There is one salient fact which stands out of all that is being reported and written of the middlewestern farm revolt; some farmers are willing to sell at the current price level, and are being restrained from doing so only by the most inflammatory and militant devisements of their fellows. The gospel preached by the pay leaders of the movement, I am aware, is in direct opposition to this. Their argument runs that the NRA is intolerable, because it is running agriculture into the ground and making it impossible for any farmer to retain his solvency, but if this were really the case, the strikers would not need any guns for domestic use--they would train their artillery, not on their neighbours, but on Washington.

What the leaders really mean, and should say, for it is indictment enough, is that the economy of depression shows forth the hollowness of the ideal known as free competition. In prosperous times, the efficient farmer is willing to reap his reward in a greater profit margin, and will tolerate the selfgratulatory gabble of his inferiors so long as his own sales volume is unimpaired. But when price becomes a sharp issue, he is wont to maintain his volume at their expense, which is what is meant by free competition. Immediately the hinds call treason, puncture the tires of his trucks, and attempt to root him from their community.

It is improbable that our present agricultural structure could survive free competition--the pulmotor must constantly be applied in the form of grants and subsidies, for so many farmers are thumbing their noses at economy by keeping milch cows and using stubbly lands that the others could not supply our needs. The only intelligent capitalist solution has been advanced by Mr. H. L. Mencken; since the farmers are obviously not up to the serious business of feeding us cheaply, they should be made hired labourers, and the agricultural system owned and managed by competing corporations, much as in mining or the manufacture of cloth. In a time of depression, even such corporations as these would be hard hit, but they would be more in keeping with the outlines of our business structure and with its implications than the present indeterminate bathos, in which prices are set by the pragmatic conclave of an inefficient majority.

Many objections arise to this view; certainly it is not so intelligent or so human as the communist solution. But it represents what must happen under capitalism. It has happened in every other industrial field, in this land of the free and home of the brave, and agriculture has been the last stronghold against it simply through the multiplicity of its owners and their vast political importance. Mr. Roosevelt, whose whole program is an infelicitous falling between the stools of Marx and Mill, has already had occasion to discover that the capitalists will not brook serious interference in the other parts of their program. Surely they will not suffer him, or his successors, to block them in a path so clear and vital as this. POLLUX.