456

AGRICULTURAL RELIEF

Mr. AswiLL. Are you willing to change your views about the
equalization fee?

Mr. CaveERrNO. Yes, sir; if I can find something that will do the
work.

Mr. AsweLL. Do you think that the equalization fee is likely to
become a law if it is passed?

Mor. Caverno. I do not know, Doctor. I will take that up a little
later, if I have the time.

Mr. WiLLiams. Something was said by Chester Gray in his testi-
mony to the effect that they had in mind offering some amend-
ments with reference to the equalization fee that he thought would
meet the objections of the President.

Mr. Caverno. If you will allow me, I will take that up a little
later on.

Mr. WirLiams. I have been listening and hoping that that matter
would be presented before the close of the hearings because I think
that is probably the most important thing that should be discussed
before the committee.

Mr. CaverNo. I have just a few minutes for the laying of an
economic foundation here and then I will talk on the practical work-
ings of this type of legislation, as I see it, and the practical workings
of other types of legislation, and make a comparison.

I may be wrong, but I have got a pretty definite machinery in mind.
I am an engineer, and I have got to make a blue print—I make a blue
print of a business system. I make a blue print of everything I
have to figure out. It has got to be on paper, and in all this dis-
cussion when people have talked pro and con, I have tried to work
it into a practical working machine.

It seems to me that the group or the commodity has now become
the unit in civilization; that up to this time the problem of civiliza-
tion has been the adjustment between human beings. But we have
grown up into groups now so that the problem of civilization is the
adjustment between groups and commodities. :

As an illustration of that, I raise wheat, but my bushel of wheat
does not reflect me at all. It is absorbed. My versonality does
not come Into it.
~ Let me illustrate that. I have down here as a memorandum,
“Interstate origin; price graphs, pushball.”

Now, where does that come in? The trouble with the farmers
to-day is that they are meeting a system of marketing organized
under interstate commerce, not only our interstate commerce law.
but an interstate commerce system.

When I came away from here, I left some wheat in my bin and
some corn in my crib. If I had made a graph of the prices on the
grain-room wall, it would have been going up and down, and I have
had no part in it. I can not have any part in it. Those prices are
fixed without my effort and without the effort of any farmer.

Everybody knows that every motion is a resultant of its component
parts, and that is where the pushball comes in. A pushball goes
just where the strongest pressure is. It makes a path across the
ground according to who is strongest on both sides.

0 In the making of that graph on my grain-room wall, that represents

e price of my wheat in the bin. I have no part in it. Nobody is
pushing on that ball to make that graph run on a higher plane.