394 'THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



Our own country is, like all other civilised countries, 

 already heavily burdened with mortgage debts. Mr. 

 H. de F. Montgomery, of Blessingbourne, in Ireland, who 

 has made a special study of this matter, something more 

 than twenty years ago estimated the collective mortgage 

 debt weighing upon agricultural property in the United 

 Kingdom at something like £900,000,000. The burden is 

 not likely to have grown any lighter since. If that money 

 had been raised for bona-fide agricultural purposes, that 

 is, to be spent upon judicious agricultural improvements, 

 the benefit to our Agriculture might have been great indeed. 

 Unfortunately the objects for which that huge debt was 

 contracted were, as is common in similar cases all the 

 world over, for the most part of a totally different char- 

 acter. The burden, however, is there and remains, like a 

 dead weight pressing upon him who has to support it. And 

 instead of being a help to Agriculture, it has become a direct 

 hindrance, because it cripples the power of the owner of 

 the land to deal improvingly with his property and make 

 it yield to himself and to the Nation what the Nation, at 

 any rate, has a right to expect. In cases like this it is 

 usual for the overburdened man to look out for some new 

 source of credit which, by an exchange such as the Romans 

 already knew by the name of versura, will make the burden 

 more bearable. This is what is, by means of co-operative 

 credit, being done on a comparatively large scale, although 

 only in respect of small debts, in India, where the mahajan's 

 and sowkar's ruinous claims, turning the borrower into a 

 veritable peon, are being steadily got rid of so far as the 

 institution works. The trouble is that in the case of our 

 British landowners it is not, as in that of the Indian rayat, 

 the heavy rate of interest that makes the debt oppressive, 

 but the improvident manner in which the debt was con- 

 tracted, and the heavy tax attaching to the act of contract- 

 ing it. For such an evil as this a versura by co-operative 

 means provides no remedy. The proper remedy — the only 

 one, in fact, of real effectiveness — is that of clearing out 

 of a false position and making room for men with longer 

 purses and more available means, 



