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Introduction
It is now 100 years since Liberty Hyde Bailey (Figure 1 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]) deposited to the Congress of the USA the Report of the Commission on Country Life and to mark its centenary it is time to take pause again to reflect on the historical significance of the moment. To this, the reader in agricultural finance will be sorely disappointed because Liberty Hyde Bailey was not of an economic mind and said little in the report, and indeed little in the entirety of his writings on the subject. But what he did say was golden, for his simple recommendation on the matter of farm debt in 1909 was that it should be locally contained and driven by cooperative principles. Beyond our interest in agricultural finance and the problems of farm credit is the social significance of the "Country Life" movement itself. It is doctrinaire in a pluralistic view of agriculture and farming, perhaps not so far dispatched from the Jefferson image, which goes well beyond the means of growing and transacting in land to justifying in a sweeping way the criticality of rural life. The symptoms identified with a reformation of rural life were perhaps best described in Roosevelt's letter to Bailey in 1908 (Appendix). But long before receipt of this letter, Bailey would be agitating for reform and on this subject he was a natural leader. In his 1911 book on the "movement", he made little attempt to offer a concrete definition of what the Country Life movement actually was. Instead he wrote:
... the country-life movement is the working out of the desire to make rural civilization as effective and satisfying as other civilization. It is not an organized movement proceeding from one center or even expressing one set of ideas. It is a world-motive to even up society as between country and city; for it is generally understood that country life has not reached as high development within its sphere as city life has reached within its sphere ([1] Bailey, 1911, p. 1).
It is no wonder that to this day it is not uncommon for faculties of agricultural economics and rural sociology to reside as one, or at least remain as intimate friends.
But there are...