onsideration when legislating on other
subjects. Our agricultural interests also need a foreign policy. For
instance, during the last month there has been a consolidation of
control of buying in world markets by the European Governments. How far
it may be extended in its policies is not clear. Nevertheless, a
combination of importers in all Europe under government control could
determine the prices on every farm in the United States.

THE MARGIN BETWEEN THE WHOLESALER AND CONSUMER

As the datum point of price determination is the wholesaler's market,
the accretions of charge for distribution from that point forward, the
economy of extravagance in these costs, is of primary interest to the
consumer. The same phenomena of marking up goods on the shelf,
calculating profits not on commodities but on dollars handled, a minor
amount of vicious speculation, and the passing on of excess profits tax,
are present in those trades during the past years. A much more pertinent
phenomenon in unduly increasing their margins is the increasing demands
of the consumer as to service. Several deliveries daily, purchases on
credit, the abandonment of the market basket in favor of the telephone,
mean many costs. One of them much overlooked is that customers must
always have "first" quality when they buy over the telephone, and the
seconds and thirds of equal food value in many commodities go to waste
and are added to the price of the firsts. That there are some people in
the United States who want to buy sanely is evidenced by the 400 per
cent increase in "cash and carry" shops. There are also too many people
in the final stages of distribution. One city in the United States has
one meat retailer for every 400 inhabitants; it would be equally well
served with one dealer for every 1200. The result is high margin to the
retailers and no out-of-the-way income to any of them. There is no very
immediate remedy for this. One possibility is an extension of
cooeperative buying by consumers. It has proved a great success abroad.
It is not socialism, for it arises from voluntary action and initiative
among the people themselves.

ILL BALANCE OF AGRICULTURE AND GENERAL INDUSTRY

There is now a tendency to ill balance between the agricultural and
general industry. For many years we were large exporters of food and
importers of manufactured goods. We gradually imported mouths,
manufactured our own goods and just as rapidly diminished our food
expo