150 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



factory results as self-help ; and it has certainly not proved capable 

 of raising anything like the enormous sums — amounting in Germany 

 to hundreds of millions of our reckoning — that self-help has seem- 

 ingly conjured up out of nothing. State help necessarily has to be 

 kept within certain limits, because the capital made available has 

 to be voted by the Legislature. That is not its worst defect. The 

 help to be given has, of necessity, to be regulated in a mechanical, hard 

 and fast, way. The State cannot discriminate between A. and B. 

 And, obviously, in the giving of credit, discrimination between a 

 proper case and an improper one, and a proper person and an 

 improper one, is of vital importance. Also, in credit, rules want to 

 be elastic, so as to be adaptable to a variety of cases. The hard 

 and fast regulations to which State help necessarily must bind 

 itself have in practice either deterred deserving applicants by their 

 severity, or else have let in unqualified persons by their flaccidity. 

 Credit wants to be very elastic in methods, but rock-firm in its 

 principles. And that it cannot be under the handling of State 

 officers, who have to act according to fixed, formal regulations, on 

 behalf of a master who has to deal with citizens having equal 

 rights, not with customers who may be supplied or refused at 

 pleasure. State-help institutions, where resorted to, have had to 

 be recast again and again, as practice revealed more and more 

 defects and shortcomings. We have had an example of that quite 

 recently in France. Germany has supplied similar instances, and 

 telling evidence also of the failings of State aid. And a fresh, 

 telling instance of great significance has occurred in the same 

 country while these pages were being written — the great Union of 

 German Traders' Credit Societies, a body more than 2,000 societies 

 strong, which was originally promoted by the State, and for the 

 supply of which with the necessary funds in great part the powerful 

 State-endowed Central Bank (Central-genossenschafts-kasse) was 

 created and endowed up to now with £3,750,000 public money, 

 having advisedly — as one of its officers, Herr Mager, recommended 

 it to do years ago — forsaken State aid and formally and genuinely 

 become an integral part of the old Union of Co-operative Societies 

 avowedly based upon self-help, which was founded by Schulze- 

 Delitzsch. The recasting of State rules inevitably requires time, 

 during which there is an interregnum of imperfect handling. Nor 

 can Legislatures, in which measures have to be brought forward to 

 pass, rather than to be the best of their kind, be accepted as the most 

 competent tribunals to judge on such delicate points as those involved 

 in precepts for the handling/)f credit. Self-help institutions, once a 



