VIL AGRICULTURAL CREDIT. BY JOHN DAVIDSON, PHIL. D., 

 Professor of Political Economy, University of New 

 Brunswick, Fredericton. 



(Head 10th March, 1903.) 



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 is, 

 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 difficulties ; 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 



(458) 



