272 Cooperation in Agriculture 



Europe, Asia, and in Canada, but not to any extent in 

 the United States. 



NATIONAL INTEREST IN RURAL CREDIT 



There is a general interest in the subject of rural credit 

 in the United States on account of the high rate of interest 

 which the farmer is supposed to pay for his credit when 

 compared with other lines of business and the difficulty of 

 obtaining ample credit in some parts of the country. In 

 foreign countries, the governments play an important 

 part in the development of the cooperative method of 

 conducting business, but it is only recently that Mr. 

 Roosevelt, through the appointment of the Country Life 

 Commission, directed the attention of the country to the 

 need of a wide application of the cooperative method to 

 the solution of rural life problems, that our own govern- 

 ment has taken official cognizance of the cooperative 

 method as a means of upbuilding better farming and bet- 

 ter rural business conditions. The comprehensive mono- 

 graph l of the European systems of rural credit by Dr. 

 Lorenzoni of the International Institute of Agriculture 

 still further stimulated the interest and led the Southern 

 Commercial Congress to hold a conference on rural finance 

 in Nashville, Tennessee, in April, 1912, and to organize 

 a commission representing each of the states to go abroad 

 in 1913 to study the systems of rural credit and to report 

 to the International Institute of Agriculture, the com- 

 mission having been indorsed by a joint resolution passed 

 in the Senate of the United States. The American 



1 "An Outline of the European Cooperation Credit Systems," Inter- 

 national Institute of Agriculture, Rome, 1912. 



