Mr. Rankin brought in another phase which was not includedits distribution to industry. The manufacturers buy certain products which they use to make other products.

The CHAIRMAN. Do you not think this bill would be broad enough to ascertain what Mr. Rankin asked?

Mr. SURFACE. It is my understanding it is.

Mr. RANKIN. Do you not think it would be better to write it in the bill so we would be dead sure?

Mr. SURFACE. I am sure you could not please the people any better than to do that.

Mr. De ROUEN. If it is not specific enough in its generic sense, it may be interpreted differently.

Mr. RANKIN. Mr. De Rouen, take your State in the manufacture of sugar and blackstrap. It is essential.

Mr. De ROUEN. I believe there is something wrong. I have often said that in the distribution, but somebody says, "What is the matter?" I will say, "I do not know." He will say, "No." I say we have not given proper attention to follow up those things. Everybody says agriculture is in a terrible fix. Everything is collapsing if we do not use our brains, or get the gentleman who can do it for us, everything will collapse.

Mr. RANKIN. I saw one time when we were paying more for oranges at home it seemed than we ever paid, and at the time I saw pictures of oranges rotting in the bins in California, and that is since I have been in Congress, unless I am mistaken.

(Informal discussion followed which the reporter was directed not to incorporate in the record.)

Mr. DE ROUEN. Coming back to the cottonseed, is there a classification by zones as to the value of it?

Mr. RANKIN. There is less information on cottonseed than any product of its value in the world.

Mr. DE ROUEN. Unless the man knows the subject he can not understand this.

The CHAIRMAN. I understand that.

Mr. RANKIN. You talk about tobacco, and all the tobacco in the world—I am not taking the figures, but I am sure all the tobacco in the United States would not amount in value to the cottonseed crop.

Mr. DE ROUEN. I have heard a great deal about cottonseed. Mr. RANKIN. In one year we produced over 600,000,000 bushels, two thirds as much cottonseed as the wheat crop of the United States. Mrs. KAHN. Why is cottonseed so important in our commerce? Mr. RANKIN. A hundred years ago a man by the name of Dunbar first analyzed cottonseed and found cottonseed oil. He wrote to a friend of his in Pennsylvania-that letter is a matter of historythat the time would come when people would raise cotton for the oil that was in the seed, and at that time our people knew little or nothing of the value of cottonseed hulls.

Mr. DE ROUEN. I think you burned the cottonseed.

Mrs. KAHN. I would like to tell you that I saw 150,000 acres planted to cotton in one tract in Mexico.

Mr. RANKIN. That does not amount to much.

Mrs. KAHN. That was one tract.

Mr. RANKIN. When you speak of 150,000, that is nothing compared with the total acreage, when you put it into forty-five or fifty million acres. That would not be much.

Mr. PEAVEY. Sugar is one of the products to be traced under this census distribution. I would like to know from the gentleman here if you can tell how the department proposes to trace the production of sugar to the ultimate consumer, when it is taken into account that hundreds of carloads of sugar are now being used in the manufacture of illicit liquor, of which no record is being maintained, in fact, the manufacturers deliberately keep from giving a record.

Mr. SURFACE. It is sold somewhere. We would not know what it was used for, but the jobber makes the sale and we would pick it up. So much was sold in this locality. We can not trace it down as to whether he ate it on his cereal or did something else with it, but we would pick it up somewhere in the process of where it was sold. Mr. PEAVEY. You would not attempt to follow the distribution of that.

Mr. SURFACE. No, sir. There are many things. You can go to & retail grocer but often he does not keep all his books in the best form. You can get his total volume of business, but can not always get how much breakfast food or sugar or some other item that he sold. You can get the kind of items he handles. You can get a long ways, as is shown on these pamphlets, on the road toward what is needed.

Mrs. KAHN. Originally this distribution was intended to handle practically all the manufactured goods, none of the raw material.

Mr. SURFACE. The experimental census was not related to manufactured goods itself, but what does the retailer sell and what does the wholesaler sell? He sells mostly manufactured goods, so consequently it applies to that, but fruits and vegetables are not manufactured goods.

Mrs. KAHN. Do you have an idea of including the distribution of minerals?

Mr. SURFACE. They do not go through the retailer and wholesaler. Mrs. KAHN. I mean under this bill, would any distribution of minerals be included?

Mr. SURFACE. A plan which would call for a complete census of the movements to industry would include the movements of minerals, also coal and cement.

The CHAIRMAN. In this census of distribution by retail stores, would you differentiate between homemade goods and imported goods.

Mr. SURFACE. I do not believe it would be practical to do that. We know how much is imported. We would have to stop there. We can not separate it out.

Mr. MOORMAN. Minerals would include rock, asphalt.

Mr. RANKIN. Take the distribution of cotton, would you follow that by grades?

Mr. SURFACE. The details of how this would be done I have not considered. I do not know whether that would be feasible or not. That is a technical matter for the Census Bureau to deal with.

Mr. RANKIN. We have a law prescribing the grades, various grades of cotton.

Mr. DE ROUEN. Is not that covered by the Smith-Lever Act? I know what you are talking about. There is a lot of cheap cotton

carried to Germany to make cheap hats, and it is not worth $10 a bale. You may have 100,000 bales and hold the certificate of the warehouse against the total amount of production, and I may have 100,000 bales of, say, standard, strict middling, American middling or Liverpool middling, and your low-grade stuff is detrimental and bearing down the cost of mine.

Mr. RANKIN. I have been reliably informed, and my information comes from a very reliable source, that there are two large firms in New York who own a vast amount of this low-grade cotton. They use that to hammer down the market. In other words when they want the market depressed they announce thay have so much cotton for sale, and they are using that to hammer down the price of cotton. This is the carry over, and a great deal of it possibly is burned cotton. I do not doubt that some of it is linters, and they use that to drive down the prices. The thing we need is to have this cotton listed according to grade.

The CHAIRMAN. Is not that covered by the Department of Agriculture?

Mr. RANKIN. We do not get any benefit from the Department of Agriculture.

Mr. DE ROUEN. The Agricultural Department deals with this subject as to the price and how it should be handled, but it does not determine what is cotton.

The CHAIRMAN. When I was in the South two or three years ago, when the depression came on I thought the figures which depressed the price of cotton were given out by the Department of Agriculture. Mr. RANKIN. That was the amount produced.

The CHAIRMAN. It is not due to the Census Bureau.
Mr. RANKIN. This is the Census Bureau's business.

The CHAIRMAN. This is, but the unfortunate circumstances to which you refer are due to the Agriculture Department.

Mr. RANKIN. I referred to two unfortunate circumstances, and the one that must be straightened out is this way of carrying over and concentrating in the hands of a few speculators a vast amount of low-grade dogtail cotton that could not be used for legitimate manufacture in any kind of first-class goods and heralding it as a part of the supply to depress the price of cotton on the market.

Mr. DE ROUEN. They can not tender that cotton.

The CHAIRMAN. Could not that be cured or rectified by amending or changing the present law in regard to the ascertainment? It has nothing to do with this bill.

Mr. RANKIN. Every census that is taken from now on, as long as I am in Congress, I am gojng to insist on a thorough census of the amount of cotton, the grades of cotton, and the cottonseed and the cottonseed products.

Mrs. KAHN. Could not that go onto the schedules as drawn up by the Bureau of the Census to take the manufacture or distribution?

The CHAIRMAN. If you attempt to put under the object of this bill tobacco, cotton, rice and sugar, and all that sort of thing, prunes, whatever it may be, you will not conform to the object of this bill. I think the thing to do is to rectify the trouble by amending the law, which I believe myself is working unsatisfactorily.

Mr. DE ROUEN. Mr. Rankin, let me get your point dealing with the classification of cotton: The point you are trying to make in this discussion which is irrelevant to the subject is that you want the bureau to show tenderable, merchantable cotton against what is not merchantable.

The CHAIRMAN. The object of the bill is to ascertain the merchantable cotton that is sold to the ultimate consumer, not the cotton that is produced in the field, not the cotton made into cloth at the mill, but the total sales of cotton throughout the country. If you try to introduce into this bill everything in the world you will not get any bill.

Mr. DE ROUEN. Your point is, Mr. Rankin, as far as I am concerned, if you are dealing with cotton in its many phases, the article is called cotton, but is it cotton? It is not cotton. What you are going to determine is how much is on the market. The carry-over from one year to another consists of two and a half million bales some say. That is not true.

Mr. RANKIN. Here is what I want in this bill. I want a census of the distribution of cotton by grades, to show where this cotton goes. Mr. DE ROUEN. I see your point.

The CHAIRMAN. You used the phrase, "Where this cotton goes.' What do you mean?

Mr. RANKIN. I mean in whose hands it goes, and what becomes of it.

The CHAIRMAN. We are going to ascertain what becomes of it when the ultimate consumer gets it.

Mr. RANKIN. I will show you when my file gets up here how it was used this year to hammer down the price of cotton.

Doctor HILL. I think we ought to remember that this census we are talking about is taken only once in ten years. The information you want ought to be procured every year, and furthermore the information we get in the census we get from interviewing the farmers and the producers. That is what the census of agriculture covers. This information has to be obtained from its source.

Mr. RANKIN. Where?

Doctor HILL. I do not know. I am not prepared to say.

Mr. RANKIN. It is the easiest information in the world to obtain. Doctor HILL. Possibly so. So we ought to elaborate the question probably.

Mr. MOORMAN. My idea is to use the census information for the first year; and then, thereafter, if there is some other source by which you can continue gathering agricultural data, and you can do it better, we would like to have each year and have it complete.

Doctor HILL. If it is practicable to obtain from the farmer his cotton by grade I am ignorant about cotton-I am sure we shall be glad to consider the practicability of doing that.

Mr. AUSTIN. How are we to get that from the farmers? Very few farmers know the grade of their cotton. The census of agriculture gets the acreage of cotton. We get it from every man who grows any cotton. The census office gets monthly a report on cotton which reports the cotton on hand in the mills in northern and southern States and mills elsewhere in the country, with the amount of cotton consumed during the month. We get a report on cotton ginned

twice a month during the ginning season. We have 685 cotton agents employed in the South. They are paid a salary or so much a gin for making those reports. We get besides that a report on cottonseed from the cottonseed mills, cottonseed received for crushing and cottonseed in stock, and the results of the crushing, oil and meal and hulls and things of that kind.

Mr. Rankin's point is he wants the cotton reported by grade. I do not know the law, but the Department of Agriculture has authority now to control a certain number of warehouses throughout the country, which they do, and they grade all cotton that is sent to these warehouses and make the report on the amount of cotton graded. That is a small amount compared to the total production. I think it runs as much as a million bales, or did last year.

In the census of agriculture, when we get our information from the farmer, it would be impossible to get cotton by grades.

The Department of Agriculture also has a law under which it has established a system of standard grades, which has been agreed to by the Liverpool Board, and they are trying to use the standard grades of the Department of Agriculture in buying and selling cotton in this country and also in foreign markets.

There is not one cotton farmer, as Mr. Rankin knows, out of 100,000 who probably could grade his own crop.

Mr. RANKIN. Mr. Austin, you know every pound of cotton is sold on grade.

Mr. AUSTIN. Mr. Rankin, that is where your cotton is brought in and a buyer handles it and he buys it according to grade. Those grades are those fixed by the Department of Agriculture.

Mr. DE ROUEN. Where is the information gotten as to the production of cotton; what bureau?

Mr. AUSTIN. The Census Office.

Mr. DE ROUEN. You were dealing with the question just now which relates to merchantable cotton. We are appealing to you to bring out this subject. When you give out the statistics that there are so many million bales, or they carry it over, the cotton industry would like to know how much of that is tenderable.

Mr. MOORMAN. As a Member from Kentucky I am interested in tobacco statistics the way these gentlemen are interested in cotton. The CHAIRMAN. We have the word "agriculture." We have drifted off from distribution.

Mrs. KAHN. Is there any other crop where the reports are numerous as the census takes, every two weeks?

Mr. AUSTIN. You mean the cotton-ginning reports?

Mrs. KAHN. Yes.

Mr. AUSTIN. None.

Mrs. KAHN. Cotton has a more complete report by the time the year goes round than any other commodity.

Mr. AUSTIN. It does in the Census Bureau.

Mr. DE ROUEN. Is it not a fact that it is one of the biggest products you have in America?

Mrs. KAHN. That is right.

Mr. RANKIN. The largest.

The CHAIRMAN. Will you describe to us briefly what your census of agriculture would be? Define the word "agriculture." We have

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