WANTED: A RURAL POLICY 89 



Is it not merely good sense to have before us a clear 

 statement of just what is involved in making American 

 agriculture all it ought to be? Yet we have never had 

 such a statement carefully formulated and placed be- 

 fore our people, by any group of men and women fully 

 representing all the various aspects of the rural ques- 

 tion. The nearest approach was the report of the 

 Roosevelt Country Life Commission, made nearly a 

 decade ago, which Congress refused to publish for 

 distribution ! 



Has not the war made clear to all thoughtful people, 

 what ought to be self-evident, that the practical prob- 

 lems of agriculture not only cannot be divorced from 

 the general question of food supply, but that the latter 

 is the real point of departure in determining what agri- 

 culture ought to do and can do? But this adjustment 

 of production to consumption of food has never been 

 attempted either by the agencies of government or by 

 the farmers' organizations. The former have for 

 years been " speeding up " production, with tardy at- 

 tention to distribution, while the latter have been 

 chiefly concerned with the fact that the farmer is disad- 

 vantaged in his buying and selling. Even the war has 

 not yet unified the attack on the food problem as a 

 whole; emergency enactments by Congress seem to give 

 duplicate powers to both the Food Administration and 

 the Department of Agriculture, and in actual adminis- 

 tration there has never been a definite coordination of 

 either purposes or activities. 



May we not learn from older countries? There 

 are those of course who persistently hold that we can- 

 not learn anything worth while from the development 

 of European agriculture. To-day, doubtless the mere 

 suggestion that Germany, for illustration, could teach 



