FAVORS FOR FARMERS

Charles W. Holman has written in the current "World's Work" a short survey of proposed farm legislation, with the all-embracing title "What the Corn Belt Demands". It demands an end to the sale of government lands, a Federal organization for dumping on Europe surplus produce, a tariff on farm produce to put agriculture on a parity with manufacture, further extension of the Farm Loan system, and a Federal agency to store surplus and superintend cooperative marketing;--any or all of these restoratives American agriculture demands.

An agrarian economic order is inflexible; while the quantity of its produce is capriciously flexible with the whims of nature. There is no accurate way of forecasting over-production until the seed is long sown. And if the disaster could be foreseen, farmers have no means of effective and beneficial crop limitation at hand. There can be little of the selling out, merging, and re-investing that characterizes industrial fluctuation and enables manufacturers to weather variations in demand without serious loss. Geographically, socially, personally, the farmers are both set and separate.

They are thus at a disadvantage in political lobbying as well as in economic initiative. Nevertheless, their political representatives are their only possible tools. Through such genius as they can command in these politicians, the farmers demand a way to economic sufficiency, to profits.

They appeal to equality and require either a tariff for themselves or the abolition of duties on manufactures. They favor dumping regardless of the fact that it but transfers the hardships of crop fluctuation to foreign farmers. But despite the carelessness and heterogeneity of the agitation, several factors are obvious: crop fluctuation brings social distress; agrarian society is rigid and comparatively helpless; if any portion of the country requires sane governmental assistance, it is the farming portion.

Congress can perhaps accomplish a great deal if it will run to ground plans for Federal storage of surplus grain to cover deficiency in an ensuing year, and plans also for cheap and efficient marketing. These subjects appear the most tangible of all referred to in the many projects broached. And if in addition to incisive planning of this nature, Congress can rise to the occasion and provide impartial and enduring machinery such as the Federal Reserve System owns, it will have handled an economic problem with political wisdom.