Excerpt from Rural Credits: Land and Cooperative In 1892 the Department of Agriculture published a bulletin prepared by Edward T. Peters on "Cooperative Credit Associations in Certain European Countries." This document, which is still the best published by the Government on these topics, described the systems of cooperative credit in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia. In 1901 Andrew McFarland Davis prepared for the American Economic Association, and published in the association's Quarterly, the history of "Currency and Banking in the Province of Massachusetts-Bay." This work, which should be carefully read by legislators proposing laws for improving land credit, explains the causes of the failures of the land banks which were established in some of the American colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century. The reports of the National Monetary Commission, appointed in 1907, contain valuable information on land-banks and cooperative credit systems of Europe. All this shows that the problems of rural credits had engaged the official attention of the Government before the launching of the recent movement. In fact, since the collapse of the farm mortgage "craze" in the early nineties, the farmers' interests have been a subject of consideration by all those who have been studying the question of currency reform. On November 22, 1908, a cooperative savings and loan society was established at Manchester, New Hampshire, for French-Canadian lumbermen working during the winter in the New Hampshire woods. Some of the members were residents of the agricultural districts of Quebec in which Alphonse Desjardins' bank was in operation. In 1909, through the influence of Pierre Jay, bank commissioner, the Massachusetts Legislature enacted a credit-union law, a fact which did not become widely known until several years later. In 1910 a thesis on "Cooperative Credit Associations of the Province of Quebec," submitted by Hector Macpherson to the faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Literature of the University of Chicago, first attracted the attention of the American public to the work of Mr. Desjardins in Quebec. 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.