recommended to the American people. These societies,
says the bulletin of the International Institute of Agriculture
published at Rome in 1912, rest on three chief safeguards:

(a) That membership is confined to persons residing within a small
district, and, therefore, the members are personally known to one
another;

(b) That the members, being mutually responsible, it will be to the
interest of all members to keep an eye upon a borrower and to see that
he makes proper use of the money lent to him;

(c) That in like manner, it is to the interest of all members to help
a member when he is in difficulties.]

[Footnote 16: This was an estate of average size, probably within
Virgil's precept, (_Georgic_ II, 412). "Laudato ingentia rura, exiguum
colito." Some scholars have deemed this phrase a quotation from Cato,
but it is more likely derived from Mago the Carthaginian who is
reported to have said: "Imbecilliorem agrum quam agricolam, esse
debere,"--the farmer should be bigger than his farm.]

[Footnote 17: The philosophy of Cato's plan, of laying out a farm is
found in the agricultural history of the Romans down to the time of
the Punic wars. Mommsen (II, 370) gives the facts, and Ferrero in his
first volume makes brilliant use of them. There is sketched the old
peasant aristocrat living on his few acres, his decay and the
creation of comparatively large estates worked by slaves in charge of
overseers, which followed the conquest of the Italian states about
B.C. 300. This was the civilization in which Cato had been reared,
but in his time another important change was taking place. The Roman
frontier was again widened by the conquest of the Mediterranean basin:
the acquisition of Sicily and Sardinia ended breadstuff farming as the
staple on the Italian peninsular. The competition of the broad and
fertile acres of those great Islands had the effect in Italy which the
cultivation of the Dakota wheat lands had upon the grain farming of
New York and Virginia. About 150 B.C. the vine and the olive became
the staples of Italy and corn was superseded. Although this was not
accomplished until after Cato's death, he foresaw it, and recommended
that a farm be laid out accordingly, and his scheme of putting one's
reliance upon the vine and the olive was doubtless very advanced
doctrine, when it first found expression.]

[Footnote 18: Pliny quotes Cato as advising to buy what others have
built rather than build oneself, and thu