Mr. CUMMINGS. Now, I admit that you thoroughly understand the tariff, but if I wanted a doctor, you would not expect me to hire you, would you?

Mr. MILES. A doctor on sugar?

Mr. CUMMINGS. No; if I needed a physician; supose I needed this tooth put back. You would not expect me to hire you, but to go to a dentist.

Mr. MILES. Well, I know sugar. I have had

Mr. CUMMINGS. You are objecting to us, because we thought we did know a little bit about sugar.

Mr. MILES. You are interested parties, every one of you is colored within interest, deeply colored.

I have heard what you said. I want to put this in the form of a question. I understand that you said that you were so sensitive about sugar that you could not bear to have a thing said against it.

Mr. CUMMINGS. No; I did not say that.

Mr. MILES. Well then, will you say what you said? I am speaking from the best of my memory, and I love you, as a man, not as chairman.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I said this, that I was as sensitive about sugar as a good father would be about a daughter, if he had one 16 years old, and I would not like for people to talk about her character who did not know anything about it.

Mr. MILES. Well, I leave it to the committee, whether I know as much about sugar as anyone who has testified during the last 6 days.

Mr. KING. Mr. Chairman, may I ask one question?

Mr. CUMMINGS. Not too many.

Mr. KING. Mr. Miles

Mr. MILES. Never mind the time.

Mr. KING. I just want to ask Mr. Miles this: You do not regard the American flag as flying over Hawaii?

Mr. MILES. I beg your pardon.

Mr. KING. The American flag flies over Hawaii?

Mr. MILES. Yes; I love Hawaii. I bless God that she has our flag; but I want to say that I am not in favor of taxing the people of Ohio $22,000,000 in order that they may raise $2,000,000 of sugar. Likewise with Hawaii that raises sugar for virtually the Cuban cost of production. I would protect Hawaii, because she must and should raise sugar. She has the cheap labor. She has everything she needs for sugar production. It is a brown man's crop, but I do not want to give her bonuses, in 1935, $52,372,000, based on the cost of cane in Louisiana, the highest cost in the world for sugar; where they have no business to raise sugar, where cane has to be cut before it is ripe; Louisiana that has prostituted legislation in Congress for 30 years to get what it knew it did not deserve.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Let me suggest that you do not put anything in that burns up the record.

Mr. MILES. I must quote the man who knew more about congressional hearings on tariffs-and this is a part of what is now called the farmers' tariff-call it what you will. It is this kind of a tariff, and no difference in the hearings. Speaker Cannon, in his pictur

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esque language, expressed his utmost contempt of this kind of congressional hearing. I have plenty of witnesses. Joe Cannon named every member of a tariff committee for quite a while. Therefore, he dominated them, dominated absolutely the action of the committee, and when there was a big row, 5 to 4, in 1909, he went in there and lambasted them until they came to his views unanimously, though most unwillingly, some of them.

Well, now, I have said enough about these hearings, but I do want to register complaint about a committee named in Congress in the interest of sugar; honorable men, of course, on this committee and you watch the clock. I will make the 40 minutes into 42, as against 6 days taken by other interests.

Mr. HOPE. Mr. Chairman, right at that point, just to keep the record straight, I would like to ask the chairman a question.

It is the understanding, is it not, that this subcommittee has been appointed solely for the purpose of conducting hearings and at any consideration of this bill will be before the entire Agricultural Committee?

Mr. CUMMINGS. I think everyone knows that, unless it is the gentleman who is talking.

Mr. MILES. I am glad I did not get that. [Laughter.]

You have heard of the man who lived so close to the mountain that he could not see it.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Yes.

Mr. MILES. The last place in the world to learn to know sugar is to go out and sit down on a sugar farm. You learn to grow sugar, but nothing there about its place in world economics. On the farm the whole world means sugar, and the grower's profit; and other people's money be damned.

Oh, there is no question that this is wicked. Let me define itthere are two kinds of congressional hearings. One is the right kind. We have had a lot of them in the last year. The committee gets counsel. It gets all of the information from all angles. When witnesses do not come, they are subpenaed.

There is the other kind, that I do not want to define. Joe Cannon said of them, "Tariff hearings. Why, they are (unprintable)." No counsel, no evidence is required. They just sit back and listen.

CHILD LABOR

It is surprising to find how little this means financially to the growers or their contract laborers.

In a letter of December 19, 1933, Dr. Coulter, then of the Tariff Commission, estimated that the total "contract workers" required were 110,354 in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana. Of these, only 122 percent, or 14,743, were children under 16 years. Of these children, 9.451 were males and 5,292 were females.

The total for all farm labor in these big sugar States was $159,394. Of this, $50,000, or virtually one-third, was for ordinary farm labor and two-thirds for contract labor. The proportion was 1 child to 20 adults.

Allowing that children of 12 to 16 years are one-half as efficient as their parents in all processes of hoeing, thinning and cutting off the

leafy tops at harvest time, and that they work as long hours, then children earned 6 percent of the $5,500,000 paid contract labor in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana. They earned $330,000. But children do little hoeing or topping, and surely the youngest of them must work short hours to be effective, as well as for health's sake.

Their specialty is thinning. On above basis they earned in thinning some 6 percent, or $131,000, of the total paid for thinning, $2,185,000. With no other data at hand, make any reasonable changes in these figures, and we see that child labor in beet fields is a moral issue and of no considerable money consequence, except to pinchpenny producers and "contracted" parents, mostly foreign born and not desirable in America.

"OTHER CROPS PAY AS WELL AS BEETS IN THE COLORADO SUGAR AREAS”

So said successful farmers in the Greeley, Colo., area, the best in the United States, including the president of the Colorado Potato Growers' Association in about 1922-26. Those who like sugar culture will say otherwise. The point is that it is questionable whether our huge sugar taxes do the growers any real good or not.

Below is a cropping plan by a great authority. It shows no need of sugar culture in Colorado, the best and biggest sugar-producing State in the United States.

FARMING WITHOUT BEETS IN COLORADO SUGAR AREAS

The crops listed below are now grown extensively in these areas, with only 17 percent of the acreage now in beets in ordinary years. Proposed cropping plan for 160-acre irrigated farm by R. T. Burdick, associate economist of the State Agricultural College and Experiment Station of Fort Collins, Colo.-without beets:

1 Potatoes usually $1 to $2 per hundredweight. In 1931 and 1932 they paid better than beets. Some leading farmers in the sugar areas say that in no 10-year period since beets were introduced have they paid as well as some other crops.

1 To cover depreciation on buildings and equipment. To pay operator for his year's labor. To cover interest on the farm investment. To buy replacement of machinery or horses.

ABSTRACT FROM A LETTER WRITTEN BY W. D. HOOVER, DENVER, COLO. (IN HIS DAY A GREAT PROFESSOR), CONCERNING ABOVE CROPPING PLAN OF MR. BURDICK

The prices of the various products shown in the accompanying statement are exceedingly conservative, if not positively low. For instance, the price of cabbage usually varies from 15 cents to $1.30 per hundred. The cost prices of materials in the items of expense are, I think, amply high to anticipate any reasonable emergency.

Mr. Burdick states that in this estimate he has made no allowance for winter feeding and that the amount of hay available from the farm as described is sufficient to normally care for about 1,000 lambs. He also assumes in this calculation that it will require nine horses and that the farmer would have three cows and about 75 chickens. These animals will double the above income.

To get a fair comparison of beets at this time I think it is proper to assume the yield of beets at 12 tons to the acre and the average price of $4.75 to $5 a ton. This yield for tenant is a positive loss.

I also think that the electrical charges for lighting, pumping, etc., could be eliminated.

The above crop distribution is for the Greeley district. It would be somewhat different for the Arkansas Valley. Also oats and hay might be included.

The following table shows how little sugar means to Colorado, and less to other States. If sugar were abandoned, all the land now in sugar would be required for the feed crops listed in table 8 to care for the vast numbers of sheep and cattle that come from the ranges to be fattened in Colorado-one of its greatest industries. Why sugar any way? Why this $410,000,000 tax for a worthless occupation?

TABLE 9.-Distribution of acreage in principal Colorado sugar counties

To lay with one hand the power of the Government on the property of the citizen, and with the other to bestow it upon favored individuals to aid private enterprise and build up private fortunes is none the less robbery, because it is done under the forms of law and is called taxation.-(Supreme Court of the United States-The Marshall case.)

TABLE 10.—Animal population in the 8 principal sugar-beet counties of Colorado

It took 38,749 American acres to produce the eggs sent Cuba in 1928-none reported for 1932.

The fattening of animals from the ranges is the most important of any one farm occupation in these counties.

The Colorado Agricultural College at Fort Collins in the beet area published, in February 1930, a typical farm budget for a 160-acre farm (see table 8 above).

It shows $4,729 gross profit above purchase price from fattening 109 steers, and 23 percent more than from 29 acres in sugar beets that brought $3,248, and only $2,581 for all general farm operations and expenses after the labor lien for weeders and blockers was paid-a special operation peculiar to beet-culture.

The total acreage distribution was: Alfalfa 58 acres, barley 43.5 acres, corn and corn silage 14.5, beets 28, pasture 4, farmstead, roads, and so forth 11. Evidently the replacement of beets by feed crops is not difficult. Now much corn is brought in from the east.

In closing may I call your attention to my statement on taxation before the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, June 14, 1936. It shows, among other things, that "hidden" or private taxes (including the sugar taxes) levied annually by authority of Congress by monopolies unlawfully and by others, total some $15,000,000,000, not less. These taxes are levied by price additions to the products