132 CO-OPERATIVE CREDIT ASSOCIATIONS. 



the wisdom of such a course cannot be questioned, having regard to the 

 principles and aims of these organisations. It is also clear that the prin- 

 ciple of unlimited liabiUty is only possible where all the members of a com- 

 paratively poor community are, more or less, on an equality in regard to the 

 possession of worldly goods. The members of the committee, or other 

 officials of the banks, get no salaries, and no dividends are paid — profits, 

 when there are any, going generally towards the formation of a reserve 

 fund. The Tables given in this report must, therefore, not be judged from 

 the standpoint of an ordinary joint stock balance sheet. The measure of 

 the prosperity of these credit associations is not large profits or handsome 

 dividends, but rather the extent to which the capital of the " bank " has 

 subserved the needs of its members, and proved productive in their hands ; 

 and the absence of serious loss. With three exceptions, all the credit asso- 

 ciations in Ireland are Raiffeisen " banks," and consequently I need not do 

 more here than allude to the well-known fact that there have been in Ger- 

 many and Italy other apostles of co-operative credit in town and country 

 v^hose fame is only second to that of Raiffeisen himself. Herr Schulze — 

 called Schulze-DeHtzsch from his birth-place— organised his first credit 

 association in 1850, a year after the Raiffeisen bank was established 

 at Flammersfeld. The Schulze " banks " are savings banks as well as 

 credit associations, and their growth has been mainly in Continental towns. 

 Their founder wished to bring credit and the opportunity for thrift to the 

 doors — not of a rural peasantry — but of the artisans and small shopkeepers 

 of town populations. The success of the Schulze-DeHtzsch associations on 

 the Continent has been remarkable. There are, at the present moment, 

 several thousands of these organisations in Germany alone, and they have 

 spread to Austria, Italy, and France. Still another modification of the 

 system of co-operative credit is found in the " Banche Popolan," which Italy 

 owes to the genius and zeal of Commendatore Luigi Luzzatti. Luzzatti 

 started his first People's Bank in Milan in 1865. Avowedly inspired by the 

 idea of Schulze-Delitzsch's associations, Luzzatti considerably modified the 

 German's conception with a view to meeting the special needs of Italy. It 

 is enough, in this place, to mention, in regard to these modifications, Luz- 

 zatti's rejection of the principle of unlimited liability. The " banche popo- 

 lari " were town " Banks " ; Italy needed also its rural credit associations. 

 To supply these was the mission of Signor Wollemborg, a Venetian land- 

 lord, whose immediate desire was to rescue his tenantry and their neighbours 

 from the thraldom of usurers. In June, 1883, the first Italian rural " bank " 

 was organised. In essentials the " casse rurali " of Italy are Raiffeisen 

 associations. An enormous impetus was given to the spread of the rural 

 " banks " of Italy by the energy and ability of Father Cerutti — the parish 

 priest of Gambarare, in Venetia — who smce 1 890 has been the promoter of 

 hundreds of these institutions in Venetia alone. 



In order to give some idea of the character of these rural credit associa- 

 tions in Ireland, I extract the following comments on their effects from the 

 Sixth Report of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society. The Secretary 

 of the Burren Bank writes : — 



" For a time only twenty-six members co-operated ; others watched 

 closely, and after a time when they saw the marvellous profits attained by 

 borrowers in short spaces of time, it was then they really took to their minds 

 what profits they could have gained had they embarked on the same ship as 



