AGRICULTURAL RELIEF

165

heing of doubtful benefit to the ultimate consumer. In other words, a surplus
may be occasioned by rapidity of delivery during the harvest season, as well as
oy actual overproduction in excess of market requirements over a year or a
season. And to the farmer the results in one case are just as real as in the other,
and no less tragic. He is not concerned with abstract economics and definitions.
He is confronted with a condition, and not a theory.

The problem for the American farmer, therefore, is not primarily one of con-
trolling production. That phase is of course entitled to consideration. But
production is in reality absolutely beyond human control. It requires constant
effort on the farmer’s part to produce enough, yet in the nature of the business,
those necessary efforts occasionally result in producing too much. The real
problem is that of controlling the surplus which is thus inevitably incident to
agricultural production of American magnitude, and which occurs occasionally
in excess of the requirements of stabilized commercial and manufacturing oper-
ations.

it can not be too strongly emphasized that the real problem before American
agriculture is not that of fixing prices. It is primarily that of securing values,
based upon the law of supply and demand, which can be done only when that
law is allowed to operate fairly and normally, and through a reasonable period
of time, without the hampered and unbalanced effects of a temporary supply
anreasonably in excess of a temporary demand. This can only be done by a
frank recognition of the nature of agricultural surpluses and of their real sig-
ficance to the public as well as to the producer, followed by the application of
sound methods of surplus control. We have an excellent illustration of what
we have in mind{in the effort last fall of Mr. Coolidge's special committee to
control a cotton surplus of disastrous proportions. The effect of this surplus
on prices was immediately retlected in a decreased purchasing power which was
felt throughout the country. It was a matter of sufficient concern to challenge
the attention of the President of the United States. It is doubtful if any Ameri-
~an farm crop was ever before the object of an equal degree of executive solicitude.
The president selected for this undertaking a most distinguished group of men:
Mr. Mellon, of the Treasury, Mr. Hoover, of Commerce, Mr. Jardine, of Agri-
~ulture, Mr. James, of the Federal Reserve Board, Mr. Williams, of the Federal
Farm Loan Board, with Mr. Meyer, of the War Finance Corporation, as active
shairman. Their decision was to relieve the market of its glutted condition by
lifting from it the weight of some four million bales of cotton, and thus allow the
normal operation of the law of supply and demand. The means adopted did not
attract sufficient cotton to the holding corporations to allow the effort to succeed.
But these gentlemen are entitled to the thanks of American agriculture for placing
of permanent record their definite approval of the wisdom and necessity of giving
play tolthe principle of surplus control, as a means of making effective the fair
operation of the law of supply and demand. That their very earnest efforts did
not succeed was not their fault. If they had been acting as a permanent board,
instead of as an emergency committee, with command of the necessary adminis-
trative machinery, already established, instead of having to devise ways and
means as temporqry as the undertaking itself, they could have accomplished
sheir purpose without question. And in doing so they would have furnished to
practical agricultural economics an object lesson even more valuable, if possible,
han was their recognition of the soundness of the principle which they sought
:0 apply.

Surplus control must be had, if American agriculture is ever to be placed upon
an equal business footing with other American basic industries. And to accom-
slish it is a matter too large in its scope and requirements to be undertaken by
‘armers themselves, without government intervention. But it should be inter-
vention only, and the machinery should be dependent upon the farmer’s initiative
ind be subject to his control. And the cost of the operation should be adjusted
;0 the particular commodity benefited thereby, and be borne by such commodity.

Can this be done with safety and by constitutional means, without imposing
anfair burdens upon other industries or upon the country at large? If this
question can not be affirmatively answered, then the producer from the soil will
set no relief. He will then have to make up his mind to remain what he is to-day,
argely a creature of wind and weather, a mere burden bearer for an industrialized
democracy, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water for the more favored classes
of his countrymen, a mudsill upon which may be safely erected the gigantic
superstructure of American business, but himself destined forever to be only a
mudsill.

A favorable answer will not be easy to translate into an accomplished fact.
Fromthe very nature of the case any such legislation must be new. Because