But cold weather and crop failure are not the only things that could bring a famine in America. Slacking in production has the same effect as crop failure. A farmers' strike could bring a famine. A railroad strike could do the same. Many men advocate a combination farmers' strike and railroad strike to destroy capital (that is, to destroy the food supply). Don't get impatient, boys. You shall have your famine, if you will wait long enough. And the less work you do while you are waiting, the sooner it will come. Nature is never whipped. Nature will take a crack at you, if you leave an opening. The generation that went before you worked ten to fourteen hours a day; they battled face to face with a raw continent in their fight with Nature. And by their muscle they drove Nature back and she surrendered. She went down like crumpled Germany, and she signed a treaty. Hard were the treaty terms our fighting fathers made with Nature. They took an indemnity. She delivered to them more houses than her cyclones had destroyed, she furnished them millions of cattle in place of the wild deer and buffalo. She yielded up her coal regions to warm them in payment for the torture her winters had inflicted. By this treaty she gave them everything she had and promised to be good. We are the inheritors of the good things of that peace treaty. We were born rich; we revel in the “reparations” that our fathers wrung from a conquered Nature. But Nature, like Germany, is not really whipped. If we relax, she will default on her payments. As long as Nature is not really whipped, her treaty is a scrap of paper. Nature, right now, is preparing for a come-back. She will not arm openly, for we would then arm to meet her. She is planning to attack us by a method that is new. She will weaken us by propaganda, and when we are helpless she will march over us at will. Who then are the propagandists that Nature is using to undermine the race that conquered her? Communists, slackers, sick men and fools. The man who says let us “quit work and divide our cake and eat it” is opening the way for Nature to strike suddenly with a famine. The man who advocates “one big strike” to destroy our capital is the secret agent of starvation. Nature when up in arms can sweep men off like flies. She has always done it and she always will, unless man uses his intelligence and his cooperation to fight the evils in Nature and not to fight his fellow men. “Capitalism,” as the communists call it, is an imperfect system. But it is the only system that has banished famine. Under communism and feudalism there was hunger. Under capitalism the world has been able to feed twice as many mouths as could be fed before.