The Pulaskian., 1919-08-15
Comprehensive Extension of the Present Food Control Act
 Is Recommended.
SITUATION CRITICAL AND DlFFl- CULT AND MUST BE MET WITH
 COURAGE AND RESOURCE.
Calm and Deliberate Consideration Rather Than Hasty Action Is Called For by the Present situa-
 tion of the Country.

Washington Extension of the pres ent food control act. both as to it's pc riod of operation and to include all commodities indisputably necessaries of life, regulation of cold storage to define the limits within which food stuffs can be held; marking of all goods destined for interstate com merce with the price at which they left the hands Of the producer; fed eral licenses for all corporations and persons engaged In interstate com merce. which will provide for com petitive selling. and passage of the pending bill giving the capital issues committee control of security issues, are the remedies proposed by Presi- dent Wilson, in his address to con gress to meet the existing high cost of living.
 The president said in part:
 Gentlemen Of the Congress:
 l have sought this opportunity to ad- dress you because it is clearly my duty to caH your attention to the present cost of living and to urge upon you with all the persuasive force of which am capable the legislative measures which would be most effective in controlling 1t and bring ing 1t down.
 The prices the people of this country are paying for everything that it is necessary for them to use in order to live are not Justified by a shortage in supply, either present or prospective and are in many cases artiticialy and deliberately created by vicious practices which ought imme- diately to be checked by law.
 Profiteers Lawbreakers.
 Some of the methods by which these prices are produced are already illegal some of them criminal and those who employ them will be energetically pro- ceeded against. But others have not yet been brought under the law. and should be dealt with at once by legislation
 With the increase in the prices of the necessaries of life come demands for in creases in wages-demands which are Justified if there be no other means of enabling men to live
 Upon the increase of wages there fol- lows close an increase in the price of the products whose producers have been ac- corded the increase-not a proportionate Increase for the manufacturer does not content himself with that, but an in crease considerably greater than the added wage cost and for which the added wage cost is oftentimes hardly more than an excuse.
 The laborers who do not get an increase in pay when they demand 1t are likely to strike. and the strike only makes mat ters worse.
 It checks production; If 1t affects the railways it prevents distribution and strips the markets; so that there is pres ently nothing to buy. and there is another excessive addition to prices resulting from the scarcity.
 Conditions Not "NaturaI."
 These are facts and forces with which we have become only too familiar: but we are not justified because of our faruil- iarity with them or because of any hasty natural and inevitable in sitting inac- lively by and letting them work their fa- tai results if there is anything that we can do to check, correct or reverse them.
 We must. l think. frankly admit that there is no complete immediate remedy to be lad from legislation and executive action. The free processes of supply and demand will not operate of themselves and no legislative or executive action can force them into full and natural operation until there is peace.
 Must Know Terms of Peace.
 There can be no confidence in indus tIys NO NdiSQA0plS baStS iOT CIeQiIS. no confident buying of systematic selling. no certain prospect of employment. no normal restoration of business, no hopeful attempt at reconstruction or a proper reassembling of the dislocated clements of enterprise until peace has be established, and, so far as may be- guaranteed. Our national life has no doubt been less radically disturbed and dismembered than the national life of kN rectly affected. with all its terrible ravaging and destructive force. but it has been nevertheless profoundly af- fected and disarranged, and our indus tries. our credits. our productive ca pacity. our economic processes are in- extricably interwoven with those of other nations and peoples-most inti- mately of all with the nations and peo- ples upon whom the chief burden and confusion of the war fell and who are now most dependent upon the CO., operative action of the world.
 Exports Greatest in History.
 We are just now shipping more goods out Of our ports to foreign markets than we ever shipped before-not foodstuffs merely, but stuffs and materials of every sort, but this is no index of what our foreign sales will continue to be or of the effect the volume ef our exports will have on supplies and prices, It is impossible yet to predict how far or how long foreign purchasers will be able to find the money or the credit to pay for or sustain such purchases on such a scale how soon or to what extent foreign manufacturers can resume their former production. foreign farmers get their accustomed crops from their own fields; foreign mines resume their former output, foreign merchants set up again their old machinery of trade with the ends of the earth. All these things must remain uncertain until peace is estab- lished and the nations of the world have