PROVISION OF BORROWING FACILITIES. 321 



otherwise than on the desire for gain. Had the societies been based and 

 worked on a charity foundation, the objections might have been 

 understood, but they are not only business associations, but business 

 successes, and are not open to the reproach of being benevolent 

 institutions, they are real associations of self-help and self -education 

 of the highest character. 



The Conditions. It is worth while to note carefully the conditions 

 under which RAIFFEISEN began his work, and the conditions of the 

 problem ; it is too common in thinking of Europe, to think of its 

 general civilization, its wealth, culture and education, and to apply 

 these vague notions to minimize the difficulties of the European 

 problem, and to exaggerate those of India. The peasantry of Europe 

 are not the cultured classes, who give the tone and name to European 

 civilization and progress ; they are often but barely instructed, while 

 their prejudices, conservatism and narrowness of idea are proverbial ; 

 they are not wealthy but excessively poor ; are much in debt and 

 ravaged by usury to a degree, of which this presidency (Madras) as a 

 whole, knows comparatively little ; what can be expected of them when 

 the vast bulk own less than 7 acres per family, and a large proportion 

 much less than that ; vast areas of Europe are bleak and infertile, 

 repaying labour with but a bare livelihood often of the meanest kind, 

 so that the small peasants obtain a poor subsistence even in good years, 

 while droughts and floods, hail, frost, blights, and cattle disease are 

 common fatalities. Moreover, RAIFFEISEN began his work more than 

 forty years ago and Europe was not then even as now ; the peasant 

 had Ions' suffered from other evils, such as from the want of communi- 



o * 



cations and of good markets, from general ignorance, from most 

 conservative ideas and practices, from the poorest methods of farming, 

 from feudal disabilities and customs, which the laws of the earlier 

 part of the century had so partially relieved that a fresh set of laws 

 was necessary, ending in 1850, to relieve them. Hence, it must not 

 be imagined that the task of starting credit societies or rural banks 

 among the peasantry was one whit easier in Europe than in the 

 Madras Presidency ; on the contrary, so hard was it that it took 

 nearly twenty years to establish more than the first such bank, while 

 the whole of France, the bulk of Germany, Austria and Italy, the 

 whole of the Iberian peninsula and the whole of Russia are still 

 almost unsupplied, in fact, with rural banks for the peasant, for even 

 the 2,000 or so Raiffeisen societies which have established tlu-mselves 

 41 



