128 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



vidua! borrower dealing with the individual lender or with the 

 individual bank, but we have got to face the question, I be- 

 lieve, of a time when some other method will be the only 

 method that wdll work in a large way, over large areas, and 

 for the great bulk of the farmers. It simply means that in 

 some way the collective security of the farmers must be made 

 available for borrowing, and there must be a method which 

 the students call amortization, by which payments can be made 

 over a long period in very small installments and with great 

 regularity, so that the farmer who borrows can go right ahead 

 with his business and this debt need not trouble him. Now 

 here in New England, I said, we had a small proportion of 

 tenantry, and yet it looks to me as though, in the long run, 

 a permanent system of farm ownership was going to be tied 

 up with an adequate system of credit. On the side of personal 

 credit I think the New England farmer has been advantaged. 

 I think it has been fairly easy for the prosperous farmers to 

 borrow money for short terms on their notes, perhaps as easy 

 as in any part of the country, and yet you do not have to 

 look into the matter very long to realize that even the New 

 England farmers do not have access to the free personal credit 

 that they ought to have. I do not suppose that anybody 

 knows, I do not suppose that anybody has really studied the 

 subject deeply enough to be able to say, how much interest 

 is paid by the New England farmers on mercantile credit. I 

 mean by that, the credit that is furnished by the fertilizer 

 companies and by other supply companies by which farmers 

 are carried for four months, six months or eight months. The 

 manufacturers or the business men must do that, because that 

 is the only system of credit that is available for the great 

 masses of farmers, but it must work to the disadvantage of the 

 farmers; the interest rate by that method must be much higher 

 than it ought to be. Our farmers are lucky compared with 

 those in the south and in some parts of the west in this mat- 

 ter, but even so, I believe that it could be shown by thorough 

 investigation that they are disadvantaged by this system of 

 personal credit. 



Massachusetts has taken some steps to remedy this difficulty 

 by the passage of the land bank act, promulgated a year ago. 



