392 PROVISION OP BORROWING FACILITIES. 



their trustworthiness and can judge their business capacity, while 

 supervision is automatically brought into play within their restricted 

 areas of operation. In ordinary commercial banking facilities it is 

 probable that German farmers of the present day are better off than 

 British farmers. As in England the great German Joint-Stock 

 Banks tend to become greater, and their branches or agencies more 

 numerous, but banks working only in one locality, one district, or 

 one province are far more numerous in Germany. There are over 

 200 small joint-stock banks, besides the urban co-operative banks, 

 about 1,200 in number, and private bankers are estimated by leading 

 writers on German banking to number from 4,000 to 6,000. In 

 nearly every country town in Germany may still be found one or 

 more substantial banking firms ; and from these, if only by reason 

 of proximity, freedom of action of managers, relatively good 

 knowledge of agricultural matters and persons (as being often 

 established in country district centres) and of competition among 

 themselves, it might have been expected that farmers could have 

 obtained credit on suitable terms. 



Despite this multitude of Raiffeisen banks, their large membership 

 * and business, PROFESSOR KIESSER, the most eminent authority on 

 German commercial and industrial banking, writing in 1912, 

 observed that much still remained to be done and must be done in 

 this direction, as "agriculture requires a credit system adapted to the 

 special nature of the conditions of its production." And a 

 distinguished Prussian Minister of Finance, in the course of a 



o * 



parliamentary debate on the budget of the Prussian State Central 

 Co-operative Bank, for whose foundation he was directly responsible, 

 declared : "This must be our goal to have a co-operative loan bank 

 in practically every parish of the whole monarchy". 



HAIFFEISEN (1818-1888), with whose name rural co-operative 

 banks have become associated, began his co-operative career in the 

 winter of 1847-8 with the foundation in a small village Of a 

 benevolent society for obtaining corn and potatoes and selling them 

 at low prices to the poorer inhabitants ; this society was one of 

 many of the same type founded in Germany about this time, ^vhen 

 very serious distress prevailed. Two years later he founded in 

 another village, a society which at first bought cattle and sold them 

 to poorer landholders, but which later lent money on surety 

 directly to the latter for this purpose. Upon his transference as 



