Farmers and farm organizations have fought for economic equality in terms of parity prices and incomes for two decades. Today, when both the general principle and our current ways of calculating parities are generally accepted, is no time to desert what we have struggled for overall these years. For this reason the current discussions of the parity principle and methods of calculating and measuring parity are especially significant. Farmers have long felt that their incomes or standards of living are not comparable to the advantages and standards of living enjoyed by the nonagricultural group. And since the Civil War, certainly, farmers have made many efforts to obtain legislation that would give them a more even break. But the roots of our present parity concept lie chiefly in the events of the last World War and in the depression that immediately followed it.
