AGRICULTURAL RELIEF

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especially as under present conditions he has no means of orderly marketing his
zoods. but must dump his crop and take whatever price he can get at the moment,
peing usually a big loser when his crop is the heaviest.

But it is as to the means of making a surplus control scheme effective that one
is particularly interested, seeing that a problem very similar has for a long time
been engaging the attention of the spinning and manufacturing side of the indus-
trv. Mr. Stone points out 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. This is
to be effected by some scheme of control, but what that scheme may be is not
settled. One thing is clear apparently and that is that the control of surplus
production is a matter too large in its scope and requirements to be undertaken
he farmers themselves, without Government intervention. But” says Mr.
Stone, ‘* it should be intervention only, and the machinery should be dependent
upon the farmer's initiative and be subject to his control.”

I do not know if Mr. Stone and his friends are aware of it, but these were
precisely the lines upon which the cotton control board, established in England
juring the war, was worked. Employers and operatives’ leaders carried out the
administration, and the Government undertook to see that the decisions of this
joint body were carried out. It worked admirably, so well indeed that I have
never ceased to deplore the dispersal of the board when the war was over. Had
we had this board in existence during the past seven years, I am convinced that
we should never have been in our present unhappy condition in Lancashire. I
have consistently advocated its revival, but a great many of our Lancashire
spinners and manufacturers seem to see some sinister meaning in the word
“control,” and can not be presuaded to try the system again, preferring to cling
to the old worn-out wasteful and costly methods of individualistic trading.

Mr. Stone, therefore, is on right lines when he advocates a system run by the
farmers themselves, and he sees to the heart of the matter in asking that the
organization be permanently established. In taking these views he is not
belittling the Government or questioning its capabilities, for he pays due credit
to the special committee set up by Mr. Coolidge to relieve the cotton market of
4.000,000 bales of the superabundant 1926 crop. That the committee failed,
he acknowledges, was not their fault, and adds, © If they (the special committee)
had been acting as a permanent board instead of an emergency committee, with
command of the necessary administrative machinery already established, instead
of having to devise ways and means as temporary as the undertaking itself, they
could have accomplished their purpose without question. And in doing so
they would have furnished to practical economics an object lesson even more
valuable, if possible, than was their recognition of the soundness of the principle
which they sought to apply.”

Without doubt that would have been so, for it is obviously wrong that planters
should be encouraged to produce all the cotton they are able, and then be denied
the means of controlling their product to such an extent as may insure their
proper livelihood. And there is no intention to do more than that, according
to Mr. Stone, just as there was no intention on the part of those who advoctaed
the formation of a new cotton ccntrol board to do anything more than make
costs of production safe in the spinning and manufacturing trades of Lancashire.
As Mr. Stone explains, the men on such a board as he is asking for would not be
composed of doctrinaires, day-dreamers, or fools, and would have common sense
to know that if they took one step hurtful to any other industry, or to the country
as a whole, the board would not survive the next session of- Congress.

Mr. Stone anticipates the flood of opposition that would be let loose should
agriculture attempt to organize itself on the lines indicated, and says that it is
certain that many interests would begin to cry out that they were about to be
sacrificed upon the altar of agricultural greed. This, I notice from one very
widely circulated journal in America, has begun already. ‘MeNary-Haugen-
ism,” as it is called, which aims at the control of surpluses particularly, is de-
scribed in this journal as ‘‘the power to corner basic agricultural commodities
and thereby create an artificial scarcity within the country in order to increase
prices,” and further, a plan to redistribute the national income by taking from
the industrial part of the population and giving to the agricultural part two or
“hree billion dollars a year.

_ We on this side understand this kind of thing, for, as promoters of a scheme
‘or saving cotton goods producers from absolute ruin, we have had to put up
with some little misrepresentation ourselves. And. strange to sav, much of it