Housing 155 



so that your children can live, so that you can live, so that 

 we all can live, and live like human beings should live. 



To those who think the State government could not suc- 

 cessfully own and manage these State stores may I point 

 to the work of the government at Panama. At Panama the 

 government showed the world how it could handle the big- 

 gest kind of an undertaking. It showed the world how it 

 could own and manage successfully a line of steamships, a 

 railroad, a cold storage plant, an electric light plant, a num- 

 ber of stores, and even a laundry. During the building of 

 the canal the government owned and managed its stores and 

 put in charge of everything a man who was big enough to ignore 

 any trust. Everything was bought in markets all over the 

 world and sold directly to the consumer. There were no 

 trusts' profits, no middlemen's profits, included in prices of 

 things bought at any of the eighteen stores in the canal zone. 

 The amount of business done amounted to over six millions 

 of dollars a year, and everything was sold at prices less than 

 it could be bought for in the United States. Besides this the 

 government furnished land free of rent and miscellaneous 

 things to the workers; it made a healthy place of the fever- 

 stricken district and accomplished the biggest task ever 

 undertaken by man. 



In the face of these facts, does it not seem foolish for any- 

 one to say that the government could not run a few small 

 stores? If it has done all these things successfully at 

 Panama, why do you not insist that the government do at 

 least a few things of a similar kind for you at home? 



Government ownership would stop 95% of the failures in 

 the poultry business; it would stop wrecking thousands of 

 homes, stop ruining thousands of lives, and stop untold suffer- 

 ing and misery. Only when government ownership is estab- 



