THE PROBLEM, THE PEOPLE, THE PLACE 7 



been with you eight years you hesitate to let him 

 go: steady men are not easy to find. This one is 

 such that I had little fear he would end up "on 

 the county" those were the days before the more 

 abundant handout if I let him go. Yet it would 

 mean one more job closed to the six to sixteen 

 millions variously estimated jobless. In those days 

 the least public-spirited would have agreed with 

 me that, assuming any conceivable alternative, 

 such a course lacked constructive merit. And while 

 it was admittedly a good idea to save all the money 

 possible, yet what should we do if a time came 

 when there was no money, or when the money we 

 had was worthless? I was in Vienna in 1923, at the 

 tail end of Austria's post-war inflation and had 

 seen something of the dire consequences of cur- 

 rency depreciation. Again, in November, 1929, I 

 heard a stock broker say, in his office in Wall 

 Street: "Thank God I still know how to milk a 

 cow." I lived to see him go back to doing just that. 

 My concern was not only that we should pull in 

 our financial neck but also that come what might 

 we should not starve. There were plenty of other 

 ways we could cut down cash expenses. Since we 

 had forty fallow acres underfoot why not keep the 

 man on and start producing our own food? Even 

 should it prove more expensive than buying it 

 ready-made, if the crash came we still would have 

 three meals a day. 



