EIGHTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VH 369 



Then he began to negotiate with the Minneapolis concern to see 

 if he could get his mortgage released, and on the 17th day of July he 

 got a letter from them which read like this: 



"We have your letter of the 9th, in re payment of your loan of 

 $1,000. In answer, would say that this loan has been sold to a client 

 of ours, and he does not wish to release it; but we think we could get 

 him to accept payment if you will pay a bonus of $50 and interest up 

 to date. We received no commission for making the loan, and, in fact, 

 paid out money for expenses in connection with it; so we would expect 

 our commission mortgage of $244 paid in full." 



How does that figure out? Interest on his loan at 10 per cent for 

 a little less than five months, $41.66; bonus, $50; commission mortgage 

 of $244; or a total of $335.66 that this man had to pay to get the fingers 

 of the money shark off his throat within five months, or a trifle over 

 81 per cent a year Shylock was a "piker" compared to this company. 

 That kind of fellows would make Shylock turn over in his grave with 

 envy. That is the sort of thing that the western farmer has been up 

 against; those are the stories which can be duplicated in every expe- 

 rience. Some of you can remember such things which happened in 

 your lifetime when you were pioneers in this state. I have a theory 

 which is not peculiar to myself. I believe that if one of you men, for 

 instance, should sell your farm in Iowa and go out into the sand liilis 

 of western Nebraska, where you can get a big ranch of a thousand acres 

 or more, and two or three hundred acres of nice alfalfa, where you 

 can get the increase which will gradually come with the rise in value 

 of the land, and where the boys have a chance to branch out for them- 

 selves, you take with you the same character that you have been a Jife- 

 time developing here. All the elements of personal credit which you 

 had acquired at your local bank in Iowa go with you as a transplanted 

 Iowa citizen, who goes two or three hundred miles west, where you 

 can farm just as well and make more money than you could on your 

 high-priced Iowa land. But you immediately find the interest rate 

 doubled on you, because you are in the outlaw territory. There ought 

 to be outlaws made of some of these fellows who have made outlaw ter- 

 ritory of that region. 



We took that $10,000,000 of business for which we had received loan 

 applications, and had it appraised very carefully by the besi, -men we 

 could find. We found that some of those fellows had put values on 

 their land which were altogether too high. They had subconsciously 

 gotten into their heads the idea of $15 hogs and $14 cattle and $3 

 wheat, and they thought it was going to last always. It rained last 

 spring, and they thought it was going to rain every spring during all the 

 years to come. We tried to figure the possibilities of getting thru on 

 this, and to lend all the money we could consistently with sound credit 

 and we loaned out there a little ever $3,000,000, on the $10,000,000 of 

 applications. Then the mortgages and applications and appraisers' 

 reports were sent down to the treasury department of the United States 

 where they were examined by experts on land values in order to de- 

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