Hopkinsville Kentuckian

OUR PUBLIC FORUM

By Peter Radford

On "Back to the Soil With Wall Street"

When Wall Street wants good business men she usually goes back to the soil to get them. That financial thoroughfare is said to be honeycombed with men who have plowed barefooted, who have drunk branch water, eaten cornbread and molasses and slept on the floor in their early days. A man is more capable of holding the reins of business who knows how to drive a team of mules, shear a sheep or put a ring in a shoat's nose.

A man is better equipped to meet the problems of life who in his youth has walked the log across the creek to get to school, courted the girls at husking bees and pitched horse shoes Saturday afternoon. A man who has spent the moonlight nights of his youth possum hunting, going to protracted meetings and occasionally turning down the community at a spelling match has the right sort of stuff in him to make a good business man. The active officials of most of the large business organizations of America it is said were, with a very few exceptions, raised on the farm, and could swim the creek, pitch hay, chop wood, milk the cows or slop the hogs as easily as they can run world-wide business institutions.

The farmers look to these capable and loyal sons of the soil to assist in the solution of the business problems of agriculture. Wall Street is reputed to be capable of financing everything from a Y. M. C. A. to a war, so why not finance agriculture? It is not sufficient to lend money to a correspondent to lend to a local banker, to lend to a broker to lend to a merchant, to lend to the landlord to lend to a farmer. Such a financial system sounds like the house that Jack built, and is just about as useful. Neither is assistance complete when money is furnished buyers to "move the crop." What the farmer wants is money to hold the crop. What better security is there than a warehouse receipt for a bale of cotton, a sack of wheat or a bushel of corn and why will such securities not travel by the side of government bonds?

The American farmer is a capable plowman. He always has filled and always will fill the nation's granary, larder and wardrobe, but he has nothing to say in fixing the price of his products. The problem confronting the farmers of this nation today is marketing and its solution depends first upon the farmer organizing for concert of action and the co-operation of the financial interests in marketing the crop. Agriculture is the biggest business in America and the only one that has not a financial system adapted to its use.