AGRICULTURAL CREDIT. DAVIDSON. 465 



really legitimate credit. It is consumer's, not producer's credit ; 

 it is accommodation which is intended to cover expenditure 

 already made, credit which is not intended to yield a profit. It is 

 not a credit of which a man may be proud, and it hurts or ought 

 to hurt the standing of a man to be known to receive it. This 

 kind of credit the farmer may receive ; but it is precisely this 

 fact that requires a remedy. He, a producer, should be entitled 

 to legitimate or producer's credit, and should not be held down 

 to that which non-producers, in an overdeveloped banking prac- 

 tice, may be given. The farmer's just ground of complaint is 

 that, while he may share with the general public in the general 

 benefits which a banking system confers, he is debarred, from 

 one reason or another, from a perfectly legitimate producer's 

 credit as a matter of business, although he may receive a limited 

 amount of personal credit as accommodation. 



Our banking system is not specially adapted to the needs of 

 the farmer as farmer. In so far as agiiculture is a branch of 

 commerce, that is, in so far as the farmer has finished goods to 

 sell, he may be specially benefitted. He is then in almost as 

 good a position as the manufacturer, who, too, like the farmer, 

 markets his wares at second hand ; and the whole process of 

 exchange is facilitated by sound banking as much for the wheat 

 from the farm as for the cloth from the factory. For commerce 

 we have a most excellent system, eminently well fitted to assist 

 in marketing goods of all kinds. It provides us with an elastic 

 currency which makes money easy at the time when most business 

 is to be done. It facilitates the moving of the crops in the latter 

 end of the year, and it is doubtful if the farming community 

 realizes how much it benefits in this way, and how much harder 

 the case would be if our bankiug system was less perfect, than it 

 is. In a general way, there is a recognition of its excellence, 

 because the banks have served the communitj so well that ^ye 

 have heard but the faintest echoes of a "silver question" in 

 Canada. 



But we have to consider the farmer, not merely as having 

 something to sell, but, in his more important aspect, as a pro- 



