The Iron Ration Part 15

I was greatly interested in these "home" casualties, and discussed them with many, among them life-insurance men, educators, and government officials. The first cla.s.s took a strictly business view of the thing.

The life-insurance companies were heavy losers. But there was no way out. Nothing at all could be done. It was hoped that the better physical trim of the young adults, and the resulting longevity, would reimburse the life-insurers. If the war did not last too long this would indeed happen. Premiums would have to be increased, however, if it became necessary for the government to apply further food restrictions.

Some of the educators took a sentimental view of the thing. Others were cynically rational. It all depended upon their viewpoint and age. Those who believed in the theories of one Osler could see nothing wrong in this method of killing off the unfit aged. Their opposites thought it shameful that better provisions were not made for them.

The att.i.tude of the government was more interesting. It took cognizance of the individual and social aspects involved--of sentiment and reality.

That manslaughter of the aged and unfit was the result of the food policy was not denied. But could the state be expected to invite dissolution because of that?

"I understand you perfectly," said a certain food-dictator to me once.

"My own parents are in that position, or would be, were it not that they have the means to buy the more expensive foods. That thousands of the poor aged are going to a premature death is only too evident. But what are we to do? We cannot for their sake lay down our arms and permit our enemies to impose upon us whatever conditions they please. Quite apart from the interests of the state as a political unit, there is here to be considered the welfare of the fit individuals. Being fit, they have the greatest claim to the benefits that come from the social and economic inst.i.tutions which political independence alone can give. That the less fit must make sacrifices for that is to be expected, for the very good reason that it is the fit cla.s.s which is carrying on the war and shedding its blood for the maintenance of the state. By the time we have provided for the infants and babies there is nothing left for the aged over and above what the adult individual gets. Of the babies we must take care because they are the carriers of our future. Of the aged we should take care because they have given us our past. But when it comes to choose which cla.s.s to preserve, I would say the young every time."

For live-stock-owning governments that is indeed the proper view to take; and since all governments belong to that cla.s.s, more or less, it seems futile to find fault with this food-dictator. The man forced to decide whether he would give the last morsel to his old father or his young son might select to divide that morsel evenly between them. But if the old man was worth his salt at all he would insist that the boy be given all the food. A social aggregate that cannot act in accordance with this principle is shortening its own day.

X

THE CRUMBS

October, 1916, marked the high water of the Central European public-subsistence problems. Misery had reached the limits of human endurance. For the next seven months the strain caused by it tore at the vitals of the Central states. The measures then conceived and applied would prove whether or no the collapse of Germany and her allies could be averted. So serious was the situation that the several governments felt compelled to send out peace-feelers, one or two of them being definite propositions of a general nature.

The crumbs and sc.r.a.ps had been saved for a long time even then. As far back as November, 1914, all garbage had been carefully sorted into rubbish and food remnants which might serve as animal feed. But that was no longer necessary now. Food remnants no longer went into the garbage-cans. Nor was it necessary to advise the public not to waste old clothing and other textiles. The ragman was paying too good a price for them. Much of the copper and bra.s.s complement of households had been turned over to the government, and most copper roofs were being replaced by tin. The church bells were being smelted. Old iron fetched a fancy price. In the currency iron was taking the place of nickel. Old paper was in keen demand. The sweepings of the street were being used as fertilizer. During the summer and fall the hedges had been searched for berries, and in the woodlands thousands of women and children had been busy gathering mushrooms and nuts. To meet the ever-growing scarcity of fuel the German government permitted the villagers to lop the dead wood in the state forests. To ease the needs of the small live-stock-owner he was allowed to cut gra.s.s on the fiscal woodlands and gather the dead leaves for stable bedding.

It was a season of saving sc.r.a.ps. The entire economic machinery seemed ready for the sc.r.a.p-heap. Much of the saving that was being practised was leading to economic waste.

The city streets were no longer as clean as they used to be. During the summer much light-fuel had been saved by the introduction of "summer time." The clocks were set ahead an hour, so that people rose shortly after dawn, worked their customary ten hours in the shops and factories, and then still had enough daylight to work in their gardens. When dusk came they went to bed. Street traction had been limited also. The early closing of shops, cafes, and restaurants effected further savings in light, and, above all, eatables.

The countryside presented a dreary picture. n.o.body had time to whitewash the buildings, and few cared about the appearance of their homes. What is the use? they said. They could wait until better times came. The dilapidated shutter kept fit company with the rain-streaked wall. The untidy yard harmonized with the neglected garden in a veritable diapason of indifference. The implements and tools of the farm were left where they had been used last. The remaining stock had an unkempt look about it.

I remember how during a trip in Steiermark I once compared the commonwealth with a lonely hen I saw scratching for food in a yard. The rusty plumage of the bird showed that n.o.body had fed it in months. There was no doubt, though, that somebody expected that hen to lay eggs.

It was now a question, however, of saving the sc.r.a.ps of the state--of the socio-economic fabric. The flood of regulation which had spilled over Central Europe had pulled so many threads out of the socio-economic life that, like a thin-worn shawl, it had no longer the qualities of keeping warm those under it. The threads had been used by those in the trenches, and the civilian population had been unable to replace them.

It would be quite impossible to give within the confines of a single volume a list of these regulations, together with a discussion of their many purposes, tendencies, and effects. I would have to start with the economic embryo of all social economy--the exchange of food between the tiller of the soil and the fisherman--to make a good job of that.

A little intensive reasoning will show what the processes applied in Central Europe had been up to the fall of 1916. Regulated was then almost everything man needs in order to live: bread, fats, meat, b.u.t.ter, milk, eggs, peas, beans, potatoes, sugar, beer, fuel, clothing, shoes, and coal-oil. These were the articles directly under control. Under the indirect influence of regulation, however, lay everything, water and air alone excepted.

Now, the purpose of this regulation had been to save and to provide the government with the funds needed for the war. That was well enough so long as there was something to save. But the time was come in which the governmental effort at saving was futile endeavor. There was nothing that could be saved any more. Surpluses had ceased to be. Production no longer equaled consumption, and when that state of things comes crumbs and sc.r.a.ps disappear of themselves.

Once I had to have a pair of heels straightened. I had no trouble finding a cobbler. But the cobbler had no leather.

"Surely," I said, "you can find sc.r.a.ps enough to fix these heels!"

"But, I can't, sir!" replied the man. "I cannot buy sc.r.a.ps, even. There is no more leather. I am allowed a small quant.i.ty each month. But what I had has been used up long ago. If you have another old pair of shoes, bring them around. I can use part of the soles of them to repair the heels, and for the remainder I will pay with my labor. I won't charge you anything for mending your shoes."

I accepted the proposal and learned later that the cobbler had not made so bad a bargain, after all.

A similar policy had to be adopted to keep the Central populations in clothes. Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey produce considerable quant.i.ties of wool, flax, silk, and cotton. But what they produce was not enough to go around, and the men at the front were wearing out their uniforms at an alarming rate. The military authorities felt that nothing would be gained by making the uniforms of poor cloth.

The wear and tear on the fabric was severe. Labor in the making and distribution of the uniforms could be saved only by using the best materials available.

For the civilians it became necessary to wear shoddy. And to obtain shoddy every sc.r.a.p must be saved. The time came when an old all-wool suit brought second-hand as good a price as a new suit fresh from the mill and the tailor shop. With the addition of a little new fiber that old suit might make two new ones. The old material was "combed" into wool again, and to this was added some new wool, cotton, or silk, and "new" goods appeared again on the counter.

The "I-cash" never had done such business before. The attics and cellars were ransacked, and since those who had most old clothing to sell bought hardly any at all now, the pinch of the war in clothing was really never felt very much by the poor. To prevent the spread of contagious diseases the several governments saw to it that the shoddy was thoroughly sterilized.

But economies of that sort are more or less automatic and lie within the realm of supply and demand. Unchecked, they may also become the cause of economic waste. The time comes when shoddy is an absolute loss. When fibers are used over and over, together with new elements, the oldest of them finally cease to have value. That means that the fabric does not have the wearing qualities which will give economic compensation for the labor spent on it and the price asked from the consumer. The stuff may be good to look upon, but in times of war that is not essential.

The profiteer found a fine field in the manufacture of shoddy. All first-hand shoddy he would sell as new material, and before he admitted that a certain piece of cloth was "indifferent" in quality, it had to be poor indeed. He would ask a good price for a suit that might fall to pieces in the first rain, and the consumer was left to do the best he could with the thing. When the consumer complained he would be told that the "war" was responsible, and the consumer, knowing in a general and superficial manner that things were indeed scarce, would decide to be reasonable.

But the government could not take that easy view. Labor which might have been put to better use had been expended in the making of that shoddy, and now the fabric served no good purpose. That had to be avoided. It was far better to abandon fiber of this sort than to have it become the cause of waste in labor and the reason for further discontent. Labor that results in nothing more than this is non-productive, and the governments of Central Europe knew only too well that they had no hands to spare for that kind of unavailing effort.

I ran into a case of this sort in Bohemia. A large mill had turned out a great deal of very poor shoddy. The cloth looked well, and, since wool fiber newly dyed makes a good appearance even long after its wearing qualities have departed forever, the firm was doing a land-office business. All went well until some of the fine cloth got on the backs of people. Then trouble came. Some of the suits shrank when wet, while others did the very opposite. The matter came to the attention of the authorities.

Experts in textiles examined the cloth. Some of the output was found to contain as much as 60 per cent. old fiber, and there was no telling how many times this old fiber had been made over. It was finally shown that, had the manufacturer been content with a little less profit, he could have converted the new fiber--which, by the way, he had obtained from the government Fiber Central--into some thirty thousand yards of first-cla.s.s shoddy under a formula that called for 65 per cent. new fiber and 35 per cent. old. As it was, he had turned the good raw material into nearly fifty-two thousand yards of fabrics that were not worth anything and he had wasted the labor of hundreds of men and women besides.

The man had been trying to make use of crumbs and sc.r.a.ps for his own benefit. Personal interests had led, in this instance, to an attempt to convert an economic negative into a positive. The useless fiber was a minus which no effort in plus could cause to have any other value than that which this profit-hunter saw in it. By the rational economist the shoddy had been abandoned, and all effort to overcome the statics of true economy, as here represented by the unserviceableness of the fiber for the use to which it had been a.s.signed, was bound to be an economic waste.

Cases such as these--and there were thousands of them--showed the authorities that there was danger even in economy. The crumbs and sc.r.a.ps themselves were useless in the end. Beyond a certain point all use of them resulted in losses, and that point was the minimum of utility that could be obtained with a maximum of effort. The economic structure could not stand on so poor a sand foundation.

But the several governments were largely responsible for this. They had regulated so much in behalf of economy that they had virtually given the economic shark _carte blanche_.

There was a season when I attended a good many trials of men who had run afoul of the law in this manner. They all had the same excuse. Nothing had been further from their minds than to make in times such as these excessive profits. They would not think of such a thing. If they had used poor materials in the things they manufactured, it was due entirely to their desire to stretch the country's resources. In doing that they had hoped to lighten the burden of the government. Conservation had become necessary and everybody would have to help in that. They had been willing to do their bit, and now the authorities were unreasonable enough to find fault with this policy.

At first many a judge had the wool pulled over his eyes in that manner.

But in the end the scheme worked no longer. Usually the limit of punishment fell on the offender.

Abuses of this sort had much to do with an improvement in conservation methods. So far as the textile industry was concerned it led to the control by the government Raw-Material Centrals, which were established rather loosely at the beginning of the war, of all fibers. The ragman thereafter turned over his wares to these centrals, and when a spinner wanted material he had to state what he wanted it for and was then given the necessary quant.i.ties in proportions. That helped, and when the government took a better interest in the goods manufactured this avenue of economic waste was closed effectively. With these measures came the clothing cards for the public. After that all seemed well. The poorer qualities of cloth disappeared from the market overnight, and a suit of clothing was now sure to give fair value for the price.

I have made use of this example to ill.u.s.trate what the factors in regulation and conservation were at times, and how difficult it was to unscramble the economic omelet which the first conservation policies had dished up.

There were other crumbs and sc.r.a.ps, however. Not the least of them was the socio-economic organism itself. That sensitive thing had been doctored so much that only a major operation could again put it on its feet. Economy faddists and military horse-doctors alike had tried their hands on the patient, and all of them had overlooked that the only thing there was wrong with the case was malnutrition. Everybody was trying to get the usual quant.i.ties and qualities of milk from a cow that was starving. Poor Bossy!

Man lives not by food alone; nor does society. It takes a whole lot of things to run a state. While the government had already in its grasp all the distribution and consumption of food, there were many things it did not care to interfere with, even if they were almost as important as food. These things were the products of industry, rather than the fruits of the fields, though usually, as is natural, it was difficult to draw a strong line of demarcation in the division of spheres. In social economy that has always been so. To get the true perspective, take a dozen pebbles, label them food, fuel, clothing, and whatever else occurs to you, and then throw the pebbles in the pond. You will find that the circular wavelets caused by the pebbles will soon run into and across one another, and if by chance you have followed the waves of food you will notice that while they have been broken by the impact of the others they still remain discernible.

Into the rippling pond the several governments had each thrown the cobblestones of regulation. The food, fuel, and clothing ripples were still there, of course, but they had been so obliterated that it was now difficult to trace them on the regulation waves.

But the waves, too, subsided, and on the backwash of them the authorities read lessons which suggested saner methods--methods whose conception and application were attended by a better regard for the nature of the operation, be this production, distribution, or consumption.

The saving of crumbs and sc.r.a.ps had not been without its value. It tended to make men short-sighted, however. The governments of Central Europe wanted to limit consumption to the absolutely necessary, but overlooked that their _modus operandi_ gave cause to serious losses. The various authorities did not wish to interfere too much with normal currents of economic life. That was well enough in a way, but had disastrous consequences. A shortage in the necessities of life was the great fact of the day. It could be met only by restricting consumption.

But the machinery of this restriction was a haphazard thing. It promoted h.o.a.rding.

There have been those who have condemned the h.o.a.rder in the roundest of terms. I am not so sure that he deserves all of the anathemas that have been hurled at him. When a government shouts day in and day out that the worst will come to pa.s.s if everybody does not save the crumbs, the more easily alarmed are bound to think only of themselves and of their own. High prices will cease to be a deterrent, for the reason that war brings only too many examples of the fact that only food and not money will sustain life. To act in accordance with this may be a weakness, but it is also along the lines of a natural condition, if self-preservation be indeed the first law of nature. Soon there are found those who promote and pamper this weakness for a profit. Food is then stored away by the majority. Some will waste much of it in over-consumption, while more will permit the food to spoil by improper storage methods, especially when the food has to be secreted in cellars and attics, wardrobes and drawers, as happens when government by inspection becomes necessary. But of this I have spoken already in its proper place.

XI

MOBILIZING THE PENNIES