Still "Embattled'

Ever since President Coolidge picked South Dakota for his vacation, reports from his summer White House have suggested that farmers are not really vexed over the question of farm relief and that the McNary-Haugen bill will not be a major issue in the next campaign. At St. Paul, last week, was offered evidence that the farmers are still "embattled farmers," and that they are standing squarely, rigidly, on the principles of the vetoed farm relief measure. For delegates to the Northwestern Agricultural Conference called the President's McNary-Haugen veto a repudiation of his Party's platform and speakers both Republican and Democratic pledged themselves to continue the farm-relief fight.

Said Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky: "Any legislation will fail unless it brings the power of the Government to control the surplus [of farm products] so that it might be fed to the market as the need for consumption arises."

F. W. Murphy of Wheaton, Minn., said that the country was suffering from a "most ruthless, cynical and selfish oligarchy. Big business has told the farmer to go home and slop his hogs," shouted Mr. Murphy, "we are here to serve notice that this contemptuous opinion of the farmer's intelligence and spirit is not to go unchallenged."

Representative Gilbert Haugen, co-author of the McNary-Haugen bill, argued that both major political parties were bound by their platform promises to alleviate the farmers' ills.

Conference leaders predicted that at the next session of Congress the McNary-Haugen bill would be revived, re-passed and would carry a majority large enough for it to become a law in spite of the President's veto.

Meanwhile Department of Agriculture reports predicted the smallest corn crop since 1903. "Crop prospects," said the report, "are fairly good in the western states but unpromising in the eastern part of the corn belt."