program too. Go back over these figures, all taken from official records--all undenied and undeniable--and ask yourself if ever before in human history the industries and credit of a successful nation and successful in the greatest War ever waged, too, were so butchered? These figures indict and convict the Federal Reserve System, as it has been maladministered, as the arch betrayer of a people's trust. It indicts and convicts them as juggling with the symbols of value to the destruction of real values. No sane man can read this record, frozen into Government statistics, and defend the oligarchs who made it. It never was "deflation." That is just a sonorous euphemism to disguise sandbaggery. It was destruction to scores of thousands and to hundreds of thousands of the real producers of real wealth. Billions of dollars of real values were annihilated, not by the trend of the markets, but by artificial "bear" markets artificially created by the throttling of credit. You can't withdraw literally billions of credit and currency--almost three billions of them--the very life-blood of commerce from industry and have it thrive any more than you can tap a man's jugular vein and have him live! That's what really happened in this Tragedy of Drastic Destruction. And upon whom did this Tragedy bear the hardest? Upon those least able to endure its fearful pressure--the farmers. Bear in mind that farming is not only the largest industry in the U.S.A., but it is the only absolutely basic industry--the keystone upon which rests the entire industrial superstructure. Here is what this Tragedy of Drastic Deflation did to the farmer as measured for the years of 1919, 1920 and 1921. Value in 1919 $13,500,000,000 Value in 1920 9,000,000,000 Value in 1921 5,675,000,000 In each of these years there was practically the same acreage under cultivation, 350,000,000 acres. In 1919, farm products were worth $39 per acre, in 1920, $26 per acre and in 1921, $16 per acre. Here is where the Federal Reserve credit crusher pulpified the finest--at the very foundation of all industry! The production of these basic farm products--the real foundation of all this Federal Reserve splendor--was practically the same in volume for these three years, but the Federal Reserve credit crusher crushed it from $39 to $26 to $16 per acre measured by its purchasing value! That's the Tragedy of Drastic Deflation in its final analysis battering down the money value of America's basic industry almost two-thirds! But the profits of the Federal Reserve System--and its exorbitant expense account and its lavish salary rolls--kept off the toboggan down which slid all the others! CHAPTER X THE PALACES OF THE MONSTER FEDERAL Reserve Oligarchy houses itself most palatially. There is nothing in Government annals or in corporate prodigality private or public to anywhere approximate the absolute squandermania of Federal Reserve obsession for luxurious quarters.