570 TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 



the enormous number of buildings on our farms that would have been 

 put up if conditions had been better. We have thousands upon thou- 

 sands of freight cars that are standing idle and out of repair at the pres- 

 ent time, and there are said to be 16,000 locomotives in this country that 

 are not in use because they need repair. His remedy for the present diffi- 

 culty is to finance operations of that kind so as to get the wheels of com- 

 merce started. If building is begun, it will be necessary to open lumber 

 yards, sawmills, brick-works, furniture factories, lime kilns, hardware 

 establishments, steel mills, and then the* coal mines, to keep them all 

 going, and all these would call upon the transportation systems to move 

 the goods, and as the direct result of this there will be more people em- 

 ployed and they will consume more food and the farmers will find larger 

 sale for their products and we will all be prosperous and happy again. 

 That sounds fairly good, doesn't it? 



There is another way to present the matter, and, in my opinion, there 

 is a better way. In this country 40 per cent of our people are engaged 

 in agriculture. Today their products have small buying power. Let me 

 illustrate: Before the war the buying power of agricultural products 

 might be indicated by a column from the table up this high (indicating), 

 and the things that they would buy, that the farmer buys, would be repre- 

 sented by another column that high (indicating). During the war the 

 price that the farmer received for his products doubled, and that column 

 went way up there (indicating), but the things that he could buy had to 

 remain stationary, he couldn't buy twice as much; he could buy only the 

 same old quantity, because the price of these things he had to buy also 

 had doubled. And what is the situation today? The price he gets for 

 his product is now the level of the prewar period — on many products it 

 is below that level — it was 91 per cent on cattle a short time ago. But 

 the prices of the articles he is buying are still abnormally high, and that 

 column has shrunken until it is so short that it stands only a little way 

 above the table. The farmer can not buy. The result is that the facto- 

 ries that would supply them are closed or running on part time, and 

 some of them have tried hard to keep going. I know of one that under 

 normal conditions carries about $100,000 worth of stock; they have bor- 

 rowed to the limit of their capacity to keep their workmen employed and 

 they have about a half million dollars worth of finished product on hand. 

 The farmers are not able to buy, so the small towns are dead, and they, 

 in turn, affect the larger towns, and all this affects our transportation 

 systems and industries. The railroads of the country have laid off 400,000 

 men because they have not the goods to haul, and down through the east 

 we have long lines of unemployed as a consequence. 



The remedy would be to find some way to give new heart and courage 

 to the farmers of the country, through finance, perhaps, but best of all 

 through giving them an opportunity to see a ray of light and hope for 

 agriculture, and we do begin to see just a little of it. An item appeared 

 in the newspapers the other day about corn selling for 50 cents a bushel 

 over in Scott county at a public sale. There is a tendency upward, and 

 if in one way or another this can be applied to the products of the farm 

 generally, we will see greatly improved conditions. Of course, that is a 



