Agriculture is a vital activity in our national life.  In it we had our beginning, and its westward march with the star of the empire has reflected the growth of the Republic.  It has its vicissitudes which no legislation will prevent, its hardships for which no law can provide escape.  But the Congress can make available to the farmer the financial facilities which have been built up under Government aid and supervision for other commercial and industrial enterprises.  It may be done on the same solid fundamentals and make the vitally important agricultural industry more secure, and it must be done.

This Congress already has taken cognizance of the misfortune which precipitate deflation brought to American agriculture.  Your measures of relief and the reduction of the Federal reserve discount rate undoubtedly saved the country from widespread disaster.  The very proof of helpfulness already given is the strongest argument for the permanent establishment of widened credits, heretofore temporarily extended through the War Finance Corporation.

The Farm Loan Bureau, which already has proven its usefulness through the Federal land banks, may well have its powers enlarged to provide ample farm production credits as well as enlarged land credits.  It is entirely practical to create a division in the Federal land banks to deal with production credits, with the limitations of time so adjusted to the farm turnover as the Federal reserve system provides for the turnover in the manufacturing and mercantile world.  Special provision must be made for live-stock production credits, and the limit of land loans may be safely enlarged.  Various measures are pending before you, and the best judgment of Congress ought to be expressed in a prompt enactment at the present session.

But American agriculture needs more than added credit facilities.  The credits will help to solve the pressing problems growing out of war-inflated land values and the drastic deflation of three years ago, but permanent and deserved agricultural good fortune depends on better and cheaper transportation.

Here is an outstanding problem, demanding the most rigorous consideration of the Congress and the country.  It has to do with more than agriculture.  It provides the channel for the flow of the country’s commerce.  But the farmer is particularly hard hit.  His market, so affected by the world consumption, does not admit of the price adjustment to meet carrying charges.  In the last half of the year now closing the railways, broken in carrying capacity because of motive power and rolling stock out of order, though insistently declaring to the contrary, embargoed his shipments or denied him cars when fortunate markets were calling.  Too frequently transportation failed while perishable products were turning from possible profit to losses counted in tens of millions.

I know of no problem exceeding in importance this one of transportation.  In our complex and interdependent modern life transportation is essential to our very existence.  Let us pass for the moment the menace in the possible paralysis of such service as we have and note the failure, for whatever reason, to expand our transportation to meet the Nation’s needs.