EDITORIAL 



Lessons From History 



M MEMBER from Edgar county is pessimistic 

 J ig, about the longtime influence of government 

 ^ ^^ f policies on the American people. He is espe- 

 cially critical of the present farm program which he be- 

 lieves will weaken the moral fibre and spirit of self-reliance 

 of those who till the soil. 



"The trouble with our leaders, " he writes, "is that 

 they seem to have no historical perspective. They think 

 all that they are doing is new. It isn't. Each great civiliza- 

 tion, which lives from 1000 to 1200 years, goes through the 

 same development and meets the same crises in the same 

 order. The political sequence is first feudalism, then king- 

 ship, then democracy, and then dictatorship. It was so in 

 Egypt, Oiina, Rome, Arabia, our own western Europe, 

 and there is much evidence that it was so in the Peruvian 

 and Mexican civilizations. They all had their agricultural 

 problems at the beginning of their dictatorship period and 

 no doubt applied the same remedies, with the result of 

 only clamping more firmly the confining restrictions of 

 dictatorships upon their people. 



"I have just read a description of conditions in Greece 

 for about a 150 year period beginning in the last part of 

 the sixth century B.C. It is an exact detailed description 

 of our immediately previous history, and what we are do- 

 ing now, and what these things will certainly do to us. 



"The article describes the change from the limited 

 franchise of republicanism to the widespread franchise of 

 democracy, concentration of wealth in the hands of the 

 few, falling birth rate followed by decreasing population, 

 migration from country to the city, relief by the state, gen- 

 eral pauperization, decreasing vitality, and energy of the 

 people. 



"There is a very pregnant sentence in this article 

 which describes the fault of our present relief program. 

 Here it is. 



" 'The state it might almost be said, in giv- 

 ing scope to the assertion of the spirit of de- 

 pendence, had ruined the self- regarding 

 energy on which both family and state alike 

 depended.' " 



Our reader's citation of history no doubt is correct. 

 But at least some of his conclusions may be open to ques- 

 tion. Many students of history believe that previous 

 civilizations went down largely because they failed to main- 

 tain a fertile soil and a happy and prosperous population 

 on the land. What is the purpose of agricultural policies 

 advocated by the Farm Bureau.-" It is primarily to conserve 

 soil fertility and to maintain a standard of living on the 

 farm that will attract and hold an intelligent, ambitious 

 and home-loving people. Other civilizations failed because 

 they allowed soil depletion and the pauperization of those 

 who remained on the land. America must not make that 

 mistake. 



The spirit of self-reliance and independence of Amer- 

 ican farmers will not be destroyed or even curbed by giv- 

 ing agriculture the equivalent of the industrial tariff and 

 the corporate form of organization. Rendering simple 



justice builds rather than destroys morale. There is danger, 

 of course, that through the dole or slip-shod work-relief, 

 we develop a class of chronic dependents. Organized 

 farmers generally are opposed to that. Charity is repugnant 

 to them. The Farm Bureau program would preserve the 

 rewards of individual effort but insists that the rules of 

 the game be applied fairly to all. 



The New Power in Government 



M T THE recent annual convention of the Amer- 



-* i' ican Economic Association, Leonard P. Ayres 



^^^ I economist with the Cleveland Trust Company 



was billed to pierce the fog and tell a waiting world what 



to expect of business and finance in the next four years. 



Colonel Ayres asserted that former methods of fore- 

 casting the future must be discarded. The Federal govern- 

 ment, he said, has taken over the responsibility, with the 

 people's consent, of establishing and maintaining prosper- 

 ity. In his opinion the government has tremendous powers 

 now to control price levels, rates of interest, yields on 

 securities, and to halt booms as well as to pull out of 

 depression. He sees no justification for predicting a wild 

 boom or uncontrolled inflation in the next three to four 

 years with power concentrated in public officials to control 

 such things. 



His entire address tended to support the view organ- 

 ized farmers have held; that government policies have 

 everything to do with farm prices and the condition of 

 the country. , 



The Problem In '37 

 C^^. WO months ago on this page we said, "The im- 

 ^— ^ mediate problem in agriculture is to grow a good 

 ^^ crop in 1937. Prices are all right but there isn't 

 enough to sell. Corn cribs and granaries are depleted on 

 many farms. Much livestock, particularly hogs, is coming 

 to market half fat. . . So interest in production control has 

 waned for the moment." 



The above statement was picked up, reprinted and 

 commented upon as far away as the Department of Agri- 

 culture at Washington. The last sentence in the quotation, 

 which this writer believes is literally true out on the farms, 

 may be open to misconstruction. Surely no thinking per- 

 son believes that the need for securing more definite and 

 effective legal means of production control has vanished. 

 In the forum discussions and by resolution at our recent 

 convention, members of the Association very specifically 

 demanded both production control, and surplus control 

 when a surplus is produced. 



The Secretary of Agriculture publicly endorsed the 

 idea of more abundant production in a recent statement. 

 While the immediate problem in 1937 is to fill up the 

 empty bins, and while the need for production control for 

 the moment has waned, the problem of how to handle 

 the surplus may be a very live one next fall. Interest in 

 production control has a habit of rising and falling in- 

 versely with the rise and fall of farm prices. 



L A. A. RECORD 



