trying to help him by creating foreign markets for his produce in which at the best, because of our tariff laws, he can exchange a dollar’s worth of wheat for seventy-five cents worth of goods or labor. If these champions of the American farmer really desire to help him, they should concern themselves with the economic rack-rent which he is now paying to the city-dweller through direct and indirect taxation.
If it should appear that the desperate position of the farmer has been stated with too much prejudice other authorities may be cited.
Mr. W. R. Ingalls, a very conservative observer, in an article entitled “Whither Are We Going” (Mining and Metallurgy, New York, May, 1923), among other comments upon the present maladjustment, states as follows: “Town labor, in general, sucks the produce for which the farmers sweat.” And further: “We are probably destined to experience even worse economic violations than at present; for the farmers, already victimized by town labor, are likely to create new evils under the guidance of political charlatans. Perhaps that very thing, disagreeable though it may be, will bring us the more quickly to sanity.”
The Guaranty Trust Company of New York, in its Survey of April 30, 1923, sounds a still more ominous note. (The italics are inserted.)
“In so far as the existing maladjustments bear heavily upon the agricultural interests, possibly more than a temporary condition is appearing. The war-time expansion of industrial producing capacity in this country has accentuated the tendency toward the predominance of manufacturing. Moreover, heavily indebted countries of Europe, whose food requirements have been a mainstay of a goodly proportion of the American Farmers, now have unusual inducements to depend as little as possible upon imported supplies. And there is the added fact that the present tariff policy inevitably operates to the greater advantage of manufacturing than of agricultural interests.”
There is one more comment to be made which may point the argument still further.
In a speech made in the Senate, pleading for remedial legislation, under date of February 2, 1923, Senator Gooding of Idaho states as follows:
“In Minnesota, thirty-four farmer suicides were reported, eighty-seven in North Dakota, thirty-two in South Dakota and fifteen in Wisconsin.”
