232 THE GREEN RISING 



and transportation. It seems that a nation's basic 

 industry should be the first to receive this kind of 

 consideration. The United States has gone farther 

 perhaps than any other nation in passing important 

 laws to encourage agriculture, but the fault has 

 been in the fragmentary way in which the problem 

 has been approached. 



Congress Attacks the Problem 



The action of the Sixty-ninth Congress is a good 

 illustration of our attitude toward agricultural en- 

 terprise. More than 200 bills and resolutions relat- 

 ing to some aspect of farm relief were introduced. 

 Most of these measures proposed some form of gov- 

 ernmental control or price fixing. Many of them 

 provided for large appropriations out of the Federal 

 treasury. The resolutions proposed investigations 

 or national or international conferences on farm 

 problems. The sincerity of purpose of the authors 

 of most of this proposed legislation is not to be 

 questioned. But it is quite obvious that many of 

 these bills and resolutions were either economically 

 unsound, or the remedy proposed would have proved 

 ineffective. The debates in Congress reveal the 

 mental confusion concerning this problem. The ex- 

 tended debate in the Sixty-ninth Congress on some 

 of the more important farm relief measures amply 

 illustrates this fact. The following colloquy, con- 

 densed from the Congressional Record of June 11, 

 1926, is rather illuminating: 



