The Governors' Conference in regular session at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on December 2, 1920, adopted the following resolution:

"The financial situation in the whole country is cause for the gravest concern but not for despair. All lines of business are realizing heavy losses but the swift decline of prices of farm commodities to far below the cost of production threatens a national disaster. The situation demands infinite patience and forbearance and supreme wisdom and courage. Nothing but evil can result from anger or fear.

We believe that the tenseness of the situation can be believed in several ways:

(1) Let every individual do all he can to help and encourage his neighbor. Let there be a complete mobilization of the financial and spiritual assets of every community. Neither God nor the Government ought to be asked to help those who do not first make every effort possible to help themselves. There ought to be a united effort in every community to keep any good man from being destroyed because he cannot immediately meet his obligations. Under existing conditions it would be acme of inhumanity and of unwisdom to force any debtor into bankruptcy if by the most liberal indulgence he would be ultimately able to pay. Business failures do more than wreck business; they oftimes destroy man.

Liberal indulgences and renewals should be granted by the manufacturers to the jobbers, by the jobbers to the merchants, by the merchants to the individuals. It is no time for a creditor to seize his debtor by the throat and savagely say "Pay me that thou owest."

(2) Let the Federal Government create a finance corporation of some sort that will enable the people of other lands to obtain from us the commodities they so greatly need but for which they are not able to make immediate payment. We believe such a corporation to be entirely feasible and that its more creation would substantially help the situation.

(3) The Federal Reserve Board should be urged and authorized to advise all banks to adopt a liberal policy of renewals. The law authorizing six months credit on agricultural paper should be liberally construed and renewals for a like period should be freely granted wherever it safely can be done. The real wealth of the country is unimpaired. It would be a suicidal policy to destroy this wealth by a peremptory call of loans.

If necessary the Congress should attonce amend the Federal Reserve law so as to temporarily supply additional credit and afford more time in which to pay to debtors in distress.

We believe that the general adoption by individuals and by the government of the policies herein suggested would not only afford material aid but would at once supplant the gloom and the fear of the present with that confidence that is so vital to wholesome and successful business."