No. 4.J ADDRESS, PRESIDENT BUTTERFIELD. 127 



have a good system of savings banks, and on the whole it 

 seems to me they have had a very liberal attitude toward the 

 farmers. Land prices have been relatively low so that the 

 need for credit, in one sense, was not so great as it has been 

 in parts of the country where land has been very high. We 

 have very few tenants; there is no part of the whole country 

 with so small a proportion of tenantry as New England. There 

 has been a good deal of what might be called family capital, 

 accumulated through the years on farms that have been farmed 

 for six or eight generations, that has been available, and there 

 has not been quite the same need, perhaps, for the getting of 

 capital from outside sources as there has been in the newer 

 parts of the country. All these things have helped. On the 

 other hand, these same things have perhaps kept us from real- 

 izing how important a question this is, until, at least, very 

 recently. Now I feel that the rural credit question is on us in 

 New England as elsewhere, and will be still more important as 

 the years go by. In the first place, the modern system of 

 farming, — what we call commercial farming, farming that is 

 really manufacturing, — it seems to me, will more and more 

 require capital, and will require more capital in order to be a 

 great success, and apparently the one great source of added 

 capital is credit. Capital cannot be created out of nothing, 

 but the farmer can use this instrument which the business man 

 learned to use years ago to his advantage, namely, credit, — 

 the borrowing of money under terms that make it advisable 

 to borrow, not under the old terms that made it a hardship 

 and disadvantage, oftentimes, to borrow. Sometimes men say 

 that we do not need any credit facilities, especially here in 

 New England. It seems to me they do not realize that if the 

 farmers, as a whole, are to be served by credit, if agriculture 

 as a whole is to take advantage of this same instrument that 

 the business man takes advantage of, it cannot well be done 

 by each individual farmer for himself, which has been the 

 old method; that more and more, farming — or farms, per- 

 haps, to put it better — must be the security; in other words, 

 that there must be a system of credit, and a method by 

 which farmers as a class may have greater access to credit. 

 Now here in Massachusetts as elsewhere it has been the indi- 



