Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/206

192 their way by virtue of getting enough wherewith to live out of relatively little work.

All of this means simply the hogging by comparatively few people of an unduly large share of a diminished national production. In other words, it is unbalanced distribution of the produce of industry. This can not continue indefinitely unless the American people have discovered a way of making something out of nothing. The charlatans who are now talking to the farmers do so in words that are capable of translation into the representation that such a discovery has been made and the farmers are beguiled into believing them. Of course, the governmental operation of railways and other services, the erection of tariff barriers, the blowing of credit bubbles, etc., mean nothing else, for none of those things contributes to increased production, which can only be accomplished by hard work, invention, good management, and thrift. Dissension between the agricultural workers and the town workers, as we see it now, was bound to come.

I think that the United States is about the last country in the world where socialism and communism can make headway, although there are plenty of propagandists for those terrible things who (generally for selfish purposes) aim to promote them and play upon the ignorant. However, Americans are too individualistic and too capitalistic, by great majority, to get into either of those boats. The only real danger is in letting themselves be guided into quagmires and letting silly experiments be tried upon them by charlatans and disingenuous prophets.

I feel great sympathy with the discontent that prevails. I look upon the confusion in minds as being