-8-                             
 
 
McCormick, a Virginia inventor, showed American farmers
 
how to grow wheat at thirty cents a bushel and produce
 
meat at two cents a pound. And American farmers, aided by
 
free land and new machines, drove British and German farmers
 
out of busines and crowded them on to emigrant boats bound 
 
for the farms of the great West. "Everybody was getting rich."
 
    But the masters of industry, of railroads and banks
 
managed to pocket nearly all the profits and there came a 
 
depression and an outcry which all but enabled the young W.
 
J. Bryan to work a revolution in 1896. He failed on a nar-
 
row margin through bribed votes, and the system was sus-
 
tained in wobbly estate till Europe went to war in 1914 as
 
France had done in 1805. The outcome all the world knows.
 
The marvelous American system seemed successful at when it was
 
not, and the Presidents of 1921-28 with their optimistic
 
Secretary of Treasury thought it a sort of millenium
 
which must rapidly cover the earth. To this dream a later
 
President added the prophesy that poverty, the curse of
 
mankind, would be abolished when he took his seat in the 
 
mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue.
 
 
                            VI.                             
 
 
     But the collapse came in 1929; it was almost as
 
terrible as that of 1789 in Paris. The hopeful, buoyant
 
United States now fell into the economic chaos into which
 
the great war had thrust all the states of Europe. The
 
unemployed outnumbered the dead and wounded of the recent
 
struggle. In place of Hoover's universal and everlasting
 
prosperity, there was threat of universal poverty. The
 
 
                          American