240 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



this sort of credit — contains better elements of security. 

 Experience has shown that more particularly small farmers 

 make excellent repayers. However, those elements are 

 not present, without further licking into shape in a market- 

 able form, current with the banker. 



For one thing, a farmer can never quite tell by what 

 time he will be able to repay his loan. He may state a 

 minimum period, which in any case is likely to be longer 

 than that for which the merchant or the manufacturer 

 needs his money. For he turns over his cash very much 

 more slowly — ^in most cases (except in dairies and similar 

 industrial undertakings) only once a year. However, that 

 one year may not suffice. For the harvest may fail. And 

 the humbler is the scale of the borrower's agricultural 

 business, the less certain will be the time that will suffice 

 for repayment. The substantial farmer may be able, in 

 the event of one source of income failing him, to repay the 

 debt from some other source. Or he may take his loan in 

 the shape of an overdraft — which in his case would be 

 perfectly legitimate. However, our practice of overdraft 

 is not as convenient as that in force abroad, and also in 

 Scotland, in the shape of Cash Credit — the form of credit 

 from which our overdraft is copied, but, as the late H. 

 Dunning Macleod has rightly pointed out — ^ace the Central 

 Chamber of Agriculture — not with the same method and 

 completeness. We regard an overdraft as an exceptional 

 resource, for a '' special, temporary purpose," a matter 

 almost of emergency. Bankers do not Uke to have too 

 many overdrafts running, because they leave them in doubt 

 as to what money may be required to meet calls. And, 

 such as they grant, they do not like to have running for 

 very long. Abroad the overdraft is taken for a year at 

 a time, to be renewed as a matter of course if all is satis- 

 factory. So it is in Scotland, where Cash Credit has worked 

 veritable wonders, " raising the country," as Mr. Macleod 

 has put it, " in the space of a hundred and fifty years, from 

 the lowest state of barbarism up to its present proud posi- 

 tion." Our bankers could not possibly be expected to 

 provide overdrafts for the entire mass of credit required 



