THE FEEDING OF THE NATION 7 



Hawaii, and elsewhere. Every great industry, in 

 fact, is organized and integrated. It has ehminated 

 one profit-taking intermediary after another between 

 the soil and the consumer. It acts with a single 

 mind. It knows from day to day the raw materials 

 available, and through its nation-wide or world-wide 

 statistical bureau it knows the fluctuations in de- 

 mand. Financial knowledge and industrial know- 

 ledge have been mobilized in a hundred great private 

 corporations, and their control has been so concen- 

 trated that all of the more important industrial 

 activities of America are susceptible of control 

 from half a dozen great offices, for the most part 

 situated in New York. 



Yet, while this perfection has been achieved in 

 banking, transportation, and industry, the greatest 

 concern of all, the feeding of the people, is wholly 

 unorganized, wholly disintegrated, and up to the 

 present time has not even been studied from the 

 point of view of the producer and the consumer. 

 It is hardly too much to say that the feeding of the 

 people is primarily under the control of the dis- 

 tributing and credit agencies of the nation, which, 

 guided only by the desire for private profit, deter- 

 mine, indirectly at least, how much shall be pro- 

 duced, how much shall be paid for the labor of those 

 who feed America, as well as the price that the 

 ultimate consumer shall pay. And springing from 

 the private control of this, the most important need 



