Uncle John and the Termites

Mr. Bradford is a well-known writer and business organization consultant.

My Uncle John was tall, thin, and muscular; and he had a notable beard that tapered to a ragged point well below his collar button. His bushy, iron-gray hair was. . .

However, this is not about how he looked, but what he did and what happened to him; for until tragedy overtook him, he achieved a remarkable career as a pioneer empire builder and accomplished things worthy to be remembered.

He came of an old and well-to-do family and might have lived out his life in comfortable sur­roundings had it not been for his adventurous spirit. He was hardly man-grown when he left the old home and made his way out to the far frontier where he used his savings to purchase some land.

During those early frontier days he saw some pretty rough times. Trees were to be felled and cut into rails, logs, and lumber. Land had to be cleared and fenced and tilled. He was far from great markets; but he had chosen well his location, along a clear, rushing stream that would furnish water power, and that led up a rich valley to a mountain pass with growing settlements on the other side.

As time went on, he bought more land and developed it; and he helped his neighbors in build­ing roads and opening up new territory beyond. He was active also in the affairs of the commu­nity that grew up about his origi­nal clearing. By his energy and skill he gradually became the fore­most farmer in the valley, and by his cooperative spirit and native gumption he became a recognized leader in the neighborhood.

Uncle John and his wife, be­lieving as they did in large fam­ilies, soon had a houseful of chil­dren. Almost before he realized it (so fast went the years) his sons and daughters were grown and married, and grandchildren be­gan to appear. His in-laws, as well as others who were not kinfolk, were attracted to the neighbor­hood because of the way it was run. Under Uncle John’s leader­ship the lands were well-fenced and tended, predatory animals had been disposed of, and there was little crime or violence. It was looked upon as a “good neighbor­hood.” Thus the protecting shadow of a man lengthened over a com­munity that was grateful for his leadership.

Being far from the older and established settlements, the peo­ple of Uncle John’s community devised their own money, and by common consent — or rather, by general demand — Uncle John be­came the controller of this cur­rency and banker for the entire settlement. As long as he carried out these functions on the simple lines of keeping solvent, all went well.

In these early years, due to his strong convictions on the subject of economy, Uncle John aimed to keep community expenses at such a level that not more than 5 per cent of the total earnings of all the people would be required to finance those expenses. This left everybody considerable surplus above what it cost to live; and presently this surplus began to be invested in various enterprises —a grist mill, the expansion of the blacksmith shop into a general metal working establishment, a sawmill and planing mill combined, a knitting mill, and the like. Most of these ventures prospered under good management, yielding a good return to investors and furnish­ing profitable employment to others.

Uncle John was a leading spirit as well as a foremost investor in all such developments; with the result that by the time his rather scraggly beard was gray, he was not only rich in worldly posses­sions but was much respected for his achievements, his probity, and his qualities of leadership.

But after a time trouble began. The people of his settlement got into a fight with some other set­tlers across the mountains. Before it was ended, the combatants, in addition to killing and wounding one another, had destroyed a lot of each other’s property. This, to­gether with the guns, ammunition, and other supplies necessary to

the conflict, cost Uncle John and his people a great deal of money.

Never having experienced the need for such an outlay for non­productive purposes, Uncle John was worried. He could hardly tax the people enough to pay expenses of the fight as it went along, so he reluctantly resorted to what he had always referred to as “going into debt.” One of his nephews had a nicer name for it: “deficit financing.” What they did was to sell bonds — promises to pay at a future date—to all the people, who were assured that the bonds were a good investment because the honor and credit of the whole com­munity were behind them.

On the strength of the credit thus created Uncle John printed up a lot of new money and put it into circulation. This led presently to much reckless spending and foolish investment_: Then, after the fight was ended and things settled down to normal, there was a general slowing down, an in­evitable tightening of credit — and pretty soon Uncle John and his people were in the middle of what they called a “panic.” Some people lost all or part of their money; some of the shops and mills closed down for want of business; em­ployment became scarce; and the community was in a bad way, with people out of jobs, interest on hastily-given mortgages falling due, and the cost of daily living to meet.

Uncle John and his family and friends helped one another. Peo­ple went out of their way to fur­nish some kind of work for those who needed it. Committees were formed, funds were raised and distributed, various plans were adopted. It was a fine example of man’s humanity to man. The trouble began to ease a bit.

Then one of the nephews, who held what he called “advanced” ideas on many things, told Uncle John that all such industrial and economic problems were not fit matters for private and individual benevolence, but were the respon­sibility of the community as a whole. He finally convinced Uncle John that money should be taken out of the community treasury to help those in trouble. Some of it was given outright. Some was spent on projects like making a park, piling up trash, or building a dam, in order to furnish jobs. A great deal was also spent to pay the people who were hired to administer the program.

It wasn’t long before the com­munity began to accept respon­sibility for the economic welfare of various groups—such as the farm­ers, and the laborers, and the industrialists, and the small businessmen, and the young people, and the old people. The nephew said this arrangement would pro­mote the general welfare!

In time further complications arose. Some people in distant set­tlements started fighting among themselves. Uncle John had re­solved long ago to keep out of all such quarrels, but at last, one of the belligerents attacked and sank some of Uncle John’s river boats — and then the fat was in the fire.

A long and bitter fight ensued. So many people got mixed up in it that it was hard to know who were friends and who were en­emies. A number of Uncle John’s grandsons were killed and wounded, and this grieved him greatly. Also, what with buying weapons and supplies for the men who were fighting, paying for their keep and transportation, paying pensions to their wives and families when they were killed or wounded — and especially what with making loans and gifts to the neighbors who were fighting on his side, Uncle John and his peo­ple emerged from the fight more deeply in debt than ever before.

On top of all this, some of the people who had fought on Uncle John’s side now turned against him and were bitterly critical and hostile. Moreover, some of the people he had helped defeat now de­manded financial aid from him —or threatened anarchy. They said enemies within were secretly un­dermining the structure of their societies — and what was Uncle John going to do about it? His first impulse was to tell them to go jump in the river, but he was as­sured by some of his most for­ward looking nephews that this would never do. So, he began to hand out money to his late enemies.

This increased the debt to such fantastic proportions that Uncle John finally called a meeting to discuss the problem. Most mem­bers of the community were very much concerned although there were a few, strangely enough, who contended that the debt was a good thing for the community and ought never to be paid! But even among those who believed it ought to be paid off or reduced, hardly anybody was willing to stop ex­penditures already agreed to; and before the meeting was over, many of them advanced proposals to spend still more on new projects. So instead of paying off the debt, they had to borrow more money —that is, sell more bonds — to take care of their current operating expenses.

As for Uncle John, he seemed to grow confused. He was now so deeply in debt, forced to pay into the community treasury such a large portion of his personal income, and beset by such constant and clamorous demands for more and more deficit spending and the accumulation of more and more debt, that he seemed to lose touch with reality.

He did understand that when he borrowed he created credit, and that the credit itself became the basis for the creation of still more debt through more borrowing, all tending to dilute the purchasing power of their money. He saw the results of this process in the slow but inexorable rise in the cost of things. But his will seemed para­lyzed. He just wasn’t able to do anything about it. His only solu­tion was to borrow more, create more credit, and issue more money.

And then something very special and tragic happened.

One evening as Uncle John sat smoking in the library of his fine old home, he noticed that the shelving in one corner seemed to be out of line. Incredibly, it sagged — and even as he watched, it sagged still more. He jumped from his chair and hurried to the cor­ner to see what was wrong; and as he did so, to his amazement the floor itself sagged under his feet. That whole corner of the house just seemed to slump down. He was puzzled and alarmed. He knew that the sills were supported by heavy walls of stone laid up in mortar. Surely those ageless foundations could not have weak­ened!

He went outside for a look. The weatherboards were intact, but the corner of the house seemed to be slacked down, as though it were tired. He quickly got a ham­mer and wrecking bar from his tool shed. He pried off a board —or rather, he started to; but when he forced the bar under the board, the paint suddenly fell off in large flakes, and the board itself simply disintegrated into a collapsed mass of fibrous dust, much as a mummy does, once the wrappings are re­moved.

As he stood wondering, a little insect appeared amid the dusty debris. Stooping to pick it up, Uncle John discovered that the wreckage was fairly crawling with small, whitish, ant-like creatures. He tore away more boards and ex­posed the sturdy stone foundation. The stones were netted with slender tubular structures made of dried mud — and he saw that the insects were apparently using these tubes as highways from the ground to the woodwork above.

Further investigation convinced him that the miserable insects were themselves the cause of the trouble. Tiny and apparently helpless, they were literally eating his house down!

In the days that followed he ex­perimented with ways to stop their depredations. Finally he found that if he treated the wood with certain chemicals, and es­pecially if he inserted a thin strip of durable metal between the stone foundation and the sills, letting the edges project an inch or two, the destroyers could not or would not build their deadly tunnels over the edge of the metal. And so at great cost of labor and money he equipped the house, as far as it was physically possible to do so, with the necessary fenders.

But he was shaken by the ex­perience. It gave him a sense of frightened helplessness to reflect that a man of his size and strength and a house of such dignity and proportions should be at the mercy of a horde of insects, working in the dark, protected from the re­vealing daylight by a screen of mud.

One day his second son came to him in great agitation: the de­vouring insects were at work in his house also!

Obviously something had to be done at once. But the young man said he simply couldn’t afford the money to jack the house up, re­place the damaged sills, and insert the shields. Uncle John was sur­prised at that. He had set the boy up handsomely when he was mar­ried, and the young fellow had been prospering at his occupation. He should have saved a comfort­able sum by this time. Of course, living costs were high, and there were those heavy taxes. . . .

However, the main thing was to stop the marauders before they destroyed the house, so Uncle John agreed to advance the money. The boy’s house must be saved —and besides, if something were not done quickly, the insects might spread to other houses. They might even get into his own house again!

That was the fear that had been eating away at Uncle John’s peace of mind. Sometimes in the middle of the night he would awake in a cold sweat, having dreamed that all the houses in the community, including his own, had been destroyed.

And then one day a man from down the valley came to see him. The man seemed agitated, but there was also a hint of calculation in his manner.

“It’s the bugs, John,” he an­nounced bluntly. “They’ve got to my place.”

Uncle John expressed his sym­pathy, and began to suggest the measures that should be taken. But the neighbor interrupted.

“I know all that,” he said, “but the trouble is, I haven’t got the money to do the job. So I came to see you about a loan — or a grant.”

A grant? Uncle John’s eyebrows went up. He knew the man had been going through some hard times, but he was by no means bankrupt. Also, he was able-bodied and could work. Uncle John knew that when he said “grant” he meant “gift.” Surely a man in his position could manage-

As if reading Uncle John’s thoughts, the neighbor shrugged. “All right,” he said, ominously, “but if they eat my house down and spread into your settlement, don’t blame me.”

More insects in his settlement! That was what Uncle John had come to fear above everything else. So he hastily “granted” the man the money — and within a week two other men, who lived so far up the river that he scarcely knew them, were on his doorstep.

“The bugs, John! We’ve got to have help. If they eat us out, pretty soon they’ll be after you, and —”

By this time his normal caution had forsaken him. He knew about these men from of old, though he hardly knew them personally. One of them, indeed, had openly sided with his enemies in the recent fighting. The other had always been shiftless and undependable.

But — the bugs! Uncle John hur­ried to get the money for them. By this time he was looking for neither accounting nor account­ability, having become completely obsessed by fear of “the bugs.” And so his next step was easy and inevitable, considering his state of mind: He made a speech at the schoolhouse, announcing that anybody up and down the valley, or in the remote settle­ments across the ridge, who was in need of money to fix up his place as a precautionary measure against possible termite invasion, had only to apply to him and the necessary funds would be forth­coming!

In a short time Uncle John was so busy passing out money that he could do little else. And, of course, he had to hire a large number of people to help handle this new activity, which added to its cost.

He lacked not only the time but also the inclination to figure out what was happening to the value of the money he was dispensing so lavishly. Over a period of years it lost in purchasing power at the rate of about 3 per cent a year. One day he awoke to the startling fact that his money would actually buy less than half what it had bought just a few years previously.

Then he looked at the size of the debt he had been building up, and he was staggered at the huge amount of it. He began to hear from certain members of his fam­ily on that score, too. They made loud outcries against what they called the extravagance of running the community. They made sharp demands for a reduction of ex­penditures, and for some payment on the gigantic and ruinous debt. But it was in vain. Too many other voices were clamoring for more, more!

As for Uncle John, he seemed to have become obsessed with the mere spending of money. Even in such vital matters as the defense of the community, he no longer said, “We have so many men un­der arms,” or “We have such-and such gunboats,” or “We have a certain number of cannons.” In­stead, he had fallen into the habit of saying, “We have spent this­and-that amount of money on de­fense.”

And his strange and indiscrim­inating fear of the termites con­tinued. In this he made a fatal error — namely, he assumed that all the destroyers were alike, and that all were the same pale whit­ish color of those he had first dis­covered. Actually, there were many other kinds. The whites, in­deed, were a minority and were not even native to his settlement, having come into his valley in relatively small numbers from distant lands.

And while he was worrying about the depredations of that particular kind of “bug,” and spending his money to protect the houses of his neighbors from in­vasion by the whites, other ter­mites, native to his area, without his being aware of it, had found unprotected spots and were silent­ly at work on the destruction of his own house.

It almost seemed as though they were also eating away at some­thing vital in Uncle John himself.

His former independence of spirit had given place to an atti­tude of placation, appeasement, and favor-seeking. Whereas he formerly made friends by the sim­ple process of being fair and just, he now went about almost cring­ingly trying to purchase friend­ship with gifts of money — there­by losing respect and earning only contempt.

His sense of pride and self-suf­ficiency were also dulled. Once he had hated debt and insolvency; now he lacked the moral courage to deny himself and his family a few luxuries so that he could put his financial house in order.

Once he had taken pride in pay­ing his bills promptly and fully; now he was in debt over the ears of his great grandchildren — and he didn’t care!

Once he had proudly told a bully that he would spend all he had for defense but wouldn’t pay a cent for tribute; now he was vol­untarily, needlessly, and often fruitlessly offering a kind of trib­ute to any who would accept it —and he was being laughed at for his stupidity.

Yes, it was as though the blind and ruthless little destroyers that were stealthily cutting away at the timbers of his house had each a ghostlike, invisible counterpart that was inwardly devouring the substance of his moral fiber.

It took the sudden and final col­lapse of his great old mansion into a heap of dusty rubble to make him realize that an even greater destruction had occurred within himself.

But then it was too late.

***

Ideas On Liberty
Trembling in the Balance

The very finest thing which the world’s civilization has ever reached is this wonderful sphere in these United States of America of free social cooperation for the advancement of education, religion and morality, the care of the sick and needy, the spread of neighborly kindness and helpfulness, and for the upbuilding, thereby, of enlightened character, which dispenses with paternalism in government and makes democracy safe for our own Country. Without this we could never have attained and maintained that system of limited government and individual liberty which has made us a great and happy and relatively con­tented people. As we have seen, this great system has received shock after shock since we started out upon that path of conquest in 1898, which veered in the direction of imperialism. It would be a very moderate statement to say that it is now trembling in the balance. It would be nearer the mark to suggest, at least, that it is anxiously awaiting what may be its death blow.

John W. Burgess, Recent Changes In American Constitutional Theory, 1923