PROVISION OF BORROWING FACILITIES. 319 



Defects. Theso are (1) the shortness of the loan term, which 

 renders societies less useful to agriculturists; (2) indefiniteness of 

 area leading to a loss of the co-operative hond such as is felt when the 

 area is limited, and to a difficulty in obtaining information as to the 

 borrowers and sureties ; (3) the entire absence of control over the use 

 to which the loan is put, whereby the societies lose a principal 

 safeguard for the value of their money, and miss some of the great 

 functions of co-operative credit, viz., the education of the borrower 

 and the development of production ; it is even said that petty usurers 

 obtain loans to no small extent and lend out the proceeds in their 

 own business ; (4) the pursuit of dividends, which though tending 

 to develop thrift, tend at least as much to injure the borrower, and to 

 divert societies into dangerous paths of business. 



RAIFFEISEN CREDIT UNIONS. 



The Raiffeisen societies are due, as in the case of their rivals, to 

 the philanthropy, prescience, courage, perseverance and skill of one 

 man, RAIFFEISEN, a man of slight estate, a burgomaster or village 

 mayor, of very poor health, with no particular property, but of 

 unbounded energy. He has been called the SCHULZE DELITZSCH of 

 rural Germany, for he has done for agriculture, though as yet on a 

 much smaller scale owing to the inherent difficulties of the case 

 what his contemporary did for the towns. Struck by the misery, 

 isolation and want of capital among the peasantry, by the shame- 

 less and fearful usury of the private money-lenders, by the absence 

 of association and public spirit in the cultivating classes, and by 

 their need for elevation not merely in the material but on the moral 

 side, he set himself alone and unaided, to develop a scheme for supply- 

 ing the needs he saw. Like SCHULZE DELITZSCH, talking and writing 

 were with him merely subsidiary to action, and that action was his 

 own, and not another's ; he asked for no aid but that of his own will, 

 his belieS in his cause and his confidence in the dormant capacities of 

 the peasant ; he formulated no great scheme, nor called on others or 

 Government to do so, but began work in his own village, with the 

 inspiration of his own ideas and of the needs around him. He had 

 no ideal entourage for his work ; on the contrary, the country round 

 Flammersfcld is represented as very poor, the men of scanty means, 

 ignorant, very superstitious and overwhelmed by debt, and his first 

 attempt at co-operative effort was on the occasion of a great famine 



