Jasper County Democrat, Volume 23, Number 72, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 December 1920 — FARMERS SEEING THE POINT [ARTICLE]

FARMERS SEEING THE POINT

We are not hearing so much just now about “America first.” So far as that campaign claptrap meant anything at all to the ordinary mind, It implied that this country was to go It alone, live off its own fat and keep foreign goods out by a high tariff. But that kind of America first is already beginning to appear too much like America hindmost. Even the farmers are waking up to the fact. The statement issued in Washington on Monday by the Farm Bureau Federation reads very much as If it were written by a spectacled professor of economics, or even by some wicked international banker disguised as Old Bill Jones of Gopherville.

Note these plain tales from the farmer: “We must open up our usual and natural outlets for cotton, wool, grain and meats if we are to relieve the present disastrous economic situation” The farmer is now asked to sell below his cost of production. What is his only hope? Why, “the opening of foreign markets.” But Europe can not buy unless it has credit, and unless it can sell its manufactures here to pay its debts. Very well, says the farm bureau, arrange for credits, and consider that it is "good business” for us to protect our loans of some $10,000,000,000 to Eu ropean countries by helping them to “start production.” This cold elementary sense is particularly refreshing coming from the farmers. They as a class have been the slowest to perceive that they are more interested than anybody else in the free flow of foreign commerce. But falling prices of their products have been rapidly»opening their eyes. If they remain as wide awake as they now seem to be. the Republican high tariffites will not have so much fun as they used to out of their old pastime of “fooling the farmer.” —New York Times.