The First Necessity Is Capital, And The Usurer Must Disappear From The
Scene.
I do not think that an agricultural bank will be practically
worked, as the value of money in the east is above 6 per cent., which is
the maximum that the Cyprian cultivator should pay.
The government must
advance loans for the special erection of water-wheels, or other methods
of irrigation, at 6 per cent., taking a mortgage of the land as their
security; this loan upon water-works to take precedence of all others.
The government can borrow at 4 per cent., and will lend at 6, which is
not a bad beginning for a national bank. The water-wheels can be
constructed in a few weeks, and their effect would be IMMEDIATE; there
would be no doubtful interval of years, but the very first season would
leave the cultivator in a position to repay the loan; at the same time,
the government would reap the direct benefit of a certain revenue from
the irrigated and assured production of the land.
This is no visionary theory; the fact is already patent in the few farms
belonging to wealthy land-owners that I have already described, as
exhibiting the simple power of a few water-wheels to produce abundance,
while upon the margin of such verdant examples the country is absolutely
desert, parched and withered by a burning sun, yielding nothing either
to the owner or to the revenue, while at the same time the water-supply
is only four or five yards beneath the feet of the miserable proprietor,
who has neither capital nor power to raise it to the surface.
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