1214 i!^EW York State Agricultural Society 



of imlimited liability prevails, every member being bound for 

 all the debts of the society and for the debts of his associates in 

 so far as they have been guaranteed by the society; not, of course, 

 outside personal debts. In some of them the system of limited 

 liability has been found adequate; that is, the liability which 

 arises from the holding of a certain number of shares and assess- 

 ment upon those shares. 



It has been found that in all these German societies, and in 

 Italian societies so far as tested, there is practically never any 

 loss, because the society itself passes upon the character and 

 admission of its members, and even apart from the scrutiny of 

 the personality of the member or applicant and his resources, the 

 scrutiny which follows the loan has produced most remarkable 

 elfects — not in Germany alone, but in Ireland where the system 

 has recently been introduced, largely through the eiforts of Sir 

 Horace Plunkett. When $50, $100 or $1^00 has been loaned to 

 a farmer for a specific purpose, he has to specify that he is 

 going to buy a cow, or dig an irrigation ditch, or do something to 

 improve or maintain his farnu When these loans have been 

 made for the specitic purposes set forth by the borrower to his 

 associates in the society, every member of that society is pretty 

 apt to bo watching his associates to see whether the money 

 is intelligently and productively employed. If a member borrows 

 $100 to buy a cow, his neighbor is pretty apt to look 

 over the fence and see whether he is treating the cow prop- 

 erly, keeping her in good condition and applying scientific 

 methods to her care and development. In that way there has 

 come about a homogenity of interest among the farmers which 

 was almost entirely lacking before the system of mutual coopera- 

 tive cri'<lit was introduced. It has created a spirit of friendly 

 conijx'tit ion among the members of the society themselves. 

 Ill those, coiiiinics, of course, the members are more tied 

 to the soil lh;iii here. They have grown up as children in their 

 nciii'liborhoods aii<l their ancestors before them have lived on the 

 same soil. I here is not the immigration or taking up of new 

 areas as in this country ; and this factor would have to be con- 

 sidered in the formation of credit societies on the frontier of 

 our civilization. lint the results in improving conditions in 



