X

And this was the year of the plague. Not a visitation of Providence. Not an affliction of the earth mother nor one of the human body. A disease of the mind. A pestilence of the divine faculty. The common imagination was seized with a speculative mania. These people, whose black beast had been private profit, now all as with one impulse began to chase the bawdy bubble.

The ease with which they had found the capital in the procrastinated form of post-dated checks for co-operative stores and lumber yards was a revelation. It was also a temptation to the instincts of greed and cunning.

Some of the same men who had canvassed the Leaguers for subscriptions to those two authorized projects, now went among them selling shares in mythical undertakings. Shares in a great steel and iron plant, though there was neither iron nor coking coal in New Freedom. Shares in a farm implement factory, in an automobile plant, in a textile plant for converting New Freedom’s flax crop into the finest linen fabrics, in an airship line to carry garden truck daily to markets in the east, mining companies, oil companies, even at last a grain trading corporation to gamble in grain on the Chicago Board of Trade for the people’s profit.

The selling arguments were in a language the Leaguers had learnt by heart. Farm implements to wit. Everyone knew how dear they were, everyone thought the price of them wicked and unreasonable, everyone believed the implement trust made enormous dividends. Who paid those dividends, really? The farmers of course. Why should they? Why not manufacture their own implements and make dividends for themselves? And automobiles. To become little Henry Fords they had only to make automobiles as Ford made them. Then they should have the automobiles and the profit, too.

Post-dated checks were accepted in payment for these shares. The checks were cashed at the People’s Bank. The promoters and canvassers took two-thirds of the proceeds for themselves; from the balance the nefarious expenses were deducted; what was left was not enough to worry about. It was out-right swindling.

In all cases, except as to the mining and oil schemes, the canvassers had letters written on Freemen’s League paper, signed by Capuchin. These letters never specifically recommended the thing itself. What they did was to endorse the general idea of creating in New Freedom a chain of industrial activities that should make the state economically self-contained. Everything for themselves. He was very keen for that idea. It was the idea of integration that came to him suddenly on the street that day of his return from New York with Dwind and Semicorn.

Yet the canvassers used these letters in a way to make it appear that Capuchin vouched for their wares. Afterward, when it was too late, he repudiated the letters, saying they had been got from him in unguarded moments and that he himself had been the worst deceived. This was probably so. At least none of the money fraudulently so taken ever touched him, or if it did the fact was not discovered.

And this also was the first year of lean crops since New Freedom was named. That would have been so in any case. It was New Freedom’s turn to be on the wrong side of the weather. Nevertheless it was true that agriculture had been neglected. The farmers spent too much of their time sitting on the fences talking politics, economics and schemes for getting rich, much in the same spirit, one can imagine, as that in which people after Luther discussed the Bible, having found a free way of their own to the kingdom of Heaven. If the fields of New Freedom looked not as green as usual, why fret about that? Everyone had bought shares in something that was going to bring him big dividends; moreover, at the very worst, one now could borrow money at low rates of interest instead of having to pawn oneself to the 10 per cent vultures.

But the crops were very bad; so bad, that thousands of those post-dated checks, made in the Spring to be paid after harvest, could not be paid. The People’s Bank, having cashed them in advance, was obliged to carry them as loans.

There was a new sound in the land, a sound of murmuring. It was indistinct because it was not informed. Nobody knew the facts. Capuchin himself did not know them; he would not look at them.

The condition of the bank was such that if it had been subject to national law the Federal authorities would have obliged it to close its doors. Yet it went on lending; it could not stop.

Capuchin called upon his economic experts to review New Freedom’s achievements, which they did, filling the League’s newspapers with laudatory essays, all of course in good faith, since everyone was defending his own work.

All news of an adverse character came from outside. Newspapers in New York and Chicago, also eastern magazines, printed much damaging matter about the stock swindling, the wasteful working of the state’s business, the perilous use of credit. These the League’s newspaper denounced as Wall street organs; they had sent their spies to New Freedom with specific instructions as to what they were to find out.

On the other hand, the radical publications of the cast, such as Grinling’s weekly, “The People’s Witness,” went on beating the timbrels and singing the song of praise. These utterances the League’s newspapers printed in full. Nobody knew really what to believe.

The year ended, as each of the others had ended, with one more river to cross. Only this was Marah, indeed; the waters were very bitter, and nothing to heal them with.

Taxes were more than doubled, and this time there was no plausible excuse.

Where were the profits from their own things that were to have made the people rejoice?

One of the largest items in the state’s budget was “Loss from Operations.” No particulars.

The fact was that nothing state-owned had earned a profit; nothing the League owned had earned a profit. Privately owned stores were out-trading the co-operative stores; privately owned lumber yards were competing successfully with those of the League. The private lumber yards sold for cash and locked their gates at night. Those of the League sold on credit and at night people helped themselves, which was even cheaper. Were these not the people’s materials? All of the League’s newspapers were wells of loss. And nobody had the facts. It was not only that the facts were suppressed. Nowhere did they head up. They were scattered, unrelated, lost in confusion.