Yet we are asked to venerate this prehensile moron as the _Ur_-burgher, the citizen _par excellence_, the foundation-stone of the state! And why? Because he produces something that all of us must have--that we must get somehow on penalty of death. And how do we get it from him? By submitting helplessly to his unconscionable blackmailing--by paying him, not under any rule of reason, but in proportion to his roguery and incompetence, and hence to the direness of our need. I doubt that the human race, as a whole, would submit to that sort of high-jacking, year in and year out, from any other necessary class of men. When the American railroad workman attempted it, in 1916, there was instant indignation; when a certain small squad of the _Polizei_ tried it, a few years later, there was such universal horror that a politician who denounced the crime became President of the United States. But the farmers do it over and over again, without challenge or reprisal, and the only thing that keeps them from reducing us, at intervals, to actual famine is their own imbecile knavery. They are all willing and eager to pillage us by starving us, but they can’t do it because they can’t resist attempts to swindle each other. Recall, for example, the case of the cotton-growers in the South. They agreed among themselves to cut down the cotton acreage in order to inflate the price--and instantly every party to the agreement began planting _more_ cotton in order to profit by the abstinence of his neighbors. That abstinence being wholly imaginary, the price of cotton fell instead of going up--and then the entire pack of scoundrels began demanding assistance from the national treasury--in brief, began demanding that the rest of us indemnify them for the failure of their plot to blackmail us!