IN FRONT LINE OF FREEDOM

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21789, 19 October 1940, Page 4

IN FRONT LINE OF FREEDOM

Prime Minister’s Message To Farmerc British Official Wireless (Received October 18, 6.30 p.m.) RUGBY. October 17. Mr Churchill, in a letter to the President of the National Farmers’ Union, in reference to correspondence on the subject of agricultural prices, states that the matter had his serious consideration. "I need not tell you that the food production of our country is, at this hour of supreme crisis, one of the vital factors in our ability to resist and overcome a formidable enemy,” he states. "We rely on the farmers. We depend on the efforts they put forth in the fields of Britain. I know that we can do this with complete confidence in their toil, ingenuity and readiness to accept hardship in a grave emergency affecting all our people. "Price levels have been fixed for the purpose of securing an increase in types of production and a decline in others. /They ke their place in the general plan to meet the exceptional needs of war. In some cases they may even be a call for the sacrifice of personal interest, but taken as a whole the price structure is believed to reconcile just treatment for the producer with the wide requirements of the nation. "Even if this were not so, the call to duty would still go out to the farms as it does to the factories and I know that it would be answered by a stern resolve to make the best of the expedients at hand to labour, strive and achieve with no thought of obstacles and no heed to difficulties. "Only if we devote our lives and energies wholly to the tasks of war can we survive the ordeal and gain the victory which will save our people from intolerable servitude, and in this service the farming community is called to play a vital part. To-day, the -arms of Britain are the frone line of freedom.”