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AGRICULTURAL RELIEF
Mr. Caverno. I will tell you a story about that. I graduated
from the University of Wisconsin in 1890, and when we get out of
college we write down our opinions. I had forgotten all about that.
In 10 years I went back there and I found that I had written this:

I am a Republican and a Congregationalist subject to change in the next world.

Mr. AsweLL. In the next world?

Mr. CaverNo. Subject to change in the next world. It shows
originally I was a pretty hidebound Republican.

One can not live in the South and meet their problems without
having his party allegiance jarred at least, and I want to say that
almost any man on this committee, if he had been born and brought
up in the South, would have been a Democrat.

“Some one has said that no question can be argued to a correct an
final conclusion without beginning with an agreement on a theory of
the universe.

1 do not wish to go quite so far back as that to reach common
ground with this committee in presenting the conclusions I have
drawn from a long and intimate study of the problems involved in
so-called “farm relief legislation.”

I am forced by my own mind to begin with this thesis, that the
characteristic feature of our present civilization and its problems as
distinguished from all preceding civilization lies in the understanding,
manipulation, and use of natural forces—physics, chemistry, engi-
neering—but that in the very conquest of these forces man has created
other forces—social and economic—more intricate, more powerful,
more dominant in the welfare of our people and our Nation.

The supreme problem of to-day is the understanding, manipula-
tion, and use of these social and economic forces, what I should call
the chemistry of human relationships.

[Let me put this into the simplest language possible. Some years
ago my small daughter said to me, “Papa, what is there left for man
to discover and invent? He has explored all of the earth, and has
invented railroads and steamships, telegraph, telephones, submarines,
automobiles, airships, and radios. What is there left for him to do
that can create such wonderful changes?”

A man does not like to be put to confusion by a child, especially
his own. The best I could do was to say: “Perhaps he will learn to
use these things wisely.” I thought at the time that perhaps I was
making a lame “getaway’’ from an embarassing situation, but the
longer 1 have thought of that answer, the more respect I have had for
myself.

I am addressing a subdivision of a political body, a lineal descend-
ant of the First Congress. I am also addressing a committee of the
board of directors of the greatest business corporation. the greatest
economic force, the world has ever known.

You have not willed this, no Congress has willed this. You may
sven deny the allegation. but the facts and the figures are against
you.

For the first 100 years the issues in American politics were largely
theoretical and political, concerned with the rights of man as against
the power of kings and potentates. Economic forces were at play
in our political structure, but in no case did they threaten popular
sovereignty except perhaps in the issue of slavery, and in this, the
economic issue was cloaked under a political doctrine. “We fight