would have been money rattling in all the farmers' pockets, until the farm- 

 ers went to the retailers and spent it. The retailer would then have bought 

 from the wholesaler and he in turn from the jobber. The jobber would have 

 bought from the manufacturer. The railroads would have had something 

 to carry. The bankers would have had the load taken off their shoulders. 

 Gradually prosperity would have come back to the country. But the inter- 

 national banker did not care so much about that. He wanted his fifty mil- 

 lion dollars' commission. 



What has Europe done with the money it has borrowed from our inter- 

 national banking syndicates. Generally it has gone to the Argentine and 

 bought Argentine corn, cattle, wheat and hogs while our products have rotted 

 on the farms or been burned for fuel, or been sold by farmers for a quarter 

 or a third the cost of production. 



That is why we are not feeding the world, today as we did during the 

 war. The government told the farmer during the war to produce all he 

 could. We plowed up our pastures, some of them pastures that we have 

 taken years to create. We went in to produce the maximum of food. At 

 the time of the signing of the armistice, Mr. Hoover submitted a report, to 

 the effect that the world needed more food than the world at that time was 

 producing. Mr. Hoover was right. The world did need the food. There 

 was a hungry mouth for every ounce of food that we or anyone else pro- 

 duced. But they did not have the cash to buy it with and suddenly we 

 stopped selling them anything on credit. Then our unsaleable surpluses 

 began to pile up and prices tumbled and business paralysis set in. 



SELL SUEPLUS ON CREDIT, IF NECESSARY. 



Now there is just one point that sometimes people don't get in connec- 

 tion with this subject, and that is the difference between the surplus crop 

 and the ordinary crop. Now a surplus crop, as I have tried to explain, is 

 not an asset, it is a liability. It is like sand in the gear box of an auto- 

 mobile, or water in the gas. If we sold it to Europe and they did not pay 

 us back for all of it we would lose a few million dollars, but we would still 

 be making money, just as we made money by giving Russia twenty million 

 dollars worth of grain. And yet international bankers like Mr. Meyer get 

 up gravely and say, "But some of these people might not be able to pay you 

 bshck." Yet these same bankers are willing to loan money to these same 

 people. These European countries have got good security. They are offer- 

 ing us good security, and every day our international bankers are loaning 

 them money on that security. 



I don't know how it is going to work out, but I hope when Mr. Hoover 

 stops buying, when he has expended his thirty million dollars, I hope there 

 won't be any sag in the price of corn. But I fear there will be. It won't 

 go back to where it was, but we have still a good big surplus on our 

 hands, hundreds of millions of bushels surplus, and that is going to be a 

 handicap to us not only for the rest of this year but also next year, in 

 spite of all of our talk about reducing the crop. You know when you talk 

 adout reducing the acreage there are always a few individuals who say, 

 "Everybody else is going to reduce, it would be a good thing for me to 

 increase my acreage, because prices are going up." And such Ishmatelites 

 will put out twice as much corn as usual. 



If we could get rid of a reasonable part of this surplus abroad on 

 credit, we could raise prices to normal. Then this country would find 

 itself once more on the highway to prosperity. Moreover we would gain 

 back some of the affection and admiration which Europe had for us during 

 the war, and I for one am not entirely oblivious to such consideration. 



I like to feel that the America we love, that the potential America is 

 the America that we see in action. You remember those words of Kipling 

 about England. 



"If England was what England seems, 

 A thing of putty, brass and paint 

 And not the England of our dreams, 



How quick we'd chuck her, but she ain't." 



