376 
AGRICULTURAL RELIEF 
Mr. Stewart. I think not exactly. The situation in France is that 
in the southern Provinces there is a tendency to use imported grain 
in their flour mills; in the northern Provinces, which for several 
centuries have been on an exportable basis, in previous centuries 
exporting even into England. In the northern Provinces it 1s more 
natural to send the product out as flour or wheat, even over into 
Belgium or into Germany. 
‘A scheme was worked out whereby the sending out of wheat from 
the northern Provinces became the occasion for the bringing in of 
duty-free wheat for milling in the southern mills. But it was not 
the same wheat that came back in. 
Mr. Fort. No; but again you have the situation that that is due 
to local conditions in their country, and not international problems. 
Mr. Stewart. It is a one-country reciprocity situation, if you 
lease. 
b Mr. Fort. Now, do you know of any place where this sort of pro- 
posal has been adopted by a nation as applicable to any commodity 
of which that nation habitually raises a surplus above its own re- 
quirements ?¢ 
Mr. Stewart. No. The reason why I have been interested in this 
other experience is that it has shown the mechanical workability of 
the plan, and it revealed a legal principle which could be worked 
under the Constitution of the United States. Our Constitution gives 
to Congress the power to lay and collect duties. That power has 
been interpreted to include the power also to lower the duties or 
to remit duties, as has been done in the case of sugar and molasses 
since 1876, now 51 years; and, inasmuch as that power to lay and 
collect duties obviously carries with it the power not to do so under 
certain specified conditions, it seems to me that this foreign expe- 
rience had a direct application under our organic law. 
Mr. Fort. I am not questioning the experience value: I am ask- 
ing as a point of historical information. 
Mr. Stewart. I am very glad you have done that. Mr. Fort, along 
that same historical line, has your economical investigation of 
this general question disclosed any country which habitually pro- 
duces a surplus over its own requirements of any commodity which 
has adopted a price-stimulation plan, except such price-stimulation 
plans as have been used in coffee, rubber, and sugar. which try to 
produce a decline in production ? 
Mr. Stewart. Yes; that was the purpose of the English bounties, 
from all I am able to learn from the researches of N. S. B. Gras, 
of the University of Minnesota, and Harvard University, who has 
given most attention to the English bounty system, I believe. That 
was apparently a deliberate purpose in England. 
Mr. Fort. What century ? 
Mr. Stewart. In the latter part of the seventeenth century and on 
through the eighteenth century. 
Mr. Fort. Was there any other nation which adopted it? 
Mr. Stewart. That, I believe, will be covered in a memorandum 
which is to be filed. It will have to be based largely upon the 
ounty bibliography of the United States Department of Agricul- 
ture, to which I referred earlier. But there is such experience. 
Yr. Fort. Has it been successful or has it had to be abandoned? 
r. STEwarT. It has been sufficiently successful to be continued.