The very mention of a personal part brings to mind a subject which might be painful were I of a petty nature. There were people who, willfully blind to the facts, held me responsible, in the face of all reason, for the Grass itself. Although it is difficult to believe, there have been many occasions when I have been denounced by demagogues and my blood called for by vicious mobs.
But enough of morbid retrospection. I think I can say at this time there was, with the exception of certain Indian nabobs, hardly a wealthy man left in the world who did not owe in some way the retention of his riches to me. I controlled more than half the steel industry; I owned outright the majority stocks of the world oil cartel; coal, iron, copper, tin and other mines either belonged directly to me or to tributary companies in which I held large interests.
Along with the demagoguery of attributing the Grass to Albert Weener there was the agitation for socialism and the expropriation of all private property, the attempt to deprive men of the fruit of their endeavor and reduce everyone to a regimented, miserable level. It is hardly necessary to say that I spared no effort to combat the insidious agents of the Fourth International. Fortunately for the preservation of the free enterprise system, I had tools ready to hand.
The overrunning of the United States wiped out the gangs which operated so freely there, but remnants made their escape, taking with them to the older continents their philosophy of life and property. Gathering native recruits, they began following the familiar patterns and would in time no doubt have divided the world into countless minute baronies.
However, I was able to subsidize and reason with enough of their leaders to persuade them that their livelihood and very existence rested on a basis of private property and that their great danger came not from each other, but from the advocates of socialism. They saw the point, and though they did not cease from warring on each other, or mulcting the general public, they were ruthless in exterminating the socialists and they left the goods and adjuncts of Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Industries scrupulously unmolested.
Strange as it sounds, it was not my part in protecting the world from the philosophy of equality, nor my ramified properties, which gave me my unique position. Unbelievably, because the change had occurred so gradually, industry, though still a vital factor, no longer played the dominant role in the world, but had given the position back to an earlier occupant. Food was once more paramount in global economy. Loss of the Americas had cut the supply in half without reducing the population correspondingly. The Socialist Union remained selfsufficient and uninterested, while Australia, New Zealand and the cultivated portions of Africa strove to feed the millions of Europeans and Asiatics whose lands could not grow enough for their own use. The slightest falling off of the harvest produced famine.
At this point Consolidated Pemmican practically took over the entire business of agriculture. Utilizing byproducts, and crops otherwise not worth gathering, waste materials, and growths inedible without processing, with plants strung out all over the four continents and with tremendously reduced shipping costs because of the small compass in which so much food could be contained, we were able to let our customers earn their daily concentrates by gathering the raw materials which went into them. I was not only the wealthiest, most powerful man in the world, but its savior and providence as well.
With the new feeling of security bathing the world, tension dissolved into somnolence and the tempo of daily life slackened until it scarcely seemed to move at all. The waves of anxiety, suspicion and distrust of an earlier decade calmed into peaceful ripples, hardly noticeable in a pondlike existence.
No longer beset by thoughts or fears of wars, nations relaxed their pride, armies were reduced to little more than palaceguards, brassbands and parade units; while navies were kept up—if periodic painting and retaining in commission a few obsolete cruisers and destroyers be so termed—only to patrol the Atlantic and Pacific shores of the lost hemisphere.
The struggle for existence almost disappeared; the wagescales set by Consolidated Pemmican were enough to sustain life, and in a world of limited horizons men became content with that. The bickering characteristic of industrial dispute vanished; along with it went the outmoded weapon of the tradesunion. It was a halcyon world and if, as cranks complained, illiteracy increased rapidly, it could only be because with everyman's livelihood assured his natural indolence took the upper hand and he not only lost refinements superficially acquired, but was uninterested in teaching them to his children.