VILLAGE INDUSTRIES 307 



suburbs of Berlin are understood to have been no less successful. 

 We shall have to do something of the same kind in this country if 

 we want to make a good thing of our rural industries. The good 

 results already obtained in our co-operative markets for agricultural 

 produce, live and dead, appear to show that we are not incapable 

 of organising co-operative marketing. Of course, we shall have to 

 train people to do the canvassing and direct the sale, as Mr. Gallagher 

 has done it so well at Dungloe, and as men like M. Favaron, M. 

 Buisson and others have done it for French societies. But that is 

 not an impossibility. 



The movement may require some little nursing. One would, 

 of course, rather see it starting at once on its own legs, by its own 

 strength, and relying upon its own resources. However, there are 

 few movements that have been so started altogether — even in our 

 own distributive co-operation now happily marked by full reliance 

 upon self-help. That co-operation had its early patrons. Co-opera- 

 tive credit was nowhere started altogether out of itself. Neither 

 was co-operative production. There is really no harm in such early 

 nursing — which in such stage we may accept as a form of teaching- 

 provided that it is not carried beyond its proper length, and is 

 advisedly so given as to develop confidence in oneself. I have 

 ventured to liken it, I believe not inaptly, to the pailful of water 

 that in olden days, when I was a child, people used to pour down a 

 newly-made pump, just to make the sucker draw — after which 

 the sucker managed to draw the water that it required out of the 

 soil by itself. It is what the philanthropist M. Dollfus, of Mulhouse — 

 to whom in some measure we owe the semi-philanthropic housing 

 movement — described by his favourite motto : Aidez-d-faire. 



We are eager for the extension of our large industry. We are 



scheming how to stimulate and increase it. We are forming giant 



banks to finance it. That is all to the good. But our eagerness 



for large industry should not blind us to the importance of the small, 



the fill-purse and leg-up to the small man, that industry which can 



bring him in money and at the same time sharpen his wits and 



accustom him to business habits, and which is no less a " rung " 



in the " ladder " of social and economic uprising than is the holding 



which we are, at any rate, trying to provide him with. A petit 



mercier petit punier ! It is the " little " that helps the " little " man. 



Let us hope that, as the countryside fills up, it will also fill with 



work of a twofold kind. Two legs are in all cases better to stand 



upon than one. Then let industry join aidingly with cultivation ! 



This matter is to us, naturally, one of considerable importance. 



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