142 THE GREEN RISING 



ney-McCumber bill, in providing protective duties 

 for vegetable oils, undoubtedly stimulated the vege- 

 table oil prices and benefited the seed crushing in- 

 dustry in the South. 



Balancing the Accounts of Agriculture and Industry 



But in its larger aspects, the tariff policy has be- 

 come one of balancing accounts, when the benefits 

 to farmers are to be considered. Farmers have been 

 led to believe, that they could afford to pay high 

 prices for their purchases, if the tariff rates were 

 equally effective in raising the prices of the things 

 they had to sell. But the wheat, cotton, and corn 

 farmers, who constitute the large majority of agri- 

 cultural producers and whose aggregate products 

 exceed enormously in value the relatively few farm 

 products on the protected list, get no protection. 

 The American Farm Bureau, which is impartial 

 politically, has estimated that the Fordney-Mc- 

 Cumber Tariff Act has added $125,000,000 to the 

 aggregate income of the farmers of the country. 

 But this amount has gone principally to the growers 

 of wool, hard spring wheat, flax seed, lemons, and 

 to the producers of sugar. And while these pro- 

 ducers were profiting by a gam of $125,000,000, the 

 growers of other staple products were losing 

 $1,500,000,000, or more than ten times as much in 

 increased prices that they were required to pay be- 

 cause of the tariff on the manufactured commodities 

 they bought. 



