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A SICK, EMACIATED SOCIAL SYSTEM.
The hard times I have been describing were in the early nineties.

The year before there had been a financial crash.

Nobody seemed to know what was the matter at the time, but it has since been learned that the hard times were the fruit of crop failures, if one can call failure fruit.
All over the world bad years had destroyed the harvests.

This great loss of foodstuffs was exactly the same as if armies in war had ravaged the fields.