FARM AND FIRESIDE

The cloud of dust which is now swept about the Convention Hall at Kansas City on the wings of agrarian oratory whispers that the Middle West is not, for the seargeants-at-arms at least, the most fortuitous location for the Republican stronghold. Most of the candidates, it appears, are like so many tares scattered among the grain growers. And if the one hundred thousand embattled farmers which Governor McMullen intends to head in their frontal attack next week are not a battalion of Grim Reapers as far as the Hoover cause is concerned, they have in the bag, at least, the easily sown kernels of discontent. Governor McMullen feels that the farmers, asserting themselves before the Wall Street gang, can reap at least their political harvest, but the callous press of his native state unites in calling his aspirations fertilizer.

The hypothetical hosts of rustics who are to intimidate the Convention like a Paris mob in a French Revolution, are partisans of the McNary-Haugen bill. According to the farm dailies and the associations of stock and wheat growers, sympathy for this price-fixing measure is neither intense nor intelligent, while the Governor's call to arms is mere political chicanery. But the public confidence in the present method of choice of candidates is already so shaky, that this putative affront by over-alled bureaucracy may happily topple it. With an improved radio system relaying to a passive citizenry every shout of the peasant revolt outside the smoke filled hotel room where the nocturnal setters-up of presidents are bartering votes, it is possible that a disgusted populace may at last move to gain the right of choice of president that has been kept from it so long.