Volume 143

Answers to Borah

S

ENATOR BORAH'S speech denouncing as nullification the proposal embodied in a referendum proposition in New York to leave the interpretation of the Eighteenth Amendment to the several States has drawn fire from the wets.

Senator Edge, of New Jersey, has said that modification of the Volstead Act is not nullification-as if anybody had suggested that it was. Senator Edwards, of New Jersey, has declared that New York has a right to order a referendum-as if anybody had suggested that it had not. Both these Senators, the one a Republican and the other a Democrat, come from the State in which honest enforcement agents, as described by Mr. Mandeville in The Outlook of last week and the week before, have been hampered by those "higher up."

Another response to Senator Borah came from President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University, as he sailed for Europe. He is reported as likening Senator Borah's statements to the sort of utterances that "the hired lobbyists of the Anti-Saloon League expect and exact from their own group of Senators and Representatives in Congress." This, of course, is not argument, for it could be completely answered by the obvious retort that Dr. Butler's remarks can be likened to the utterances of paid lobbyists of the liquor interests. More to the point are Dr. Butler's proposals. He suggests: (1) Repeal the Volstead Law; (2) Repeal the Eighteenth Amendment; (3) For the State of New York adopt the Quebec dispensary system. It has sometimes been said that the Eighteenth Amendment was "slipped over" on the country. If that is so, it ought not to be difficult for the opponents of prohibition to persuade twothirds of Congress and three-fourths of the States to repair the effect of the inadvertence by adopting Dr. Butler's proposals.

In the meantime the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate has pronounced, by a vote of four to one, that the President's order enabling local

will pretend that this result has no significance beyond that of a contest between two men in Iowa. It signifies something as to the attitude of the agricultural West toward the policy of the National Administration with regard to what is called agricultural relief. There were other factors-many of them. One was sympathy for Brookhart because the Senate unseated him in favor of Steck, the Democrat. One was the fact that Senator Cummins is no longer young and that his organization had grown old with him. But farmer unrest and dissatisfaction with an Administration program was the largest factor.

On the day before the present session of Congress began President Coolidge made a speech before the National meeting of the American Farm Bureau Federation in Chicago. The Federation

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promptly adopted resolutions demanding the very things that the President had asked it not to demand. A storm of protest against the President's position began which during December blew alarmingly from the western slope of the Alleghanies to the eastern slope of the Rockies. It centered in Iowa, the leading agricultural State and the most dissatisfied.

The Administration began what appeared to be an effort to trim its sails to the wind. A statement was issued from the White House to the effect that the President's speech and his Message to Congress had been misunderstood. Α determination was reached to draft an Administration bill which would go considerably further than the President had indicated in his speech or his Message.

Senator Cummins was selected to draft this bill. He promptly showed a disposition to go, not as far as the farm organizations wished, but further than the Administration was at that time prepared to go. The drafting of the Administration bill was given into other hands. In the end the Administration indicated its approval of measures decidedly more radical than those which Senator Cummins would have drafted, and the Senator himself went all the way to support of the Haugen Bill; but the impression was out and could not be changed that the Administration and Cummins as its agent were offering a sop to agriculture, and even that unwillingly.

One of the things that the farmer organizations most lustily demanded was lower freight rates on agricultural products.

This was particularly true of Iowa, remote from both seaboards and even from the Lakes. Senator Cummins was one of the authors of the EschCummins Act under which the rate structure, regarded by Iowa farmers as unjust to them, was erected. They had had time to find out, or to think they had found out, how it worked. Cummins's support of the Haugen Bill, even if his constituents had believed it spontaneous, was not sufficient to remove resentment against him.

Comparatively few voters, it may be believed, voted for Brookhart because he

is Brookhart. He has neither the ability nor the personality to command unfaltering support for himself. Those who nominated him voted for a conception of agricultural relief legislation and against Senator Cummins and the Administration at Washington.

Brookhart's nomination does not necessarily mean that he will again go to the Senate. The Democratic has become, at least temporarily, the conservative party in Iowa. Many conservative Republicans may support Claud R. Porter this year, as many undoubtedly supported Steck two years ago. And the fact that a majority of Iowa Republicans now condemn the Coolidge Administration in so far as its agricultural policy is concerned does not necessarily mean that they will do so two years from now.

Stilts for the Farmer

'HAT the result of the Iowa RepubliTHAT

can primary has a significance recognized in Washington is indicated by the fact that within an hour after Senators read their newspapers the next morning a movement was begun for amending the Jardine Co-operative Marketing Bill, the Administration measure, in such way as to incorporate in it some of the essential features of the Haugen Bill, recently defeated by a margin of twenty-three votes in the House. Agricultural relief legislation "came back" as a possibility for the present session.

The Jardine Bill has passed the House. If it passes the Senate with amendments,

the $100,000,000 provided in the Tincher Bill than to the $375,000,000 provided in the Haugen Bill.

These three features-the Council, the Board, and the revolving fund-are said to constitute the minimum that will be accepted by the farm organizations, particularly the Western constituencies of those organizations, as legislation adequate to agricultural needs.

A very large number of farmers and of business men whose success depends upon agriculture sincerely believe that permanent and uninterrupted agricultural success will never be possible until a measure such as this extends the protection of the tariff to agricultural equally with manufactured products. It was in the past mainly Western farmers and business men who held undeviatingly to this belief, but the fact that some sixty Southern Representatives who voted against a similar bill in the last Congress voted for the Haugen Bill this time appears to indicate that the South is coming more nearly into accord with. the West.

All of this may be based on false principles in political economy. There are many who think it is. The Administration quite evidently thought so at the outset. Whether political exigencies will force it to deviate further from that conviction is one of the things to be revealed in the closing weeks of this session of Congress.

Log-Rolling Recrudescent

F the Senate concurs in the action of

I'

the status of a bill which has passed one house, and the differences will be for adjustment in conference. This is regarded as a status more favorable than could be given to any new bill or to any undefeated bill still pending but not passed by either house.

The features of the Haugen Bill likely to be incorporated in the Jardine Bill are the establishment of a Federal Farm Advisory Council composed of representatives of farmers' organizations and a Federal Farm Board for the handling of crop surpluses. The members of the Board are to be appointed by the President of the United States, and the Board. is to function in the Department of Agriculture for the orderly marketing of basic agricultural products by the use of an equalization fee assessed against the products and of a revolving fund to be appropriated from the Treasury. The size of this fund, however, is to be nearer

bors Appropriation Bill, the camel's nose will be under the tent again. The system of making consecutive appropriations on the recommendation of Army engineers and in conformity with Budget estimates will be on its way to the discard.

Money for rivers and harbors Money for rivers and harbors work will be again in the hands of traders and log-rollers. Indeed, more than half of the appropriation called for by the bill as it passed the House was secured by the old obnoxious system.

The bill calls for appropriations totaling $73,500,000. Of this, $46,000,000 is appropriated for the improvement of a four-hundred-mile stretch of the Missouri River between Kansas City, Missouri, and Sioux City, Iowa. The Board of Army Engineers had definitely declined to approve this project. No provision was made for it in the Budget. Objections to it, both technical and

economical, were sufficient to eliminate it from consideration for this session. But the House, with only thirty-eight Representatives in opposition, voted it into the bill.

Undoubtedly it would be desirable to have the Missouri River improved. Probably the sum of $46,000,000 could be spent to advantage on this particular reach of the stream. It is not the appropriation of money for the improvement of the Missouri that is objectionable, but the manner in which the appropriation was made by the House. It was passed as an agricultural relief measure, after the House had refused to pass the Haugen Export Corporation Bill. The argument offered was that water transportation on the Missouri would reduce freight rates on farm products, particularly wheat. Perhaps the argument may be sound, though experience with other streams has not shown that water transportation has any appreciable effect on the general level of domestic freight rates. But, no matter what the fact may be as to that, the House was not justified in appropriating a large sum of money on an unapproved project by way of placating farm organizations, angered by the rejection of the Haugen Bill. We do not believe that the farm organizations will be placated by it. They may be mistaken in their estimate of what the Haugen Bill would have done for them, but they are not so credulous as to believe that dredging some mud out of the channel of the Missouri will do for them what an export corporation was expected to do.

The Senate has not in recent times shown itself better advised than the

House; but it has the opportunity now of doing something toward redeeming its reputation by rejecting the Missouri River item until it has the approval of competent engineering authority. And there are other items in the bill which should receive careful scrutiny by the Senate.