AGRICULTURAL RELIEF

455

I want to say this, that I approach this whole matter in the spirit
of the man who woke up in the night and heard a burglar in the
house. He said, “What do you want?”

The burglar said, “Money.”

He said, “Well, just wait a minute. If there is any in the house,

would just like to help find it.”

I will be perfectly frank and tell you that I believe that the equaliza-
tion fee is the most practical, almost the essential thing to solve this
problem, as I see it, but I want to tell you what my experience has
been and why I see it that way, and that is all.

Heaven knows that a controversial proposition like that we want
to get away from, if we can.

I want to say that the most searching criticism of the equalization
fee that I have heard has not occurred in this room. It has occurred
in the conferences of the farmers’ associations themselves.

Twenty years ago I was in partnership with the late Senator
McKinley in a public-service corporation in Illinois. I sold out my
interest at that time and I took my ill-gotten gains and invested them
in three things—a daily newspaper, a manufacturing plant in which 1
was previously interested, and a tract of swamp land in southeast
Missouri.

This brought me this experience for a good many years. I oscil-
lated from my office in New York back to my prosperous manufac-
turing city in the State of Illinois, and then to my timber patch in
southeast Missouri.

I worked in that swamp land, with the original timber standing on
it, for 10 years. I went through the kind of pioneering which Senator
Reed thinks we are going through now, every man being an individual
and able to take care of himself.

Ilived in 10 years down there what the Nation has gone through in
150 years.

I started in logging with cattle and kept a pack of coon hounds.
I watched that place grow out of the swamp. 1 was able to meet the
situation. I went down there and gloried in the hardships of pioneer-
ing and I cleared the land.

I remember coming in one day and saying to my folks, “I do not
know who will own this land 1,000 years from now, but I cleared it.”

I took some pride in having made a scar on the face of the earth that
would last, and it gave me some sense of accomplishment.

It was only when I got up to the point where I began to raise farm
crops and market them after my experience in the business world,
that my sense of manhood was violated, and I felt as much strangled
by forces over which I had no control as the men in that famous
statue Liaocoon—the snakes were all around me, and I could not get
away from them. :

I want to talk to you about the practical working of the Haugen
bill. I will say this: I will turn in for any bill—and I know what it
means to support a bill of this kind which is as liable as it is to a
veto—I will go as far as any human in making modifications that will
leave anything for the farmer. I do not want to say right now what
bill T was for. It was either Mr. Kincheloe or else Mr. Kincheloe
told-tha story, of someoCongressman:whoshegard hie constituents. had
ehanged: their’ opinioniand hesseid, ‘{Theylican fot lehangd any Tqstd?
than Baan oiAnd J milikals Gongrbsoman ind thed. ds) to 2uidauye

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