Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 206, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 August 1913 — CASH FOR FARMER [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

CASH FOR FARMER

Col. Green Hits Sending Surplus to Wall Street. ~L~ • —_ •. ■■* ; ' —T~7fr ’.?* • Millionaire Declares That Local Bank Balances Created by Producers Bhould Be Loaned Agriculturists at Very Moderate Rates. New York. —Col. Edward H. R. Green of Texas and New York city. Bon of Mrs. Hetty Green, the richest woman in the world, and her active associate in a vast money lending business that extends across the country, has decided views of financing the American farmer, He has practical get-up-and-do-lt ideas that have a big, substantial bearing on the subject Although in business within a stone’s throw of the New York stock exchange, Colonel Green never enters itß portals. He is opposed to stock gambling. Twenty years in Texas, running a railroad that got its tonnage from carrying products of the soil, gave him a viewpoint quite at variance with the ideas of the exchange floor. “The farmer still rocks the cradle of our country, but I often wonder how he does it so well with no financial scheme whatever in existence for his particular benefit,” he said. "Everybody 1b telling how to finance the farmer these days. It is almost as popular a topic as ‘better tenements’ for the city and ‘good roads’ for motor club members to use and fanners to pay for. In all I have read and heard no one seems yet to have got down to brass tacks with a real financial uplift plan for the farmer. “Two phases of the farmer’s predicament have enlisted my personal inter eat because they run directly counter to the way my mother has always handled her wealth in relation to the public good. “First is the rate of Interest the farmer has to pay for money he borrows. Government statistics show that 12,000,000 fanners of the United States pay an average interest rate of 8*? pec cent upon borrowed capital of about 23,192,000,000 to work crops on land valued at $40,000,000,000. Since my mother began her career as a business woman she has never asked more than 6 per cent a year for the use of her money. The bulk of her lopns have been at rates considerably below 6 per cent. In France and Germany the farmer gets all the money he wants at from 3ft to 4ft ppr cent “The second phase of the problem I have observed is the action of banks throughout the country in sending

their balances to Wall street, formingi a huge fund used for speculative purposes. These balances represent thei net busliiesß profit of each particular locality—the very cream off the pani of milk in the cool springhouße—yeti th§ creators of this surplus wealth, the! farmers, are starved financially when; they apply for loans, because the funds, of the community are in Wall street being used in stock and bond promotions reaching even to China and the. Philippines. . "For years ray mother has held to the belief and has absolutely lived up to it, as far as her influence and power have gone, that every community is entitled to the full benefit of its prosperity. She always made it an inviolable rule that profits acquired in a given locality belonged to that locality and should always be reinvested in that locality. Our books are divided into different cities; we keep an aocount of San Francisco money sepa-

rate from Chicago money; Toledo money separate from New York money, while Texas not only has its own net profits left for reinvestment in Texas enterprises, but now and then gets additional help from surplus funds.” Colonel Green explained that the application of his mother’s principles of home cash for home people and her rule of 6 per cent or less would work wonders in giving the fanner a freer hand if generally adopted. ,

Col. E. H. R. Green.