and unemployment in that line of business, the fighting men went abroad and fought the barbarian through a succession of generations. The very founding of America was very certainly the result of 'desperate depressions in Europe. What Woodrow Wilson called "the swarming of the English" into other lands was caused by the hard necessity of poverty. Colonial expansion was the cure for unemployment that England devised. The American colonies were one of the major results.. *'F*

Sir Thomas More, early in the Sixteenth Century, writes of the numerous husbandmen compelled to sell their homes "and depart away, poor innocent wretches, goods, men, women; husbands, wives, fatherlcss children, widows, woeful mothers and their young babes, out of their known and accustomed houies, finding no place to rest in. And when they have wandered abroad what can they do but steal, or go about begging? And then also they be cast in prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not, whom no man will set to work." Sounds something like 1933, except that we don't put folks in jail for debt or enforced unemployment any more.

Fifty years later in 157;,; *u ,n Humphrey Gilbert, of England, suggesting: "\trfe might inhabit some part of these Contreyes (America) and settle there these needy people of our country which now trouble the Commonwealth and through want here at home are enforced to commit outrageous ofrenses whereby they are daily consumed by the gallows." Then, early i4 the Seventeenth Century, when the first settlement in Virginia had becn efrected and an outlet for the English unemployed created, a Spanish ambassador wrote: "Their principal reason for colonizing these parts is to give an outlet to so many, wretched idle people as they have in England." From now until 1630 the conditions in England were desperately depressed, and the people turned to the colonization of America as their only resort. Thus a great depression undoubtedly brought about the colonization of the future United States, making this nation the direct result and offspring ofagreatpanic.

The first. strictly American panic was about 1675' and was a tobacco panic. Tobacco had come into great demand, the price was high and the market active' and there \pas a huge develoPment and'investmerrt in tobacco plan- tations. The tobacco boom exploded with a dull thud, and tobacco became a drug on the rnarket. So, naturally, did tobacco raising properties, and mortgages on such properties. It was.then that Nathaniel Bacon led his revolt against British authorities whom he blamed for the panic. He captured the seat of government at Jamestown. He lost his life and his enterprise died. There were other depressions in this country during the colonial period, the most notable one being in 1764. ln 1764 there came a huge depression both in this country and abroad, and it may be well said that the severity of this depression did much to hasten the corning of the Revolutionary War. Here is another great lesson from panics. Business in this country was in a state of collapse. Unemployment was general, and there was tragedy abroad in the land. It was this time that England chose to impose new and. increased taxes on the people of our colonies. That is always a mistak+a dangerous mistake. It proved to be so in this case. When everyone was in difficulty, and everyone was hard up, was a poor time to put the tax screws on tighter. But England did so, and we spilled her tea in Boston Harbor, and then went about the business of whipping her armies, and setting up our own little fonn of government. So not only the colonization of this country was caused by a panic, but the Revolution itself 1ryas. the direct offspring of another. +,F*

One very important fact in our own history that few of us realize is that we had a regular war-time boom during the Revolutionary War. While Washington and his forces were having the very Devil of a time, the folks at home were looking at more cash than they had ever heard of be- fore. It was like the times we enjoyed in l9l7 and 1918. The British and French both brought war chests over and dumped their silver and gold, and we issued our own Continental paper money. Everyone paid their debts, prices soared, there were jobs for everyone, and the goose hung high. The minute the war ended this all flopped, and we had a real panic. In this great collapse America reached the very depths of financial and economic despair. And out of that great panic came the American Constitution. So, from a panic, was born one of the greatest forward steps in human history, one of the greatest progressive acts of all time. :1.

'And now came one of our greatest and worst panics, that of 1819. During the Napoleonic Wars there had developed a great land boom in America-our first. Large areas were bought on credit, and pretentious towns were laid out. It was our first broad effort at what we have come to call "sub-dividing." It crashed in 1819, and the whole structure fell. Prices of everything dropped from 5O to Z0 per cent. Factories stopped, merchants failed, unemployment was everywhere, and wretchedness was the condition of the majority. The banks became the owners of every sort of property by foreclosure. The national bank in Cincinnati became known as "The Monster" because it became the owner of almost all the property in that city and territory.. Nothing like it was ever known before-or since. But out of that panic came progress and development. Up to that tirne every state had its debtors laws, and its debtors prisons. These were all abolished during the 1gl9 panic. Up to that time land in tlrc West was sold and allotted only in great areas. The reduction in the size of

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