COOPERATIVES: EARLY PHASES 85 



uation when it suggested that there be devised a method of cooperative 

 credit through which the farmers could more easily secure loans on fair 

 terms. The report of Senator Aldrich's National Monetary Commission 

 contributed further to the same cause by presenting a favorable account 

 of the German Landschaft system of farm-mortgage credit. 61 In addition, 

 in 1912, President Taft called attention to the problem by asking the 

 American ambassadors in Europe to investigate the cooperative credit 

 systems in the countries to which they were assigned. 



Perhaps more important than all this was the work of an investigating 

 committee sent to Europe in 1912. In April of that year, the Southern 

 Commercial Congress, mainly through the influence of David Lubin, 

 eminent California agriculturalist, devoted a large share of its program 

 to the rural-credits question. After some discussion the congress author- 

 ized "a' commission of 70 delegates, representing 29 States and 4 Provinces 

 of Canada," to visit Europe and report upon the cooperative credit systems 

 there in use. This commission was joined by a congressional commission 

 of seven set up in order to make a similar investigation. The result of 

 their combined efforts was a joint report, but the congressional group 

 carried its mandate a step further by submitting a draft of a proposed 

 rural-credit bill based on the Landschajt system that had been operating 

 in Germany for over a century and had been adopted more or less by 

 England, France, and other European countries. The extent to which 

 cooperative credit facilities had become a popular goal can be measured 

 by the fact that in the campaign of 1912 the three principal political parties 

 all gave this subject favorable mention in their platforms. 62 



Meanwhile, congressmen, eager to satisfy the demands of their con- 

 stituents, had flooded the Sixty-third Congress with no less than seventy 

 rural-credit measures. These proposals did not necessarily reflect the 

 acceptance of European precedents; according to one authority, "when 



61. James B. Morman, Farm Credits in the United States and Canada (New 

 York, 1924), pp. 76-77. 



62. Myers, Cooperative farm Mortgage Credit, pp. 5-6. See also the preface of 

 Myron T. Herrick's Rural Credits, Land and Cooperative (New York, 1915). 

 Herrick discusses the German Landschajten in Chapters 5 to 9. Another study is 

 found in Henry W. Wolff, Co-operative Credit for the United States (New York, 

 1917). See also Pope, in Quarterly Journal of Economics, XXVIII (August, 1914), 

 pp. 728-29, for a criticism of the commission investigation on European rural credits. 



