people, as the difficulty of a school boy's sum, is the register of their progress," he said. "And it is no more absurd for a boy who is given a problem in algebra to try to apply short division methods to it than it is for a people to try to solve their problem in the terms of the problem of the generation before."
He was talking to me then of the way we were and are restricting our cotton acreage in the south because we had not developed needs for all we could grow; of the waste in the unharvested food products of the West; and the shut-downs in the many factories and mills in the East because our ability to produce as a nation kept running so steadily ahead of our ability to consume our own products.
The reductions and shut-downs under consideration were not the abnormal ones of panic. He was merely counting up the routine and periodical reductions and shut-downs prevalent in prosperous times and due to nothing else than the notorious ability of Americans to produce much more and much faster than they consume.
"The problem of our generation," he explained, "was to make—to produce. Yours is to use—to consume. And yet you seem to be trying to solve your problem in the terms of ours!
"We had to learn to make. You have to learn to need! And what is the matter with all you Americans today that you don't try harder to use
