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AMERICAN POMOROGICAR SOCIETY 
to advance $500 and $1,000 and so on; and he expects in a matter of sixty 
sr seventy-five years to pay for a farm out of itself in addition to the support 
®f the family. It is a fact even in Ireland at the present time in which 
place of course agriculture is more or less favorably conducted, they do not 
«&pect the Irish tenants now to become landowners or to have farms of their 
wq under fifty or sixty, or even a longer term of years. And I may say just 
in passing that Ireland has 360,000 landowners as tenants. To be sure, 
ffeese 360,000 old and new landowners do not own all their farms eptire, 
floor- some are still partially unpaid for, but they know that the farms are 
fEteirs and if they are just average farmers they will own the farms in 
Ume, and they will pass on down to their children in their lives. 
The first thing, then, is a system whereby the young farmer, now 
Icrand as a tenant, will buy that farm and pay for it as it may be convenient! 
Hurope solved that problem the same as our cities have solved the problem 
building various enterprises. If the city wants to build a public building, 
m, filtration plant, a fresh-water system, electric-light plant, street car sys- 
tem, or any other kind of public enterprise, it does not go to 1 work and take 
m. collection and pay for it all in one lump. What does the city do? The 
city, we will say, wants to borrow $100,000 and pay it back in the next 
twenty-five years; it decides to “create a sinking fund; just borrow the money 
and issue bonds to pay for tne enterprise, and then pay it off gradually, in 
twenty-five or fifty years.” 
All over Europe, I say that advisedly, all over Europe, from Italy on up 
through Austria to Hungary, up through to Russia (which we may perhaps 
think of as so backward), Scandinavia, Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, 
Ik all Europe, they have such systems of farm improvement as it seems 
should point the way to us; a man without a penny buying his farm on a 
small margin. And they have a system of long-time land mortgage banks 
m efficient and so simple that a farmer can buy the farm and pay for it 
gradually over a period of twenty-five or fifty years, always with a period 
within which he is able to do it sooner if he proves able and chooses to. 
la other words, when he can by unusual care and industry, or if he should 
lave a great crop or in any other way be able to completely pay for the 
farm, he may do so at one time. But he is allafwed a long period in which 
to pay for it. 
We Must Have Long Term Loans. 
We must do that in this country. The United States started in the 
business of finance and development, you might say, only a few years ago. 
Why, sixty or sixty-five years ago there was not a railroad las far west as 
Chicago; they started out with limited lines, the land being absolutely so> 
large that in no way otherwise could you have done these things. Then 
came free land for everybody, but the railroads for years were so few that 
even the young men nowadays can tell how their fathers were one-hundred 
nr one hundred and fifty miles beyond the last point on the railroad. In 
£fiose few years what developments in agriculture! We have two, three, or 
four million tenants, with far more than three million tenant families, liv- 
ing on land they are not particularly interested in, seeing no great advantage 
