The Times News

It is singular that the secretary of agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, should begin an address in these words:

"Joseph was one of the earliest economic statesmen in history. During seven years of good weather, according to the 47th chapter of Genesis, he stored up the surplus crops to be used when the drouth years came."

Singular, because where Joseph stored up the surplus, the New Deal destroyed the seeming abundance. Not only that, but the New Deal, hoping to assure against plenty, set about to control production by curtailing acreage and by limiting the breeding of swine and cattle.

Under the New Deal the seeming surplus was reduced and then the drouths and the dust storms came. The surplus was gone and the new crops failed to produce enough for the normal needs of the whole people. Joseph's people had the stored supplies upon which to draw; the American people were, and are, without great store of supplies.

A New Deal objective was to help the American farmer whereas it is helping the foreign farmers, for this country must import great quantities of foodstuffs. The American farmer is without stuffs for the market, and the American consumer is having to pay high prices which are going higher week by week.

Mr. Wallace says:

"The cry, 'you cannot regiment nature,' while true enough, is the cry of little men lost in primitive superstition. Joseph had a bigger vision than they. He didn't regiment nature, but he did prepare for the whims of nature."

The American people are paying for the New Deal's effort to regiment nature; Joseph's people benefited because he prepared for the whims of nature. One of Mr. Wallace's colleagues in the New Deal, Senator Byrnes, told South Carolina farmers who had been hurt by drouth that he would call upon the New Deal to overcome the vagaries of weather. The vagaries of weather are whims of nature.

However adroitly the New Deal spokesman shall argue, the cold fact remains that man cannot control nature. In terms of agriculture, man cripples himself when he destroys the abundance of his fields.

Mr. Wallace says that Joseph's plan "worked well in ancient Egypt because behind Joseph stood Pharaoh." Well, behind Mr. Wallace, Mr. Bankhead and all the others who sought to destroy the surplus and to reduce production has stood the Pharaoh of this time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He has stood behind them with the funds of the people. Farmers have been well paid for ploughing crops under and for curtailing production.

If the plan followed by Joseph of old were in effect, the American people would not be compelled to import great quantities of foodstuffs. American consumers are paying such prices that foreign producers find it profitable to hurdle the high tariff wall and offer their stuffs in American markets. More than a million pounds of pork products are coming into this country from Poland every month. That is a sign of the New Deal's failure to cope with the whims of nature, the vagaries of the weather.

Americans to live must eat and to eat they must pay high prices under a national administration which assured that it would protect them against high food prices while bestowing money benefits upon farmers. Ask your grocer whether prices are bound upward. Compare prices with what they were a few months ago. The New Deal in rewriting the law of economy has placed a heavy impost upon the American people. --Charleston News and Courier.