This year - 1913 - the administration issued sudden orders that no
man owning less than five acres could borrow on security of his land.
The matter interested me directly, because I held five hundred pounds
worth of shares in that State-guaranteed Bank, and more than half our
clients were small men of less than five acres. So I made inquiries in
quarters that seemed to possess information, and was told that the new
law was precisely on all-fours with the Homestead Act or the United
States and France, and the intentions of Divine Providence - or words to
that effect.
'But,' I asked, 'won't this limitation of credit prevent the men with
less than five acres from borrowing more to buy more land and getting on
in the world?'
'Yes,' was the answer, 'of course it will. That's just what we want to
prevent. Half these fellows ruin themselves trying to buy more land.
We've got to protect them against themselves.'
That, alas! is the one enemy against which no law can protect any son of
Adam; since the real reasons that make or break a man are too absurd or
too obscene to be reached from outside. Then I cast about in other
quarters to discover what the cultivator was going to do about it.
