472 AGRICULTURAL CREDIT.—DAVIDSON. 
chattels as grain, cattle and implements. An assignment of 
these, according to the forin prescribed by the act, would not, 
like a chattel mortgage, become notorious, and the basis of a 
farmer's credit would be badly impaired, no creditor being able 
to know whether the ownership of property is in the person 
whom he is asked to trust or in some bank.” (Breckenridge, 
p. 348.) The principies of our banking system are so well 
established and its practice so well approved by experience, that 
the farmer has nothing more to hope for in that quarter. He 
has still less to hope for from any tinkering and amendment of 
that system which might destroy its present perfect adaptation 
to our commercial and currency needs without being able to 
improve the farmer's position in the slightest degree. 
But the problem still remains how the farmer is to be 
accommodated with the capital and the credit his business 
require. We may acquiesce in the political wisdom of rigidly 
confining the banks to their proper function of providing com- 
mercial credit, but must we acquiesce in the absence of credit 
facilities for the farmer? Agriculture is in all countries the 
most important, and in most the dominant, industry, and its pro- 
gress cannot be hampered and hindered without national loss, 
We may ask, therefore, whether it is not possible to develope 
credit institutions, under government regulation, it may be, to 
supply this need, or whether it is possible for the government of 
the country to supply the lack directly. Such attempts have 
been made, and we now turn to a description of what has been 
done, and is being done, in other countries, or among ourselves, 
to meet the demand. There are two great methods, people's 
banks and government loans. Both are of comparatively recent 
origin, and both have the same aim of providing the farmer with 
what the banks have not, and, in my opinion, cannot adequately 
provide. 
The People’s Banks of Europe were established to provide 
farming credit, and it is difficult to realise the amount of busi- 
ness that is done through them. They are of two classes: one 
better adapted for providing credit to small merchants and pro- 
ducers, the other distinctively agricultural. They aim at making 
