THE FARMERS INDEMNITY 
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milk and lift the curse of anaemia and rickets from the rising 
generation. Overproduction of cash crops is a necessity, in a 
debt ridden farm population, and overproduction means low 
prices. Low prices, given fixed debt charges, evoke greater efforts 
to produce. The farmer thus joins hands with the German around 
the vicious circle. 
It may be permitted to draw one final analogy. The Germans, 
compelled to produce as much and consume as little as possible, 
make a poor market for Allied producers. The British textile 
workers and the French vineyards have grievances of their own 
against the indemnity. Is it to be supposed that our debt ridden 
farmers are a good market for our industrial products? Ask 
the local merchants, the disconsolate salesmen, the manufac- 
turers who find trade becoming more and more a hand to mouth 
affair. The farmers don’t buy as they should, because they can't. 
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A concrete example may serve to set us on our way toward the 
next phase of our inquiry, the search for causes. I take for my 
example a prairie state farm with whose history I am familiar but 
which is in no other respect a departure from type. This farm 
was won from the public domain in the middle sixties. The 
original owner sold it in 1895. The farm was sold again in 1910, 
and was purchased by the present owner in 1919. Like all other 
farms in the county it is now for sale, and will probably remain 
in this state for five or ten years. 
Even a cursory survey of the farm will show that its golden 
age lies well in the past. The house, unusually spacious for a 
prairie state farm, is sadly dilapidated. The rain goes through 
the roof of the east wing, but the farm family doesn’t use the 
east wing. The shingles are badly curled on the rest of the roof, 
prepared to catch a spark some windy night. The barn roof 
sags in the middle and one corner has settled badly; the carriage 
shed is a morass in wet weather. The skeleton of a windmill 
still stands, but the pump is worked by the farmer’s big boy, who 
means to get a job in Kansas City before many droughty sum- 
mers have gone. There is a tract of wet land on the place, once 
drained and miraculously productive. It reverted to swamp 
through the choking of the drainage pipes. Since the days of the 
original owner the orchard has been grubbed out to make five