WORKING CREDIT FOR FARMERS. 233 



In the same way Co-operative Banks whip up new cus- 

 tomers for banking in the wide, neglected plains on which 

 banking would without them not be thought of, train them 

 to banking ways, teach them how to lay by out of their 

 earnings, to form capital. And when a certain point of 

 accumulation is reached they necessarily — for their cloth 

 will then admit of the cutting of a moderate-sized coat — 

 hand them over, with money and banking habits formed, 

 to their bigger, non-co-operative colleagues. 



Abroad ordinary banks are only too glad to do business 

 with and for co-operative banks. It is so very notably 

 in Italy. And in Germany the wealthy Dresdner Bank 

 acts to its own and to its customers' satisfaction, as Central 

 BanTc, or bank at the back of the Central Bank — apex bank, 

 as they call it in India — both for the powerful Schulze- 

 Delitzsch Union and the more strictly agricultural Union 

 adopting the principles of Raiffeisen. Its own officers 

 have assured me that they are satisfied. The Bank main- 

 tains a separate Co-operative Section. Not a few of our 

 most intelligent bankers have readily perceived and freely 

 owned that co-operative banking rather promises to favour 

 than threatens to damage their own interest. The late 

 Lord Avebury, having spoken for co-operative banks in 

 the House of Commons, expressed to me his views in that 

 sense by a special letter. And another member of a well- 

 known and prominent banker's family wrote to me unsoli- 

 citedly at about the same time (in 1894) to bid me " God- 

 speed " and say that in his opinion I was advocating just 

 what was urgently wanted and certainly ought to be done. 

 But there are more clear-sighted bankers even in this coun- 

 try. And abroad we have the best of them on our side. 

 In Italy Comm. Ettore Levi, being one of the tip-top bankers 

 — he was Vice-President of the National Bank of Italy — 

 has written a very valuable handbook on Co-operative 

 Banking. We have had bankers taking the chair at our 

 Co-operative Banking Congresses. And a recent German 

 Bankers' Congress, meeting at Munich, passed a special 

 resolution declaring that the work which co-operative banks 

 are doing in that country wants to be done and that those 



