Daily Capital Journal

OUTLOOK FOR SALEM IS BRIGHT

Last year Salem and the Willamette valley were hard hit by the failure of the prune crop and the low price of hops. As the valley, or the Salem section of it, at least, depended largely on these crops there was a rather hard season. The growers did not have the money and those who earn many dollars in the prune orchards and hop fields had their incomes cut off.

Of course this was felt in all lines of business. This year the outlook is most favorable for both crops. The frost that did such damage in other fruit sections passed us by. The prune growers say the outlook for a number one crop was never better; and as prices are high and will remain that way for some time, they should have the most prosperous season in years.

There is a demand for prunes that cannot be supplied. Idaho, which usually sends a million or two dollars worth of green prunes to the eastern markets, will send none this year because the frost took practically the entire crop. So in northern California. But little if any damage was done in Oregon, which can boast still more loudly of her climate when the state where sunshine and climate is one of the largest assets loses millions from frost, that we nearly a thousand miles further north escaped.

The outlook for a bumper crop of hops is also good, and as prices have picked up and the market become stronger the owners of hop-fields are smiling and hopeful. With both these crops good and prices fair Salem will have an unusually good year.

Every time this state shows evidence of emerging from the business depression that has enveloped it for the past three years, the calamity howlers have to get busy for political effect. Two years ago the Oregonian advertised to the country at large that workingmen were starving to death in Oregon, and just as we are beginning to get over one campaign of this kind another opens up and hits us another swat. Just now Cummins' calamity howlers, a political circus troupe from Iowa, are holding forth in the state telling people how democratic free wool and free lumber have bankrupted our people-although at the present time wool growing and lumbering are our livest industries. Too bad that we can't enact a law making professional politics a felony, and then enforce it to the limit.