nothing of our triumphs; it will distrust our motives and methods; it will have seen the Nazis at work and know nothing of new techniques of production; we will have to teach them to be free and to work. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote A: I have not traveled the route; but General Sir Francis Younghusband who had, gave me the figures--and the motive.] CHAPTER XIII The Liberty Bell Above all things our function is to proclaim liberty, to proclaim it as the soil on which we grow and as the air we breathe, to make the world understand that liberty is what we fight for and live by. We have to keep the word always sounding so that people will not forget--and we have to create liberty so that it is always real and people will have a goal to fight for, and never believe that it is only a word. We do not need to convert the world to a special form of political democracy, but we have to keep liberty alive so that the peoples who want to be free can destroy their enemies and count on us to help. We will do it by the war we are waging and the peace we will make and the prosperity of the peoples of the world which we will underwrite. For in the act of proclaiming and creating liberty we must also give to the world the demonstration we have made at home: that there is no liberty if the people perish of starvation and that alone among all the ways of living tried in the long martyrdom of man, freedom can destroy poverty. We have been bold in creating food and cars and radios and electric power; now we must be bold in creating liberty on a scale never known before, not even to ourselves. For we have to create enough liberty to take up the shameful slack in our own country. We all know, indifferently, that people (somewhere--where was it?--wasn't there a movie about them?) hadn't enough to eat. But we assume that Americans always have enough liberty. The Senate's committee report on the fascism of organized big-farming in California is a shock which Americans are not aware of; in the greater shock of war we do not understand that we have been weakened internally, as England was weakened by its distressed areas and its Malayan snobbery. We do not yet see the difference between the misfortune of an imperfect economic system and calculated denials of liberty. We have denied liberty in hundreds of instances, until certain sections of the country, certain portions of industry, have become black infections of fascism and have started the counter-infection of communism. Most of the shameful occasions we have cheerfully forgotten; in the midst of our war against tyranny, any new blow at our liberty is destructive. Here are the facts in the California case, chosen because the documentation comes from official sources: