Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/62

48, unmoral, and a lot of other adverbial things, the politicians who pretend to lead the Western farmers allege that the property of the railway stockholders has been overvalued in the interest of the malign profiteers of Wall Street and that the public should not be constrained to pay charges on their plunder. This was the inspiration of the physical valuation of the railways, instigated by Senator LaFollette. The results of that investigation by the Interstate Commerce Commission have proceeded sufficiently far to show that the aggregate physical value of the railways of the United States is in excess of what the transportation industry itself had heretofore claimed. Obviously therefore, there is no merit whatsoever in the agrarian contention for a reduction of railway rates at the expense of railway stockholders.

The Western farmers were not, of course, the victims of any deliberate deflation in 1920, as has been vociferously alleged by some of their exponents. The collapse that began about the middle of 1920 had long been foreseen by economists who knew that the extravagant post-war boom could not long continue in the face of a situation that was inherently unsound. The collapse was precipitated by the exhaustion of the credits that we had given to Europe, which withdrew Europe as a free buyer of our commodities and thus annulled a demand that had previously been contributing to the maintenance of our markets. The exhaustion of those credits and what was then going to ensue were clearly foreseen by the experts, but as is frequently the case most people refused to pay attention to them. Yet even those who did pay attention were helpless, for there could be no swift and complete liquidation on a rapidly