212 TwENTY-FlBST BlENNIAL RbPOBT 



THE BANKER'S RELATION TO AGRICULTURE. 



Address of Mr. W. F. Bradshaw, Jr., of Paducah, Mem- 

 ber Executive Conmiittee Kentucky Bankers' As- 

 sociation, Before Meeting of Groups 1 and 2 of 

 the Association, at Dawson Springs, Ky. 



Published through, the courtesy of Mr. Arch B. Davis, 

 Secretary, Kentucky Bankers ' Association. 



Mr. President and Fellow Members of the Association: 



A discussion of agriculture and farming in pubHo 

 gatherings has given rise to a custom sanctioned by long 

 usage, of approaching the question from either one of 

 two asi)ects. The more ancient and respectable method 

 of handling the question is for the speaker to draw an 

 attractive picture of the beauties of the pastoral life; 

 of the farmer as the man of all others whose life is 

 marked by an independence, simplicity and beauty that 

 no other enjoys; far removed from the turmoil and noisy 

 strife of city life ; free to live and do with his time as he 

 pleases, the lord of his broad acres, and master of all 

 he surveys, and whose cattle graze upon his thousand 

 hills. One of the well beloved governors of Tennessee 

 used to draw such a picture of the farmer's life, and 

 for the moment made us all wish that we were back on 

 the farm. 



The other method of approaching the subject, a more 

 modem and less respectable, but more popular one, is 

 to draw first the picture of the golden age now past as 

 the natural, inherited right of the farmer, and then con- 

 trast with it the picture of the farmer as despoiled of all 

 his natural rights by the rapacious hand of organized 

 and grasping wealth, and piratical industry, and urge 

 upon the farmer that.the only recourse left him from 

 the degradation and despair in which he now finds him- 

 self, is to arise as a unit, destroy the whole existing order 

 of things, reconstruct society anew, and the penetrating 

 inference is left that when the era of reconstruction fol- 

 lowing that of destruction arrives, the speaker is the one 



