322 PROVISION OF BORROWING FACILITIES. 



since 1868, when their real development began, are but a trifle even 

 in Prussia alone with its 54,000 communes. 



E/AIFFEISEN was the burgomaster of a village afterwards of a 



o \j 



group of villages in one of the poorest parts of Germany, the 

 Westerwald; it had but a "barren soil, scanty means of communication, 

 bleak surroundings, indifferent markets." Nature had proved a very 

 step-mother to this inhospitable bit of territory, upon which the half- 

 starved population ill-clad, ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-brought up by 

 hard labour eked out barely enough to keep body and soul together, 

 with the support of the scanty produce of their little patches of r}'e, 

 buckwheat or potatoes, and the milk and flesh of some half -famished 

 cattle, for the most part ruinously pledged to the Jews. "That 

 reference indicates a peculiarly sore point in the rural economy of 

 Western and Southern Germany, which led RAIFFEISEN to become an 

 economic reformer. In this country we have no idea of the pest of 

 remorseless usury which has fastened like a vampire upon the rural 

 population of those parts. Even the gombeenman cannot compare 

 with those hardened blood-suckers. The poor peasantry have long 

 lain helpless in their grasp, suffering in mute despair the process of 

 gradual extinction. My enquiries into the system of small holdings 

 in those regions have brought me into personal contact with many of 

 the most representative inhabitants heads of agricultural depart- 

 ments, judges, parsons, peasants. And from one and all here, there, 

 and everywhere have I heard the self-same ever repeated bitter 

 complaint, that the villages are being sucked absolutely dry by the 

 'Jews'. Usury laws, police-regulations, warnings and monitions have 

 all been tried as a remedy, and tried in vain/' ( WOLFF.) 



It was this miserable district "where every little wretched 

 cottage and tumble-down house was mortgaged and most of the 



o o o 



peasants' cattle belonged to the Jews/' that was severely visited by 

 the famine of 1846-47, and it was the misery of the people that 

 moved RAIFFEISEN to action. Such were the conditions of the, country 

 and of the people, and no more unpromising field could have been 

 selected. And the conditions of the problem were no less difficult, 



viz., to supply within, confidence, courage, the spirit of thrift, of 







self-help and of mutual help through association to a peasantry so 

 enfeebled, suspicious and dispirited, and to inspire without such 

 confidence and credit that, upon the guarantee of such a peasantry, 

 external capital should be attracted in sufficient quantities to free the 



