Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty.… Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.…

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

Would people learn? she wondered. Or would they go back to grabbing all they could grab as soon as the depression was over? Men put so much stock in money and property and possessions. Velma had always been disgusted when a wealthy banker or stockbroker killed himself because he had lost his money. She had survived two long stays in the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives, listened through the endless nights to women coughing away their lives, watched in the morning when the cheerful, whistling orderlies gathered from the bedposts the bags stuffed with cloths soaked in blood and sputum, took the bags out past the dairy and set fire to them, warming themselves over bonfires made with the rags of the dying. The women in the sanitarium had fought so hard to live. Fought and asked for nothing except to be able to breathe freely, to have the strength to get up and walk out of that hospital on their own two legs. Some had lived, like Velma, long past their time, with so very little. You couldn’t live on nothing, but you could live on a little, if you had a roof over your head and fuel for the stove, enough to eat and clothes on your back. Roosevelt seemed to understand that clearly, but Emaline wondered if folks would grasp his message and join him in the struggle to put America on a different course.