AGRICULTURAL RELIEF
underconsumption ; anyhow, it left a large part of the cotton unsalable.
In former times the farm relief bills were presented merely from an
emergency point of view, of trying to solve a temporary condition;
now, any farm relief bill introduced—I do not care on what feature
it may be founded, nor what method it may seek to use in trying to
solve the surplus question—can not approach the farm relief question
from an emergency or temporary point of view.

At least, those organizations which President Thompson read the
names of awhile ago, all of which are in support of H. R. 7940, have
gotten far beyond the point that farm relief, as originally considered,
is an emergency soiution. We are trying to set up a permanent
agricultural policy for the disposition of the surplus. We are on
a permanent basis now and have been for some time in the past.
Farm relief has progressed from a point of simply making an effort
to solve a temporary condition to an effort to set up a permanent
beneficial condition, as to agriculture; and that gives the question a
much more potent and much more favorable situation than perhaps
it had in times past.

Another point of progress which has been made in farm relief is
that we are somewhat unconcerned now—at least, these organiza-
tions, the names of which were read a while ago, are unconcerned
about the size of the revolving fund. We are not so much concerned
about that, provided it is not too radically low or too elaborately
large. Any average-sized revolving fund is satisfactory to us, and
we are not caring particularly to designate what that amount shall be,
for this reason, that when the bill which we are advocating is passed,
the revolving fund is merely a loan to agriculture for use by the
Federal Farm Board in disposing of the surplus, and the loan shall
carry 4 per cent interest. As it 1s a loan, with the stabilization fund
being built up by the equalization fee on the commodity, not on the
producer, it is immaterial, with the qualifications I have just ex-
pressed, whether the revolving fund is large or small. The fund
coming from the Federal Treasury as a loan and being used in the
operation periods, being guaranteed and safeguarded and protected
by the stabilization fund, will go back into the Treasury eventually
at 4 per cent interest and be what its name designates it to be, a
revolving fund.

In some former efforts at farm relief bills, going back two or three
years, the revolving fund was not a revolving fund in a direct appli-
cation of that definition. It was a gift; it was a gratuity to agricul-
ture with no method, in most farm relief bills, for returning that fund
to the Federal Treasury from which it came, much less returning it
with 4 per cent interest. We, in the group whose names you heard
read awhile ago, are not asking for any gratuity from the Federal
Government; we are not asking that Uncle Sam be a sort of Santa
Claus, if I may so colloquially express it, to help out in the dispo-
sition of surpluses; but, as we see it, we are asking the Federal Gov-
ernment to provide the initiatory money, under the name of a re-
volving fund, and to get that money back eventually with interest
thereon. That is progress. To use the word I first used, it is evolu-
tion. It is beneficial progress, and when I use those words, I am not
applying them merely to those bills which have been based upon the
equalization plan; but I am applying them to all farm relief bills.
There 1s quite a difference between those bills which are based upon