PROVISION OF BORROWING FACILITIES. 313 



was the more compelled to this as the habit of leaning on the State 

 for help in eveiy difficulty, of blaming it for every misfortune, the 

 habit of submitting to State guidance, regulations and control in all 

 the affairs of life, was receiving fresh development from the growing 

 socialism of the State, which, in the hands of MARX, LASSALLE &c., 

 was assuming its modern form. SCHULZE DELITZSCH conceived this to 

 be a radically mischievous development, and he spent his life in comba- 

 ting it, not by words only but chiefly by his marvellous skill in 

 developing into solid fact the idea of co-operation. He saw, perhaps 

 he was compelled to see, that powerful as is the pen, it is per se 

 wholly insufficient, even powerless, to act on the classes who form 

 the mass of the nation, and whom it was his aim to develop. Hence, 

 while incessant in writing, lecturing, exhorting, it was in the creation 

 of successful models by the power of his own individual influence and 

 within his own immediate sphere, that he chiefly trusted. Neither 

 did he attempt a vast agitation nor the institution of a grand society 

 to drive all human ills out of the State ; he was content to lay the 

 foundation of a hnmble village edifice, which, like some Indian fane, 

 should grow from within outwards till it became world famous ; he 

 believed in local growth and the development of individual powers 

 inherent in all men, not in the importation of elaborate machinery. 

 He had no universal panacea with which, in half a dozen years, the 

 nation was to be re-created, and poverty, the legacy of a series of 

 generations, the offspring of centuries of error and oppression, the 

 result of social manners, customs and ignorance, the outcome in 

 short of its history, was to be straightway eliminated ; he aimed at 

 practical education, and, if his efforts have been crowned with a 

 marvellous and probably unlooked for success, it is but the greater 

 proof of his wisdom in seizing the true idea of progress suited to the 

 conditions and needs of his country, viz., the development of the 

 individual through association, so that the powerlcssness, carelessness 

 and ignorance of the isolated worker might give place to the prudence, 

 the thoughtfulness, the credit, the strength and self-reliance, of 

 banded and disciplined groups, Moreover it was not simple credit 

 that he a*imed at ; credit without a proper knowledge of its use, he 

 rightly hold to be an error if not a fatal injury ; it was disciplined 

 and safe-guarded credit, credit based on thrift and prudence and 

 Jiaving directly a productive object. Nor was it credit only but all 

 the benefits of co-operation at which he aimed. His first association 

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