536 TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 



with the improvement of foreign exchange for a day or two. Those 

 things may be summed up, as the old saying goes, one swallow doesn't 

 make the summer. The fundamental condition we have to bear in mind 

 is that the great center of civilization upon which our whole economic 

 life depended still is bankrupt, and that the prospect of facing that situa- 

 tion has not been actually met up to the present time. The statement 

 has been made here today, and it has been made at every meeting of 

 farmers, that conditions can not improve until the purchasing power of 

 the farmer is so improved as to enable him to dispose of his stocks at a 

 price greater than at the present time. Argue that thing around, and 

 you come back to the situation of the economic life of Europe at the 

 present time, and the outstanding thought of it is that they have not up 

 to the present time balanced their budgets; they have been living beyond 

 their means since the end of the war period, they have been get- 

 ting worse rather than better, so far as their possibility of buying goods 

 from America at remunerative prices is concerned. Just now, I think 

 one of the outstanding things amongst people discussing this question 

 is to point to the large volume of goods that is going abroad, but going 

 abroad at what sort of prices. In other words, if you cut your price 

 down low enough, you can sell in quantities, and that is exactly the point, 

 that the farmer has had to mark his stuff down to a price so low, and he 

 has accepted those prices simply because he was in a position of dis- 

 tress, that the figure of increased volume of exports has precious little 

 in it that is encouraging, so far as he can see it. In other words, what 

 may we expect this dark line to do? If we can expect it to stop its de- 

 cline, not by an immediate advance of considerable magnitude in farm 

 prices, but let us hope by slight advances, offset by considerable decline 

 in the commodity prices, we may see the farm population holding their 

 own next year, or at least getting a firm footing on this slippery hill that 

 they have been sliding down. Further than that, I think it would be 

 extremely unwise to count upon additional improvement. To make pur- 

 chases .or to incur obligations on the basis of any greater improvement 

 than that is, in my judgment, extremely unwise. 



I have noticed the remark passed from time to time that agriculture 

 is the only industry which has really liquidated, and that it has entirely 

 liquidated. I think some exception should be taken even to a remark 

 such as that, as much as we have tried to believe it. So far as the matter 

 of corn is concerned, the price is deflated, but the stocks are not liqui- 

 dated. There is still an unprecedented volume held over on the market 

 from previous years, and there are some other things which have not 

 been liquidated. One of them is, and I suppose it is unfortunate and 

 unpleasant to mention it, but one of them is land prices. We know that 

 to a considerable extent our land prices were marked up during the war. 

 Now, have they been liquidated? The question there is, are they going 

 to be able to be turned, in the years following, during which a consider- 

 able share of them have got to be passed from hand to hand, are they 

 going to be turned at approximately the values to which they were 

 marked during that war period? What do we mean by liquidation? Cer- 

 tainly we do not mean that those lands have been resold on a supply-and- 



