The Press. Thursday, April 14, 1921. The Farmer and his Enemies.

Press, Volume LVII, Issue 17119, 14 April 1921, Page 6

The Press. Thursday, April 14, 1921. The Farmer and his Enemies.

There an instructive sequel to our article of Tuesday on the wheat question, in which we suggested that the Government, which induced farmera to grow wheat by promising to . guarantee remunerative prices, should complete its guarantee by enabling the . ' farmers to receive their money without delay,-either through purchase by the • Government or by ■ some other means. The Government guaranteed a price ranging from 7s 6d to Bs, and the farmer is fully entitled to receive this price. He must receive it sooner or later. The Government must buy the wheat at the guaranteed price, if necessary, and if it does so, it can re-sell it without loss. "What we requested was that the Government, which must honour its guarantee Booner or later, ought to honour it forthwith, in order that the farmer, whose meat and wool has slumped to prices that mean a very serious loss to him, may have the means of carrying oh and of sowing' wheat for the people's consumption nest year. Now the sequel to our article is an article in our morning contemporary vigorously denouncing the farmer and passionately urging the Government to tear up its contract and repudiate its guarantee. It invites its public to laugh at the idea that "the "farmers ought to be relieved of the " inconvenience which they suffer "through the tardiness of buyers." • The more inconvenience and loss that can be inflicted on the farmer, the better it will be —such is the attitude of this spokesman of the Liberal tail of the anti-agrarian body of which tho revolutionary Labour Party is the head. If they can, these enemies of the farmer will "larn him to be a toad." • When it fixed the guarantee prices, we are told, the Government "did not " absolutely compel the community to "pay tho price fixed." There is a loophole, we suppose, through which the Government may, and through which the farmer's inveterate enemy jays the Government ought, to wriggle. The Government, it need hardly be said, is as likely to take this odious hint as to compete with anti-agrarian Liberalism for an alliance with the party whose working rule is "To Hell " with contracts." Our contemporary, we dare say, knows this; but it hopes 1 that the Government may, nevertheless, embarrass the farmer as much as possible by letting him stand out of I his money to the latest possible date. Everyone who knows anything of tho conditions in Canterbury and

elsowheT© knows that not the farmers only, but the whole public, will suffer if the farmers do not realise promptly on the wheat that a guarantee induced them to grow. The immorality of the suggestion that the Government should repudiate its contract is amazing. Hardly less amazing is the folly of it. The present disagreeable economic and financial situation has revealed to all intelligent people the fact that unless the men on the land are prospering the country as a whole cannot continue in health, and yet we find our local contemporaries zestfully adopting a policy of hostility to the farmer —either discounting the primary industries as the occupation of backward and barbarous folic, or, like our morning contemporary, urging the Government to go the length even of tearing up its contracts in order to injure the men on the land. The farmer has been very patient, but the sooner he faces his enemies actively the better it will be for him.