328 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



It is across these barricades of at any rate one-sidedly engrained old 

 customs, which in a Runnymede spirit many of us nolumus mutari, 

 that we have to advance to the full freedom which automatously 

 gives ease and thereby creates free comradeship. The " Miller of 

 Sabssouci " wants to be placed in a position to say " No " to his 

 neighbour King Frederick, Carlyle's pet hero. If people are really 

 to associate heartily, if there is to be attractiveness in the rural scene 

 counterbalancing the meretricious allurements of the town, if rural 

 settlements are to increase in size and in number, and if people are 

 to be brought to seek their shelter, people must be able to settle 

 there with a sense of full equality and independence — independence 

 of one another, save in that human way which makes every one of 

 us in part dependent upon one another — at their ease. 



Towards the attainment of that end, among other things, co-opera- 

 tion of the right sort will be found most effective — not that spurious 

 co-operation which has become politics, but co-operation of the 

 old Rochdale type, which longed to see equality for working folk 

 everywhere, and among other things particularly and expressly to 

 see working folk permanently settled on the land, each with his 

 family, under his own vine and fig tree; and that co-operation 

 which, under woman's management, has created stores for the poor 

 in Coronation Street. Give it free scope, encourage its expansion, 

 and you may see rural reconstruction furthered a good bit. 

 There is remarkable uniting power in co-operation — socially uniting 

 as well as economically. You may see this everywhere where 

 co-operation has had free play, especially in rural districts. For 

 it makes folk gregarious, not least so in the country, where, among 

 a sparser population, but with generally more identical interests, 

 the uniting power naturally tells most. Look at the social 

 solidarity which makes the Belgian Maisons du Peuple very 

 beehives of labouring folk's social life ! Look at the Italian co- 

 operative societies, with the Societa Umanitaria at their head, as 

 their central point, in which high and low meet on a footing of 

 equality, all bent upon the furtherance of the same interest. 

 There are probably only few in this country who have seen a village 

 with a genuine Raiffeisen Society established in it — one of those 

 societies which banish thefts and intemperance, make people honest, 

 temperate, peaceable and mutually helpful, and knit neighbours 

 together as in an enlarged family. There are some features in that 

 institution which do not appear altogether suited to our circum- 

 stances in their original form. That form implies unlimited liability 

 from which our more moneyed people nervously shrink, even in such, 



