Vermont watchman and State journal. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1836-1883, 1879-01-22
A Few Home Truths.

rev nome IrutnS.
In a sense il is doubtless true, as DIR. Hol-
land says in Scribner's Monthly, that nobody
becomes poor, much less pauper, except
by his own fault. No one can deny but
that we all of us deserve any chastisement
that comes to us. But in the ordinary sense,
and as compared among ourselves, riches
and poverty are by no means distinctive
marks of merit and demerit. They were
not so in Bible days, they are not so now
All of us have seen the wicked flourish and
spread themselves, though we may never
have seen the righteous forsaken. 1t is not
virtue that has made many men rich, nor
has sin made them poor, in the worldly sense.
Neither is acknowledge of any kind neces-
sarily a source of wealth, nor ignorance an
absolute hindrance to its accumulation.
Some of the richest men in America to-day
are very illiterate, and very immoral.
When we take individual cases, however,
and study them Gas DR.. Holland was proba-
bly, doing when he wrote his much-quoted
artice), we seem to see in each the faults
that prevented him from gaining pecunary
independence. Take hundreds of farmers
who are hopelessly in debt, for instance.
Cannot any shrewd neighbor put his finger
on the things each has done or neglected,
willfully and needlessly, that have kept him
poor Or if not wilfully, then through an
ignorance of his own trade which by reason
of self-conceit he does not himself admit,
and therefore does not try to remedy.
But we need not go to the neighbors for
testimony. How many of us who have not
paid up our interest debt this last New
Years day, and haven't the money, and
don't know where we shall get it-how many
of us do not in our own consciences knou
that we failed to get that money by the lack
of something in ourselves that ought not to
have been lacking, and would not have been
lacking if we had always been true to our
selves For true indeed are Shakespeares
words:
ITO thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
We have preached not few of our lay
sermons from the text about the destruction
wrought among the poor by their poverty;
and we know full well that poor folks have
and must have poor ways. We believe, and
have said, that loss and distress happen to
farmers by reason of bad laws or bad adj
ministration. Aud yet we recognize fully
=. Al e. Al.
poet, declaring:
Few are the ills which men endure
That laws create or laws can cure
AS citizens we ought to see that all bad
laws and bad administration are reformed
but while this is slow, difficult, and as it
would seem sometimes almost hopeless
task the reforms that ought to be made at
home, and in ourselves, are more under our
control. The greatest single cause of the
immense aggregate Indebtedness among
farmers is their childish ignorance of the
first principles of business or finance. This
ignorance makes perfect tools and serfs of
them in the hands Of capitalists who make
practice of loaning their money on farm
security. Almost every man in the country
who has a farm and wants money will hire
it without hesitation, and give mortgage
on his farm at the "going rate of interest.
1t is this willingness to hire money on mort
gage, or what is the same thing, to buy more
land than he can pay for and give mort
gage for the balance, that keeps more than
half our farmers under the harrow all their
days. 1t has introduced among us practically
a tenure of farm land worse, many times,
than the tenant system of England. Taking
the value OF the crops into comparison, every
Vermont farmer who has his land mortgaged
for half its value at six per cent. interest is
paying a higher rent for his farm, in that
interest, than any tenant farmer in Great
Britain. Yet the man who holds the mort
gage has none of the responsibilities of
landlord, nor the farmer any of the rights of
tenant. And all this is solely the fault of
the farmers themselves. No money lender
can compel them to borrow his money,
neither could he get any more than fair rate
of interest, if the farmers themselves knew
what they could afford to pay, and refused
to hire money at higher rate. theoretically
(and practically too, in the long rum we
have this matter entirely in our own hands.
What we lack, in order to emancipate our
selves from usury, is the business intelligence
that would keep us from running in debt
when we know that we cannot afford to pay
high rates of interest If every farmer had
been taught in the public schools a few
simple facts of political economy in this
connection, few would be found to bind them
selves to long, hopeless drudgery and final
ruin, by such contracts.
Let us look at the subject in the light of
known facts. The average annual increase
OF our national wealth, as shown by Stats
tical records, is less than three per cent
Agriculture pays smaller net profit than
any other productive industry, except min
ing for the precious metals. But let us
suppose that it pays three per cent. Then
it is plain that the farmer who mortgages
his farm for half its value at six per cent
interest actually agrees to pay the whole
net profit of his farm to the lender; sup
posing his farm to be an average one in
productiveness and himself an average far
mer in strength and skill Six per cent.
interest gives to loaned money capital a
double profit over the average gains of in
dustry in the nation. AID yet it is not it.
self anything productive 1t is, in fact,
mere credit, and simply enables the farmer
who borrows it to spread his labor over more
acres, when, as "a matter of fact, he does not
and cannot fully develop the productive
power of as much land as he can pay cash for.
If the farmers of this country generally
understood these simple facts (and they
ought to be taught in every district school,
even if the niceties of English grammar and
the heights of the Himalaya mountains re-
main forever unknown) there would abso-
lutely be no demand for loans on farm prop
erty at rates higher than four per cent. For
we suppose that no man really wants to bind
himself in hopeless slavery for life to any
money-lender.