-6- wholly unequal to the payment of promised dividends. The people of the United States thus carried an unbearable load of worthless, fraudulent debt in 1929. I suspect other industrial peoples bore similar burdens. And even more amazing, American industrialists raised import duties in 1929 and again in 1930 to levels which almost closed their markets to the outside world. And having barred im- ports, they loaned Europeans and Latin Americans billions of dollars so they could buy American exports. They would ruin other peoples and then lend the ruined peoples money to buy goods and put more bad securities on their own mar- ket| There had never been anything like this in all known history. The collapse of 1929 was predicted and warned against by the most eminent economic and historical authorities everywhere. Governmental authorities gave no heed. It was the end of the era. The free lands of three centuries were gone; the right of peoples to migrate from country to country was abolished; there was no longer a semblance of free trade; and when outstanding statesmen sought to associate all the differing peoples in a co- operative economic life and abolish wars as the causes of the greatest disasters, there were great outcries of opposi- tion. All the old co-operative forces were gone and nobody was willing to introduce new ones. III. After four years of unprecedented distress; after Samuel |