PITY THE POOR FARMER.

Evening Star, Issue 21293, 23 December 1932, Page 9

PITY THE POOR FARMER.

TO THE EDITOR.

Sir, —On behalf of his association the chairman of the Associated Chambers of Commerce is reported to have deplored parliamentary, interference with the sanctity of private contract. Mr Burgess desires the mortgaged farmer to submit to the sanie process of “ adjustment that is still going on unobtrusively in private business.” Stripped of its verbiage, this means let the farmer be forced into bankruptcy. That the lender of money niay get his pound, of flesh, the toiler on whose back we all ride is to find his roof sold over his head, himself and his family out on the road with nowhere to go and nothing to take there —serfs without help or hope for the future. This dire process of liquidation has been going forward at a tremendous rate in the United States; for, unable to pay, hundreds of thousands of “their country’s pride ” have had their all seized by the financial institutions.

No doubt some of us who find.our assets frozen in farm mortgages would welcome an opportunity of stepping into excellent properties by foreclosure. But if we did, would not our ethics fall farther short of our professed ideal than those of the Shylock we used to loathe? To let “economic laws ” take their course—is not this

the policy of laissez-faire that has brought things to their present pass ? “ Everyone for himself, and the de’il take the hindmost.” To set some limit to the operations of such “economic law” is, surely,, the primary duty of Parliament. Should it fail we revert to the • jungle law of “ Nature red in tooth and claw.” In the present, state of Christian impotence and moral incapacity, it may surpass our power to bring in the day When “the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.” ' Yet every man of goodwill ' must endorse Mr Coates in boldly declaring that he can-, not, and will not, allow the farmer to be sucked dry by the financial octopus. It is this species, not the widowed and working mortgagee, that Mr George Armstrong , had in mind.. The bighearted president of the Texas Steel Company thus placed himself on record: “They have the power to expand (credit) and contract it at Will. They expand it and we buy at high prices; they contract it and freeze us out. Operated in connection with the stock exchange it is the greatest flimflam game that has over been devised. —I am, etc., MacGregor Wai.mßl.ey. December 22.