FOREWORD Vll 



engages at least one-third of the population. It 

 should receive more serious consideration than any 

 other industry; both in and out of Congress it receives 

 less. Every other civilized country has, during the 

 last sixty years, bettered its agricultural conditions 

 and enormously increased its yield per acre of cereals. 

 We have not done so to any appreciable extent. For 

 fourteen years prior to the beginning of this war, the 

 average wheat yield per acre of France was approxi- 

 mately 36 per cent, above ours; that of Germany, 107 

 per cent, above; and that of England, 124 per cent, 

 above. (See 1914 Year Book.) Had our 1917 

 wheat yield per acre been on a parity with those coun- 

 tries, we could have sent to the Allies an amount of 

 wheat equal to our entire yield for that year, and have 

 had a superabundance for home consumption. No 

 national economic policy is sound, nor can it long en- 

 dure, that fails to give due consideration to this, our 

 great creative class, nor in whose counsels the farm- 

 er's voice is not heard. 



For nearly three years the American people rejected 

 all evidence as to the sinister and brutal motives of 

 Kaiserism, accepting instead fairy tales, spun by the 

 pacifists, to show that the brotherhood of man was es- 

 tablished on earth, and that war could come no more. 

 In blood and money we are paying the penalty of our 

 unbelief. It is as dangerously unwise to reject a truth 

 because it is disagreeable as to cherish an error because 

 " beautiful, if true." People who do the one usually 

 do the other. 



Should the American people refuse to recognize in 

 the trend of events certain economic, socialistic, if not 



