232 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



will almost as rapidly fly out at the other. Englishmen 

 boggle badly over taking it in with their one ear. But 

 once it gets in, it sticks. Let us hope that such will prove 

 the case in this connection. For up to the present the mes- 

 sage does not appear to have passed even into the first ear. 

 There appears to be a very unfounded apprehension among 

 bankers that Co-operative Credit might interfere with their 

 business and damage their interest. It is odd how timid 

 bankers, armed as they are with their panoply of gold, are 

 in such matters. Twenty-four years ago they offered such 

 stout resistance to a valuable Bill amending our Savings 

 Banks legislation that they succeeded in extracting a 

 concession which does them no good, but for a long time 

 diminished the utility of the measure by cutting down the 

 amount allowed to be paid in in one year on one account. 

 Now they appear to be obstructing progress in co-operative 

 banking in something of the same spirit. And yet their 

 market is unassailably theirs. In the present case nobody 

 is so much as contemplating any inroad upon it. Rather 

 would co-operative banking prepare new ground for their 

 conquest by training new recruits for service in the army of 

 their customers and creating new business which must 

 ultimately infallibly come to them. \Vhat the co-operative 

 banks contemplated are to do is what ordinary bankers in 

 their own interest absolutely cannot do ; and the business 

 that ordinary banks do in the same way lies altogether 

 beyond the reach of the humble little credit societies pro- 

 jected. A very apt comparison is that with the relations 

 existing between Collecting Banks — very meritorious insti- 

 tutions that they are — and Savings Banks. Collecting 

 Banks collect deposits like the Savings Banks. But they 

 do not compete with them. Their emissaries collect the pence 

 coming in on pay-days in working men's homes, before there 

 is a chance of their being wasted, and keep them for a time. 

 But as soon as the money collected from one person reaches 

 the sum of £5, they hand it over to the Savings Bank, and 

 from that moment only does the deposit begin to bear 

 interest. We want thousands of these modest little institu- 

 tions. Many crumbs proverbially make a loaf. 



