TWENTIETH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 569 



factured products which he must buy to continually advance in price. 

 If the products of the factory, the forest and the mine had declined pro- 

 portionately in price with farm products, then no farmer's voice, whether 

 he be great or small, would have been heard protesting against the re- 

 duction in the price of his produce, but because what he must buy has 

 increased in price continuously the past year while he has to sell his 

 products at a reduction of from 25 to 50 per cent. These are the things 

 that make the patient, long-suffering farmers feel like rebelling and 

 announcing to the powers that be that from this on they will play the 

 game the same as the other fellow. Until the farmers make up their 

 minds to do this they will continually be made the goat and be left hold- 

 ing the sack. 



If the farmers of this country will demand the same wage scale, 

 based on the eight-hour day, adopted by union labor, and time and one- 

 half for overtime, they can solve the question of remunerative prices 

 of farm products inside the next tw^o years, and be able to fix the price 

 of their wares on the sam'e basis as is used by the manufacturer, which 

 is the cost of production plus a reasonable profit. 



No class of citizens have toiled and sacrificed and taken chances 

 as have the farmers laboring much of the time under the most unfavor- 

 able weather conditions; they have worked from twelve to sixteen hours 

 a day when it was one hundred in the shade in the summer and twenty 

 below zero in the winter that they might do their bit in furnishing food 

 for a hungry world, being assured by such men as Herbert Hoover, 

 Thomas Wilson and others that there would be unlimited demand at 

 remunerative prices for all that could be produced; but lo and behold, 

 before they had scarcely started to harvest their present crop they 

 were informed that prices were too high and must come down and 

 down they sure did come, so far as the farmers' products were con- 

 cerned, but nothing else, and now we are wondering what hit us and 

 why the products of the factories, the forest and the mine have not 

 suffered a like decline in price. The answer is a restricted production, 

 apparently cunningly devised and aggravated by labor's position of con- 

 tinually demanding higher wages and shorter hours for a day's work. 



Shall we, then, as farmers, continue to toil and sacrifice and blindly 

 produce unlimited quantities of food and sell it far below the cost of 

 production, or shall we organize intelligently and be in a position to 

 demand that the cost of production shall be one of the chief factors to be 

 considered in fixing the price on our products? 



During the early part of August the government with a great flourish 

 of power, pestered and nagged by the demands of organized labor for 

 higher wages on the one hand and the consumers' league for the lower- 

 ing of the high cost of living on the other, jumped out and launched a 

 great national drive against the high cost of living. Wonderful threats 

 and warnings were given out by the head of the department of justice, 

 the little and the big tanks were all gotten in readiness to sweep from 

 the face of the earth everything that offended or tended to profiteering, 

 and the H. C. of L. was at once to be brought down from its exalted 

 perch, but what has been the result? The unsophisticated, unorganized 



