6 AGRICULTURAL ORGANISATION 



appropriations ; that small abuses occur still ; and that the 

 exploitation of the peasant has not yet disappeared everywhere. 

 But, in spite of all this, we have left far behind the days when a 

 peasant could not borrow money unless he paid two or three 

 francs a month for every twenty francs ; when usurers swarmed 

 in and out of villages, and speculated mercilessly on dire need and 

 misery : when neither the law nor the administration could 

 protect the worker from this slavery, or mitigate his frightful 

 poverty, or prevent the abuses of speculation on labour which 

 led to the revolution of 1907. 



India is an exceptional country in matters of finance, 

 since a rate of interest amounting to 12 J per cent, is there 

 regarded as reasonable even by the credit societies, and any- 

 thing below 9 per cent, is looked upon as a mistake ; but 

 even these rates are modest compared with the 24, 36, 60 

 and even 75 per cent, charged in different provinces by 

 village money-lenders. 



It was the inauguration of the Raiffeisen system of rural 

 credit in Germany, where, in the middle of the nineteenth 

 century, the money-lender had become all-powerful in the 

 poorer agricultural districts, that showed the way out of the 

 difficulty by which the small cultivator was faced. His lack 

 of visible security was met by the formation of village or local 

 societies whose members became jointly and severally respon- 

 sible for the repayment of loans which they themselves 

 granted to men whom, from personal knowledge, they 

 regarded as worthy of confidence, while the loans were to be 

 applied to specified purposes of an exclusively reproductive 

 character. 



Starting in this very small way, the Raiffeisen system 

 underwent various developments, eventually gave rise to 

 the creation of a net-work of societies, federations and state 

 or provincial agricultural credit banks, spread into many 

 different lands, and forms to-day the basis on which has 

 been built up much of the systematic organisation of agricul- 

 ture that has become so active a force throughout the world 

 in general. 



SCIENTIFIC PRODUCTION, 



The need alike for agricultural credit and for agricultural 

 organisation became greater by reason of the changes in 



