AGRICULTURAL RELIEF

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cent less, and the rest of the world’s exports were only about equal to their pre-
war volume. (P. 22, 1927 report of Secretary of Commerce.)

B. A supplemental report in the Department of Commerce is that for the first
nine months of 1927 the exports of the United States increased 3 per cent in value,
amounting quantitatively to some 10 per cent increase, or a 50 per cent increase
over 1913. (U.S. Department of Commerce reports, Dec. 26, 1927, pp. 772-773.)
Loans to Europe by this country helped to supplv purchasing power for Europe
in this country.
THE EVIDENCE
Thus the evidence is unimpeachable as to the disaster to the peoples abroad
from the return of conservative government in the United States.
INDUSTRIAL CRISIS

The thickly populated countries in Europe have been borrowing capital in
this country to keep going, to keep from an industrial breakdown and wide-
spread starvation that would have been accompanied by the coming into power
of the Communists, and worse and worse conditions that would have been accom-
panied, doubtless, by the usual orgy of wholesale executions of the propertied
class.
INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION FOR RELIEF

October, 1926, there was issued an international warning. A statement was
issued signed by prominent bankers in many lands urgently calling upon the
nations of earth to recognize an acute industrial crisis, world-wide, caused, they
said, “by the impoverishment of Europe’ from the loss of international trade.

Next the League of Nations called the International Economic Conference to
meet during May, 1927. It met at the international capital, Geneva.

Two months before the assembling of the delegates to that economic confer-
ence there was published in London and in New York two editions of a book,
The Road to Prosperity, by Sir George Paish, banker, London, who had helped
to put forth the widely signed statement.

In this book there are brought together much of the data on which the bankers
had relied, the substance being ‘‘the impoverishment of Europe’ as the result
of loss of international trade. Sir George Paish goes somewhat into detail in
his book, and the conclusion he reaches is that Europe’s impoverishment is such
that if its loss of trade shall continue ‘‘the consequences will be more disastrous
than the failure to avert the political danger of 1914.” (P. 157.)
PRESENT-DAY WORLD-WIDE CRISIS

In other words, since the coming in of conservative government in the United
States, March 4, 1921, there has existed relatively high prices by the organized
business interests, accompanied by underconsumption and the dumping abroad
of part of the surplus. This dumping has been at whatever prices would get the
trade, thereby taking trade which normally should have gone to other countries,
s0 as to supply them with raw materials and food. Paish does not trace it
directly to the United States, lacking the data which we are supplying, in sup-
port of the aforesaid economic principle, are the relative index numbers of the
United States Department of Agriculture, charted.

THE BACKGROUND MORE IN DETAIL.
The economic background more in detail is that since the opening of the
Wrold War, in 1914, the United States has been in a position where her exports
have exceeded her imvorts to the extent of something like $22.000.000.000—a
fabulous sum.

This has come in two periods:

I. From the autumn of 1915 for nearly five years there was a rapid rise in our
price level, with huge profits to the business interests. The people cried out
against the high cost of living; and because of the relatively high prices to the
consumers they were obliged to skimp in their pruchases, and cut down in the
extent of their living quarters. That was the proper way to figth a hard-fought
war. The United States exported its surplus from this underconsumption,
thereby helping to win the World War. And in 1919 and 1920 our large exports
helped the rest of the world to recover from the losses in the war.