PROVIDING THE FUNDS 155 



looked at co-operative banking, eyed it askance, belittled it, 

 then approved it in theory. Mr. Asquith as Prime Minister refused 

 to grant an inquiry into it on the ground that its utility had been 

 already so fully established that no further inquiry was needed — 

 and then authorised his representative in the House of Lords, the 

 then youthful Lord Denman, a Junior Lord of the Treasury, em- 

 phatically to forbid the banns of co-operative credit with a theatrical 

 Rouherlike " Never," which time is sure to belie as it has belied 

 M. Rouher's veto. 



The objection has been raised that the system is " foreign." 

 " Give us something ' English,' : ' so said Mr. Leroy Lewis, in 1895, 

 with all the patriotic ardour which recent naturalisation had 

 inspired, " and we will consider it." And the Central Chamber of 

 Agriculture, of which Mr. Lewis had been chairman, according to 

 Mr. Lewis's own testimony, endorsed that saying with an unanimous 

 " Amen." 



The system is no more foreign in essence than is ordinary banking 

 which we got from the Lombards, or than Lincolnshire warping, a 

 capital process, which we got from the Dutch. Indeed, it is less so, 

 for it was our " friendly societies' " organisation which suggested 

 co-operative banking, as a useful development of the same principle, 

 to Schulze Delitzsch, the chosen friend and trusted ally in co-opera- 

 tion of our E. Vansittart Neale, the " father " of our " Co-operative 

 Union." Schulze Delitzsch's first co-operative bank began as a 

 friendly society ; so did Raiffeisen's ; and so did M. Luzzatti's. 

 " Our co-operative banks," so M. Luzzatti has formally declared, 

 " have sprung from the womb of the friendly societies." Co- 

 operative banking rests on precisely the same basis as does other 

 co-operation, which is still in this country regarded as a distinctively 

 British speciality, applied abroad by copying it. 



Under another aspect co-operative banking is merely a co-opera- 

 tive expansion of "cash credit," which unquestionably is a Scottish 

 invention. 



A more plausible cause explaining our backwardness and timidity 

 is the fact that the particular form of co-operative credit thus far 

 most pressingly recommended to us for application in agriculture 

 involves the acceptance of a form of liability bearing a name — it 

 is only a name, as will still be shown — which we not unreasonably 

 hold in abhorrence, that is, its unlimited form. Now, that is a 

 difficulty that can very easily be got over ; for unlimited liability 

 is essential only in one form of co-operative banking, and can, if 

 another form is accepted, readily be dispensed with. 



