The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, August 2, 1917, Page 7

S B Y A oAt i Mt 7 7 g % the railroads of the United States, not only for the war, but forever, to make America still safer for democracy. Elsewhere the Leader reports the drawing up of a bill, which will be introduced in congress, providing for a huge public corporation to take over all the railroads, unite them in one great system and operate them for the government. The owners of the railroads will be paid for their holdings from the earnings of the roads under government operation, the payments to be made over a series of years. The war has brought the proposition of government ownership of railroads to the front and focused attention on it. The time is ripe for action. If this one thing comes out of the war an accomplished fact, the war will not have been in vain. The world may be plunged in the darkness of universal hate and bloody conflict. But it is no time for gloom. The dawn of a world safe for democracy is not far off. The Russian revolution has lit our horizon with the fires of freedom of a people, long slaves, triumphant. There are signs that Germany will throw off its military autocracy; that Ireland will win a measure of independence from Great Brit- ain as a result of the war. Re- VROOMAN AND BRAND ment of agriculture is that it contains both Carl Vrooman and C. J. Brand, two men whose ideas differ fundamentally. Vroo- man, the assistant secretary, is broad and progressive, even radical; Brand, the head of the office of markets, narrow -and conservative, even reactionary. Vrooman sees modern economic abuses as they are and does not mince matters in attacking them and demanding sweep- ing reforms. He is not afraid of Big Business or Special Privilege. ONE of the interesting things about the United States depart- = - Brand, on the other hand, fails to see the fundamental abuses the far- mer is suffering from—he can not get the producer’s point of view, and his method of procedure is by half-way measures and compromise. The Northwest has had an opportunity to study. both these men— Vrooman when he spoke in Fargo a yecar ago and again during his Northwest trip last week; Brand last- winter, when he held hearings in the Northwest for the United States department of-agriculture on the new federal grain grades. During the hearings on grain forms at home will not be forgot- l_“——— grades, Brand was plainly on the ten; the side of the people is not A FRONT AND BACK VIEW 3 ‘ side of the millers and elevator going to be made to seem seditious l and the side of the plutocrats to secem patriotie. * * * Railroads are crying for more" cars to haul coal to the Northwest, threatened 'with a winter fuel famine, and the Great Lakes ships are traveling 1,200 miles empty from the coal region to the North- west—such is the efficiency of pri- vate ownership of industry! * * * DOES ORGANIZATION PAY? F\ HE Nonpartisan league I has insisted in its propa- *® ganda that the farmer should be organized just like other business men—that all other businesses are o_z'ganized to get favorable legislation,» and that o only the farmer has been unorgan- s ‘iMW////// ized in this respect. The result has | U/ '{fifl : been that organizations of all Y kinds of business have controlled legislatures, except farmers’ or- ganizations. What wonder, then, if the laws favor the great com- binations that fix the prices that the farmer must sell his products for, and the prices that he must pay for what he buys? If farmers think the opposition is not alive to the henefits of or- ganization an editorial in the Underwriters’ Review of San Francisco will change their opin- ion. (This is an insurance man’s paper and insurance men are fighting the League because in some of the states where the League is organizing it is work- ing for state hail insurance for farmers. This would cut .rates to 90 per cent of what they are, and of course put the hail insur- men and against the farmers. e pooh-poohed and belittled the fa- mous Ladd grain milling tests which have demonstrated the rob- bery of the farmers, and the new federal grades he has promul- gated ignore the Ladd tests. Brand “attempted to solve the problem of the Pacific Northwest apple growers, and instead of promoting a plan of striet co-op- eration among the growers them- selves for their own bhenefit and to rehabilitate the industry, he worked out a compromise plan approved by the commercial in- terests, the hankers and the apple middlemen. He seemed more anx- ious first to safeguard profits for middlemen. than -to see that the producer got a square deal. Vrooman, on the other hand, stands for justice for the producer first and last. He realizes that if farming can not be made profit- i able and %afe. that the drift to- ward farm tenantry will continue. He knows that the interests that farm the farmer are in no need of protection but that the farmers that farm the land are. He knows that a free and prosperous farm population is the basis for all prosperity. At Fargo, Vrooman said : ‘‘The farmer should be repre- sented more, not only in our state life but 4n our mnational govern- ment. . . We have, drafted the best blood of the nation; we are also going to draft the wealth of the nation. . . Food pirates are making more trouble in Washing- ton today than the German army, ance companies out of business.’ As it appears from the rear—our old enemies in North-Dakota blowing the bel- and certain of the coal barons are The insurance man’s paper says: The activities of the Nonpartisan league should result in increased sup- port for the insurance federations, if the efforts of public ownership advo- cates are to be combatted by insurance men......Insurance men should lose no time in contributing their support toward saving their business from the attacks of crack-brained crusaders. In other words, the insurance men are going to strengthen their organizations. Their organizations have always maintained expensive lobbies, but now that the people are organizing through the Non- ~partisan league, the insurance men won’t have such easy sailing. Does it pay to organize? Ask the insurance men, who have been organized for 50 years and are now going to organize stronger than ever to de- feat the farmers. N % % % The Grand Forks Herald pretends to be the only paper in North Dakota standing up for the national administration. The Herald fired_' S. S. McDonald, president of the State Federation of Labor, because the federation indorsed the Nonpartisan league. The national administration turns right around and appoints McDonald federal labor agent for this state. This doesn’t lock as if the administration appreciated the kind of support that Jerry Bacon has been giving. lows and pulling the levers to make it work. taking the same stand.’’ These are not the words of a conservative of the Brand type, anxious to conciliate and compromise., 3 L . i When Rockefeller subscribed his second $5,000,000 for Liberty Loan bonds, the price of gasoline raised automatically a fraction of a cent a gallon—and then the government only let him have $2,000,000 of the bonds. What did John do with the balance of that sinking fund? * * * / Tor several weeks the speculators have been whistling to keep their courage up. Now they are scared and their knees knock together, First, they poohooed ‘‘price control’’—said it would do violence to ‘“‘economiclaws’’; that it couldn’t be done. The market page writers, loyal to the clan, came forward with arguments galore, precedents, reasons, logic (such as it was), praised speculation, eulogized it as.the finest, most subtle art of commerce. But government price control kept looming darker on the horizon. Then speculators did what *‘couldn’t be done’’—they established a price control of their own, busted up all the ‘‘economie laws’’ they had been talking about and withdrew the speculation that they had praised. - ? ' 1 < ! ¢ 1