534 TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 



you get this black line running along here with very slight deviation from 

 a general base line of 100. In other words, everything went down a little 

 bit last year, and this black line follows the same trend. Now, here comes 

 the worry and the fireworks: this green line which goes sailing up here 

 and down again, as we all know, and that is the crop price line. This red 

 line going up not so high, coming down sooner and coming down some- 

 what farther, is the live stock. Now here our yellow line does the thing 

 which we have heard about so often, it lagged both coming and going. 

 That is to say, your price of crops moved up here quite rapidly; your 

 price of commodities, as we know, being high at the beginning of the 

 war, declined for a time, and afterward picked up, but for several years, 

 clear over to here, to the end of the war, tended to lag somewhat behind 

 the advance of farm crop prices, but tended to be a little bit ahead of the 

 animal prices. If you take the ratio between those two, you will see that 

 the farmer did, as the statement is often made, get a little bit the jump 

 on the thing at the start — his condition was actually improved to a con- 

 siderable extent in the first year of the war; that is to say, he was a 

 little ahead and the other interests were lagging behind. The next year 

 he was better than he was in 1913, but they were gaining on him, and 

 then the commodity price shoots up very, very rapidly. The forced 

 orders from Europe and that sort of thing were responsible for that. 

 The condition of the farmer declines, not only with respect to what 

 benefit he had been getting those two years, but wipes out all of that 

 improvement in his condition and considerably more, and in the year 

 1916 he is actually worse off than he was at the opening of the war and 

 the average of the prewar years. 



We entered the war in 1917, and it was jazzing up somewhat, and we 

 started through the cycle with more steam, farm prices shooting up very 

 rapidly and live stock shooting up at not quite the same rate, and com- 

 modity prices at about the same rate as our live stock. What happens? 

 Again the big jump in farm crop prices, which gave the farmer a little 

 bit of the first advantage, and he comes above the line about 108 per cent 

 as compared with prewar years, and just about catches up what he lost 

 previously, and then commodity prices start going up here while farm 

 crops and live stock prices both slow down, even more than this indi- 

 cates, because the man who drew this chart is no friend of mine, and he 

 has made it look more favorable to the farmer than the facts warrant — 

 so they are about four points higher than they should be, and the advan- 

 tage gained in the preceding two years is just about half wiped out. 

 Then we hit the toboggan in 1918, and that toboggan has let us down so 

 rapidly that we are just about here at the present time. Now, as a mat- 

 ter of fact, those figures for 1921 are not complete for this year; they 

 are figures for only eight months of this year, and whether the figures 

 will be higher or lower we will have to see along in January at the time 

 the figures become available. 



Now, as to the farmer's situation at the present time — he is feeling 

 the effects of conditions that are just behind him; he is feeling that ad- 

 vance of commodity prices because of the rapid decline of his own crop 

 and live stock prices, and that is true notwithstanding the fact that we 



