38 MONTHLY JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURE. 



to be had, complex in their provisions, and so hazardous to those who might 

 accept them, that large capitals are left in the hands of the great shavers, and 

 he who would invest his small earnings as in a savings-bank in his own neigh- 

 borhood, under his own eyes, has no such resource ; while the moneyless man 

 of knowledge and enterprise is driven into other States, where men and legisla- 

 tors have too much sagacity to bar the door against the access of capital and the 

 skill and labor which are sure to follow the demand for them which capital 

 creates. 



But for clearer and more enlarged views of this part of the subject, we recom- 

 mend the reader to turn back to pages 494-5 of our May number, to the luminous 

 disquisition of a correspondent eminently conversant with such topics. Speaking 

 there of the w^^e policy of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and its effects'on the 

 agricultural interest and the general welfare of society throughout tliose States, 

 he says : " The consequence is that there are distributed throughout those two 

 Slates nearly two hundred money-shops, constantly engaged in the collection 

 and distribution of capital owned by the people of the neighborhood, who them- 

 selves manage their own property, and are not compelled to transmit it to Bos- 

 ton, to be managed by others of whom they know but little. The general result 

 is, that the trade in money is attended by little loss to those who deal with 

 banks, and more uniform, steady and moderate profit to those who own them, 

 than in any other part of the ivorld. Throughout both States, every man is 

 within the reach of a money-shop, and the industrious and prudent farmer, shop- 

 keeper or mechanic, can at any time command small loans to aid him m his 

 business. In no part of the world does capital distribute itself so equally — fall- 

 ing almost like the dew, and fertilizing Avhere it falls ; in none is there a cur- 

 rency so unexpensive, and in none is the quantity of currency so little liable to 

 fluctuation." 



Farmers and planters in Maryland and Virginia ! will you not ponder these 

 facts, and elect for your law-makers men who are capable of appreciating and 

 acting upon them, instead of men too many of whom are mere drones without 

 knowledge and without ambition or industry to seek for it — men intent only on 

 setting party traps for their political opponents, until the time comes to fob their 

 per diem, and go back to that life of inactivity from which they should never 

 have emerged? How enviably different is the prosperous condition of the masses 

 in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as here described, from that of States where 

 usury laws prevail, and where every attempt to incorporate capital and industry 

 for the more efficient use and exercise of both, is held up and denounced as an at- 

 tempt to establish a despicable monopoly ! Suppose an industrious young farmer, 

 in any of these States, in coming to an exhausted farm, desires to buy and lay on 

 a thousand bushels of lime, or to purchase economical, labor-saving and abun- 

 dant implements and machinery, for which expenditure is true economy, he must 

 either forego them and drag on, as with a broken back, the best years of his life, 

 or he must first hunt up his " town endorser " and go begging to one of those 

 mammoth banks with agricultural titles, which are concentrated in the great 

 commercial emporiums, where the utmost accommodation to be had is the dis- ■< 

 count of a " sixty-day note," perhaps a few times renewable. 



Then as to the ''profits of farming''' in that State where " the industrious 



and prudent farmer can command small loans to aid him in his business," look 



at the testimony given in at a meeting of the farmers of Massachusetts in the last 



number of this Journal, li elsewhere appears, too, in an authentic shape, that the 



(86) 



