Excerpt from Agricultural Banks: Their Object and Their Work Credi'i' has long since become the recognized moving force in business, the driving-wheel from which all machinery of trade and industry derives its impetus. It is difficult to conceive what economic life would be with out this active motor which, like a well-adapted pinion in a machine, accelerates the motion and intensifies the action of capital, and makes a pound do what before its introduction it required ten, twenty, or thirty pounds to accomplish. The entire community has gained by a change which has substituted the cheque-book for the money bag, and the bill-pf-exchange for the strong box carried about to fairs and markets. And in no country has credit been made to render more useful service than in this commercial Britain of ours, in which, from the Treasury and Exchequer down to the newspaper and tobacco shop in the by-lane, credit has been installed everywhere as medium of exchange, and has become, in very truth, the currency of business. There are only two quarters of economic life into which, among ourselves, credit has not yet been allowed to penetrate. For the rich, who have ample money, there is credit in plenty, to make their riches more useful. For the poor, who stand in far more urgent need of it as Signor Vigano, the Father of Italian Co-operation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.