134 



million tons of foods and textile each country needed how many million 

 tons France needed, how many million tons Czecho-Slovakia needed, how 

 many million tons Italy needed, how many million tons Germany needed, 

 how many million tons Austria needed, and so on. That report was a tre- 

 mendous bull factor and it is going to be a permanent bull factor. It ap- 

 peared a few days before Congress voted the gift of twenty million dollars' 

 worth of grain for Russian Relief. 



A GOOD BUSINESS PROPOSITION. 



I am trying to make plain that I am not attempting to infer that our 

 gift of grain to Russia was the only bull factor, but it clearly was the one 

 that finally started the market on the up grade. It would be putting it very 

 moderately to attribute at least 5 cents a bushel of the rise in grain prices 

 to this cause. I suppose there are about one billion five hundred million 

 bushels of corn in the country now. Five cents a bushel on a billion and a 

 half bushels would be seventy-five million dollars. By giving away twenty 

 million dollars worth of grain we made a profit of seventy-five million dol- 

 lars in a few days. Not a bad business operation. 



Now I am appealing to you not as humanitarians, I am appealing to 

 you as business men. We are supposed to be a business nation. Did you 

 ever hear of anybody making money faster than that? And can you tell me 

 why we are not now all standing up on the house tops and "hollaring our 

 heads off" demanding that Uncle Sam give away more millions of dollars' 

 worth of corn and still more, until we have no more surplus corn and 

 Europe has no more starving mouths. Wouldn't it be good business, to say 

 nothing about consciences and right and our place in history? 



When I first went abroad during the war there wasn't a nation over 

 there that did not love us. They looked upon us as the saviors of civiliza- 

 tion. We had come into the war without a selfish purpose; we had come 

 into the war just to save human liberty, and they were too grateful for 

 words. I would hate to go over there now, because I know what they think 

 of us. They think we have forgotten them; they think we have grown 

 cold and selfish; that we have become a lot of money-grabbers, what they 

 used to say we were. They forgot it during the war, but they have had 

 cause to remember it of late. While they starve over there not by the thou- 

 sands, nor by the hundreds of thousands, but by the millions we have kept 

 back our food and not because we need it ourselves. No! Our food was 

 rotting in every state in the middle west and northwest; and we were burn- 

 ing it for fuel. We would not give them or even sell them on credit the 

 crumbs that fell from the rich man's table. 



THE REAL CAUSE INTERNATIONAL BANKERS. 



Can you tell me why Mr. Meyer and Mr. McFadden stabbed that bill in 

 the back when it was too late to have another vote of congress on it? I 

 have asked myself a hundred times, "Why has this man done this awful 

 thing? It is too inhuman, and besides it is bad business." But one day 

 I picked up a paper in which was a statement that a syndicate of interna- 

 tional investment bankers were planning to loan a billion dol'ars to Europe. 

 Suddenly, the whole thing seemed to flash through my mind. Yes, these 

 syndicates, they have been loaning money to Europe ever since the signing 

 of the armistice and loaning it to them not only at a high rate of interest, 

 but for big commissions as well. 



If we loaned, as this bill in Washington provided, if we exetnded to 

 them credit to the amount of five hundred billion dollars' with which to buy 

 our agricultural surpluses, nobody would make any commissions. But if 

 these bankers could loan them that much money the bankers would make 

 at least fifty million dollars in commissions. Now do you see any reason 

 why they wanted to stop this law? 



Five hundred million dollars' worth of our agricultural surplus exported 

 or even one-half of that amount would have pushed the price of corn to at 

 least seventy-five cents. It would have rehabilitated agriculture. There 



