434 PROVISION OF BORROWING FACILITIES. 



sees in this development a veiy important practical contribution to 

 the vexed question of organization." 



Our village societies "with unlimited liability," once started, 

 commenced to improve in quality and to show a spirit that had not 

 been expected to appear so quickly. Accounts remained and still 

 remain the one part of their business which societies are quite unable 

 to manage for themselves. From the ranks of the societies capable men 

 commenced to appear ; and very soon the first type of Central Bank 

 (of which societies were not members) will have vanished altogether. 

 Societies hold shares and are members of Central Banking Unions and 

 they have a voice in their management and votes with which to make 

 that voice heard. I consider this particular advance towards better 

 co-operative organization to be far reaching in its consequences, and, as 

 will presently be shown, it has enabled us to deal with the question of 

 account-keeping in a way which, but for this co-operative development, 

 would be decidedly dangerous. 



At first the Directors of our Central Banks employed no paid staff. 

 They had to master the details of their business before they could hope 

 to be able to guide and manage paid staff ; so, with the Registrar's 

 assistance, they did all the work themselves. In all our young Banks 

 we still follow the same plan and allow no paid staff until Directors 

 have acquired solid practical experience. The Auditor on the 

 Government staff assists, of course ; and, as a rule, we find that until 

 Central Banks are advanced enough to employ staff the Government 

 Auditor has to actually write up the accounts of the credit societies as 

 well as audit them. We are fast getting beyond this very elementary 

 sta^e ; in our well established banks the duties of Government are now 



O ' 



confind to supervision and audit. They do not extend to the actual 

 organization of new credit societies and the preparation of applications 

 for registration, for the banks themselves are able to undertake this 

 work. Thanks to the fact that our Central Banking Unions have 

 banded themselves together in the Provincial Union of co-operative 

 Banks, which is a supervisory body formed to protect the movement 

 from rash and unwise behaviour on the part of the individual banks 

 which are (with their constituent societies) its members, we have*' been 

 able to provide machinery by means of which co-operation may be run 

 on safe lines with the assistance and under the supervision of the 

 Registrar and his small staff. This machinery I will describe 

 later. 



