The midland journal. (Rising Sun, Md.) 1885-1947, 1920-12-03

the same way as any other business
undertakes to provide a profitable
sales end for the products it manufac-
lures.
So l say your program today, with
the exception of the last meeting is
absolutely silent as to the business end
of farming. 1t is an astonishing thing,
my friends, that in this country of
ours the tenancy on farms has in
creased to over 40 per cent. Just think
of that for a moment! Forty farms
out of every one hundred are occu-
pied by tenancy, and in some parts
of the United States this tenancy has
gone up to 80 per cent, and the native
born Americans, the original owners of
the farms, are drifting away steadily;
so you are going bac kto the condi-
ton of Ireland. If that is true, then
| am not far out of the way in saying
that our present condition of farming
is breaking down. If this thing goes
on, in ten or twenty years from now
we shall have an absolutely non-owner-
ship system of farming in this country,
and you know as well as 1 do exactly
what that means. From the earliest
time tenancy has been known as the
mark of deterioration in agriculture.
Well, what are you going to do
about it? You can do what Australia
has done, what England has done,
what Italy is doing, what Germany is
doing. You can give State aid. l am
not going into that because the time
is too short, but State aid-dividing
plots, selling it on long terms, without
interest on the first few, taking care
of the individual owner and letting
him pay for fifty years if necessary,
is all good as far as you have gone;
but when you have done that, up pops
again, like little Banquo's ghost, this
same figure that says, What are you
going to do with the farm products
after you have got them?
Now there is kind of dairy organi-
zation that you and / are interested
| in-the business end of 1t. That is the
thing that the Departments of Foods
and Markets in New York State have
to concern themselves with. l don't
expect to solve it; hope to begin sue
cessfuly the solution of it. The sys-
tenn of distribution that we have that
affects milk as well as other products,
is a system that has grown up for
years. 1t is the product, think l can
safely say, Of business experience;
and where you have system that has
taken years to form, that has grown
steadily and slowly, Think it is safe
to say that some parts of that system
are sound and sane and worthy of
preservation.
So in reforming our methods, it isn't
question of sweeping aside with one
fell swoop our present system of dis
tribution; it is question of preserv-
| ing the parts which are excellent.
The middlemen, taken as group, are
just as good citizens as any other body
of men-they may have their dishon-
est men, their grasping and avaricious
men, that is very true, but don't you
find them elsewhere? So the problem
isn't to wipe out the dishonest and I'M
scrupulous middlemen at the same
time that we are modifying the sys-
tenn of distribution. You must re-
member that if in this milk quetion
you wi peout the middleman, for ex-
ample, and ship your own milk to New
York and establish your own terminal
stations, you will have only put an
other middleman in there; you will
have become the middleman then, you
will have to pay the cost of that dis
tributing system in New York, you will
have to pay the rent of your markets,
you will have to pay all those charges
that the middleman is paying now, and
| you Gall uO >lIlotI oihy SICoPOl
the middleman, then the middleman
isn't a business necessity If you can't
do it, then the middleman is the man
that you want, and in a great many
cases in certain lines of business we
will never be able to eliminate the
middleman because we need him and
he makes money for us. l learned a
curious thing a short while ago; that
they have middlemen between middle
men to serve middlemen. You know
why they do it. 1t is an actual fact
that by establishing new middleman
between two others, money can be
saved by the concentrated activities
of this one man. Now that only shows
that a good many of us, perhaps are
mistaken when we think that we want
to sweep all this system out of ex-
istence at once.