| OCR Text |
Show OUR PUBLIC FORUJVl IX-Peter Radford I 1 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 tejj w ' thoroughfare Is said to be honeycombed with men who fcaASj 1 have plowed barefooted, who have drunk branch water, 'f"1''sL! eaten cornbread and molasses and slept on the floor In jis P their early days. A man is more capable of holding the tl " y reins of business who knows how to drive a team of JlS' Jhh 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 S- in his youth ha3 walked the log across the creek to get fpi X, M&P$ to school, courted the ej1b at husking bees and &gy3 - 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 maletl 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 com-plete 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 ware-i ware-i house receipt for a bale of cotton, a sack of wheat or a bushel of cor 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 al-ways 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 farm-ers 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 Axuerica and the only one that has not a financial system adapted to Its use. |
