The success of the peasant farmer in Denmark is, as I have already suggested, due to a very large extent to the coöperative societies which manufacture and sell his farm products. Through the medium of these the Danish peasant has become a business man--I might almost say, a capitalist. I do not know how much money is invested in these different coöperative dairies, egg-collecting and pork-packing concerns, but all Denmark is dotted with them, and the total amount of money invested in them must be considerable. There are, for example, 1,157 coöperative dairies, with a membership of 157,000. The number of coöperative pork-packing societies is 34, with a membership of 95,000. As soon as I found to what extent the peasants were manufacturing and selling their own products, I naturally wanted to know how they had succeeded in getting the capital to carry on these large enterprises, because in the part of the country from which I hail the average farmer not only has no money to put into any sort of business outside his farm, but has to borrow money, frequently at a high rate of interest, to carry on his farming operations. I found that when the farmers in Denmark began establishing coöperative dairies some of the well-to-do farmers came together and signed a contract to send all their milk which they were not able to use at home to the community dairy. Then they borrowed money on their land to raise the money to begin operations. In borrowing this money they bound themselves "jointly and severally," as the legal phrase is, to secure the payments of the money borrowed--that is, each man became individually responsible for the whole loan. This gave the bank which made the loan a much better security than if each individual had secured a loan on his own responsibility, and in this way it was possible to provide the capital needed at a very moderate rate of interest.