This Noble Land by James A. Michener Page A

population. But the basic truth of a rising stock market today is that the rich become richer playing games in the market while the poor remain where they were or become even poorer. The joy of the man who profited from the rise in the Dow Jones should not blind us to the grief of the man of fifty with a family to support who is suddenly without a job.
    I am reminded of that universal truth voiced by Oliver Goldsmith:
    Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
    Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
    Changes in American life during the past three decades seem to prove the accuracy of the poet’s lament. During recent years my attempts to help friends find new jobs have accomplished little, and at the same time I see that my graduate students who are soon to enter the labor market view with apprehension their chances of finding jobs commensurate with the years they have spent preparing for them. I do not find, in American life generally, much awareness of the tragedy of unemployment. We commiserate with the homeless and weep for the young people dying of AIDS, but we do not allow the brutal facts of mid-level unemployment to sink into our conscience. Another of Goldsmith’s couplets is equally applicable to the situation:
    But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
    When once destroy’d, can never be supplied.
    The economic revolution of recent times has gone far toward destroying our ‘bold peasantry,’ among them the factory worker who has spent years building his skills and his value to his company but who now finds he is no longer needed because his factory has fled either eastward to Asia—Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea—or south to Mexico. If this drift continues much longer, I can foresee only a radical redefinition of American life.
    The closest historical analogy to our perilous position today is found in sixteenth-century Spain, which ruled much of the world and controlled not only the rich Iberian Peninsula but also much of central Europe, including Austria and the Netherlands. Commerce flowed freely among this group of nations; industries in one country balanced and supported those in another, and there was a rich symbiotic interrelationship. But what impresses me most about Spain in those days was that it had one of the strongest peasant cadres in the world, stalwart men and women who had mastered agriculture, wine making, leather curing, ironfabrication and the sensible harvesting of forested lands. In 1520 they excelled in all these fields and had established a high standard by which workers in other countries were judged; cordovan leather, a Toledo blade and sherry wine were known and treasured throughout the civilized world. Spain stood preeminent in the stability of its national economy, its good government under the Hapsburgs and its military genius.
    In the Spanish colonies of Peru and Mexico, the conquistadores discovered silver and gold. Yearly caravels from Peru began to sail up the Pacific coastline to Panama, where mule trains hauled the precious metals across the isthmus to be loaded onto the great treasure fleets that crossed the Caribbean and Atlantic with the treasures from Peru and Mexico, depositing them at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River.
    What this newfound wealth from the colonies did was to flood the economy in Spain with unearned currency. Prices for everyday goods skyrocketed and the peasants were diverted from their normal tasks. Spaniards now bought things instead of making them. The thrifty farmers no longer worked their fields. Much of the mineral wealth mined in Peru and Mexico passed quickly through Spain to finance its endeavors on foreign battlefields. The decline of Spain began with this ungoverned influx of unearned wealth, which caused the trades and industries on which Spain had depended for her greatness to fall into disuse.
    France and England were fortunate that in neither their homelands nor their colonies did they discover gold. There was no sudden