REPORT OF IOWA FARM BUREAU FEDERATION 399 



You ought to take action in these matters, and you ought to let the 

 congress at Washington know how you feel upon these vital subjects that 

 affect your prosperity. Let the government collect the interest. If Great 

 Britain can maintain an elaborate royal family at an expense to the tax- 

 payers of 9 million dollars a year, with castles and estates and all those 

 things that go with royalty, then it ought to be able to pay us the interest 

 on what it borrowed from us. And when that interest is paid we can re- 

 lieve a desperate situation yonder in the Orient and we can make our 

 farmers' situation in the Mississippi valley easier, and when the farmers 

 get to selling their produce at a fair margin of profit, the wheels of in- 

 dustry will begin to revolve as in former times. We have got to have a 

 market, and right away, unless we expect to see disaster more acute than 

 it has been up to this time. Paternalism? Yes, it is paternalism, but in 

 ordinary times rational minds will discountenance it, but these are not 

 ordinary times. We are passing through desperate times, and if we can 

 send 20 million bushels of corn to relieve starving Russia, if we can make 

 these fabulous contributions of public moneys to relieve people five 

 thousand miles away, can we not make something to relieve the men and 

 women in this country to influence the return of prosperity to this 

 country? 



We talked to the farmers for years "Work and produce," "Work and 

 produce," "Work and produce," — a slogan that took hold of everybody's 

 imagination, but farmers are just like other people, actuated by impulses 

 just like other people, and are they going to work and produce unless that 

 production shall result In a profit? I heard men advise the burning of 

 corn and the restricting of acreage next year. I don't know what your 

 views may be, and I am not going to conceal what mine are. I am a plain 

 man and I speak what I believe. Whether you agree with me, or not, I 

 say this, when three or four hundred millions of people are starving to 

 death — your brothers and mine under the spiritual law — when those 

 people are starving to death, the idea of restricting or destroying a food 

 commodity is repugnant to me. There is some other method by which we 

 can bring relief. 



Well, I said another thing. We have started now with the War Finance 

 Corporation, and I hope it may result in great benefits. I am a little appre- 

 hensive that the conditions are too oppressive to make that relief uni- 

 versal and general. I said to these men down there "Here is the Federal 

 Reserve Bank law, the basic law. If I were in congress I would introduce 

 a bill to take from that law that clause which prohibits the government 

 from dealing directly with the borrower." Take South Dakota up here, if 

 you please. They have a rural credits law there, operated splendidly, and 

 we must have one in Iowa. We started on one last winter, but there 

 were influences too powerful . 



Here is another plan that is worthy of consideration, and I hope you 

 may consider all of the things I have said. Suppose that the United 

 States government should announce that it would establish a dozen ware- 

 houses in Iowa and that it would issue warehouse receipts for 50 cents a 

 bushel for every bushel of corn deposited there, those warehouse receipts 

 to be the basis of credit with the government of the United States. There 

 would not have to be a bushel of corn deposited in those warehouses be- 



