154 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



And when, once more, in addition to their capacity to act for such 

 purpose, you make them to join with that person in his responsi- 

 bility for his loan, when his default might well mean ruin to them, 

 you can absolutely not obtain a better security. In this manner is 

 the purely personal, and in such shape " unbankable," security of 

 the individual case converted, by combination, into a bankable 

 security such as lenders and depositors — who, of course, are lenders — 

 whether they be private individuals or financial institutions, can 

 accept as a basis for business. For of course ultimately the money 

 to be loaned must in a large measure come from the great money 

 market. And even deposits coming from local persons require some 

 such kind of security. To rely upon the contributions of members 

 alone would degrade the institution to the status of a mere loan 

 society, with an altogether inadequate endowment for the purpose 

 that we have in view. 



Now this system of self-help banking does not come to us as an 

 untried practice, big only with promise. It has been at work in 

 foreign countries, all around us, in the sight of all who cared to see, 

 for something like seven decades, and has answered admirably, 

 yielding really astonishing results, shedding blessings around it, 

 not in agriculture and rural life only — results which have surprised 

 the world. In our immediate — European — neighbourhood we our- 

 selves are left quite alone without their stay to our economic 

 fabric. 



If it be asked for what reason, with such an ample " cloud of 

 witnesses " to attest the goodness of the practice, with a crying want 

 declared and universally recognised, and with an approved remedy 

 for our evil within so easy reach, we have not yet made that remedy 

 our own, it is not easy to suggest a satisfactory answer, except it be 

 this, that we are constitutionally a slow-going race, nervously afraid, 

 as Sir G. Cornwall Lewis has shown, of all new practices, and that 

 we have a confirmed habit of buying our Sibylline books at the 

 dearest possible price, as witness Irish Home Rule, which we despised 

 at the cheap price at which Mr. Gladstone offered it to us in 1886 and 

 1892, but which we are now eager to pay for at an infinitely heavier 

 sacrifice. Witness, again, industrial banking, which for a long time 

 was condemned as " foreign " and " un-English," until we found 

 foreign countries with its help whipping off the cream off foreign 

 commerce, which was escaping us. Witness, once more, our long 

 disparagement of arable farming, which can raise large quantities of 

 green food and roots, without diminishing, rather while adding to, 

 the yield in grain. It is the same in the present case. We have 



