It has frequently been suggested that the farmer could save largely from the financial results of his year’s work by participating in co-operative movements for the supply of stores and other necessities of his family on his farm. It may not be known to theorists that this suggestion has nothing new in it. It occurred to the farmer in hundreds of counties, and he endeavored to act upon it. But what can a man do in the way of purchasing from first hands, who has no capital with which to purchase? Farmers’ stores and farmers’ clubs were tried, to a large extent, forty or fifty years ago, all over the States which now are the most populous section of the Mississippi valley. Sometimes the effort resulted in the establishment of depots of supply for farmers alone, but a single year of bad crops, whether caused by drought or insect pests or overflows, or any other cause entirely outside of the control of the farmer, would cause the ruin of any establishment which chanced to be started with capital sufficient only for a little while. As before stated, and as must be kept in mind in each and in all considerations of the farmer’s lot and the farmer’s future, the agriculturist of the United States is almost always a man without capital, and a man whose constant struggle is to be equal by his output to his daily demands. When a farmer’s store failed, the deficiency had to be made up in cash, even if some of the backers had to sell their estates. Bankruptcy proceedings or “arrangements” with creditors were not easy. It is no exaggeration to say that it would be far easier, in most parts of the United States, to sell a white elephant or a million-dollar diamond than to turn a farm into cash at short notice, although the seller were willing to submit to a ruinous sacrifice. There are hundreds of thousands of farmers in the better and more fully settled States, who for years have had their estates in the market, and been willing and anxious to sell at a loss, yet have been utterly unable to find a purchaser, except among men of their own class, who had no money to pay in advance and who could simply offer a mortgage as security for future payment, and from which mortgage, in case of default on interest or principal, nothing could be obtained for a year or more, and even then only after proceedings most uncomfortable to institute and likely only to result in a terrible sacrifice to the creditor. The number of men who are “land poor” in the agricultural districts of the United States is almost beyond computation. The man who has a farm of two or three hundred acres, nominally valued at a hundred dollars per acre, is supposed to be worth twenty or thirty thousand dollars and quite good for all his debts. The truth is that often he suffers more for lack of some small necessity for which cash must be paid than the city mechanic or laborer, who receives only a few dollars per week for his services.