“Not more than one year,” replied the older boy. “There never was a time when mankind had food enough accumulated to last for much more than a year, and probably there never will be. If there should be no crop for a single year, hundreds of thousands would starve every month, and a second failure would simply blot out the race. As for forehandedness, we actually live from hand to mouth, especially the people in the big cities. Only last winter a great snowstorm blockaded the railroads leading into New York for only three or four days, and even in that short time the price of food went up so high that the charitable institutions had all they could do to keep poor people from starving. So far from the world generally being forehanded for food, there never was a time when the food on hand was really sufficient to go round.”
“Well, of course,” said Will, meditatively, “there are always some people so ‘down on their luck,’ as the saying is, that they can’t earn a living, but there’s always enough food for them if they could get hold of it.”
“You’re mistaken,” said Ed. “There is nearly always something like a famine in parts of India and Russia, and even in Italy and other parts of Europe there are great masses of very hard-working people who never in their lives get enough to eat.”
There were exclamations of surprise at this, but Ed presently continued: “In many European countries the peasants do not see a piece of meat once a year, and in hardly any of them do the poorer people get what we would think sufficient for food. In fact, their food is not sufficient. They are always more or less starved, and that’s the reason so many of them are the little runts they are.”
“Then we are better off than most other nations?” said Irv.
“Immeasurably!” said Ed. “Ours is the best fed nation in the world. It is the only nation in which the poorest laborer can have meat on his table every day in the year, for even in England the poorer laborers have to make out with cheese pretty often.”
“What’s the reason?” asked Phil, who had acquired the habit of using short sentences and as few words as possible since his burden of responsibility had borne so heavily upon him.
“There are several reasons. Our soil is fertile—but so is that of France and Italy, for that matter. I suppose the great reason is that we do not have to support vast armies in idleness. In most of the European countries they make everybody serve in the army for three or four years. It costs a lot of money to support these armies and it costs the country a great deal more than that.”
“In what way?” asked Constant, who, being on sentry duty over Hughes, was sitting halfway down the ladder.
“Why, by taking all the young men away from productive work for three years. Take half a million young men away from work and put them in the army, and you lose each year all the work that a man could do in half a million years, all the food or other things that half a million men could produce in a year?”