VIL—AGRICULTURAL CreDIT—By Joun Davipson, PHIL. Dz 
Professor of Political Economy, University of New 
Brunswick, Fredericton. 
(Read 10th March, 1902.) 
The great business of agriculture has generally shown itself 
conservative in character and slow to adopt innovations in the 
methods and organization which have been freely adopted in 
other industries; and the result has not infrequently been an 
agrarian crisis arising out of the conflict of old established ways 
and new ideas. Such a crisis occurs when a nation or a people 
is passing from a natural economy to a money economy, that 1s, 
from a condition when each farm was almost a self-sufficing 
unit, to a condition in which rents and wages are paid in money. 
At such periods there has usually been a good deal of distress. 
To a smaller degree the same difficulties arise with every exten- 
sion of the market and every improvement of transportation 
which separates producer and consumer, and brings in a greater 
competition. The farmers of Europe have, during the last half 
century, been experiencing such difticulties ; and apparently the 
farmers in the newest countries, whether in America or in the 
antipodes, have found that their enterprise in forcing an entrance 
into the European market has made a decisive change in their 
own conditions. Briefly speaking, the change is that farming 
has become a business requiring all the aids and assistance that 
modern businesses require. The days of the self-sufficing farmer 
have gone, never to return. Men will never again carve out 
homes for themselves in the wilderness. It is not that the men 
of to-day have not the grit and the energy and the perseverance 
of the heroic pioneers. It is simply that the farmer has become 
a producer for a market, and that his success is measured by his 
achievements in that market. He no longer measures himself 
by the old standard. He expects to buy, not to make, much of 
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