When the most successful farmers on the best land in Illinois lose twenty-five cents on every bushel of corn they raised, as was the case in 1921, and when it is easier for isolated farmers in Kansas to burn corn than to buy coal at the prices current, while at the same time millions of innocent women and children are starving in Europe, it seems evident that the complex system of marketing upon which modern industry and civilization has depended, is pretty well out of gear and that national and international questions must be wisely solved before it can again function. Yet in last analysis the solution of the complex problems of marketing rests not alone with international treaties, but with the farmers' selling associations of the rural communities. If we are to have a marketing system which is truly functional, which is built on the principle of the greatest service at the lowest cost, rather than on the principle now implicit in business of sufficient service to secure the maximum of profit which the traffic will bear, then it must be a cooperative system, the primary unit of which is the local cooperative association, whose success depends upon the loyalty of its members to the cooperative principle. So cooperation is a community problem. Nor can we expect marked progress in other phases of rural life as long as the economic question is acute. It is not true that economic prosperity in agriculture will of itself ensure the higher culture of the countryside; but it is true that so long as the farmer is compelled to devote all of his strength and time to making a competence for his family, that his attention must necessarily be fixed on economic ends and that he will have neither the means nor the time for those satisfactions of life which are possible to one with some leisure. Says "A.E.": "I believe the fading hold the heavens have over the world is due to the neglect of the economic basis of spiritual life. What profound spiritual life can there be when the social order almost forces men to battle with each other for the means of existence?"[29] For weal or woe the material existence of both farmer and townman throughout the civilized world is inextricably inter-dependent. If a better economic system is to arise it must come through the general understanding of these relations by the education of all parties and by a willingness to find satisfaction in the well-being of all rather than in the largest individual profit. Unless these attitudes can be established in the local community, how can we expect to secure harmony of interests among larger groups? Loyalty to the common good must first be developed in the local community among neighbors.