242 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



dormant security of the agricultural borrower is made 

 marketable by his pledging himself to a certain approved 

 employment of his loan, out of which employment — care- 

 fully considered and scrutinised and made obligatory upon 

 the borrower by the lender — the loan is in truth to be repaid. 

 No tolerably certain prospect of repayment, no loan ! 

 Even so, additional grace may have to be granted. For, 

 apart from bad seasons, there may be other causes of delay. 

 And to make the borrower who has borrowed money, 

 let us say, for the buying of a cow, or a pig, or the draining 

 of a field, or the sinking of a well, repay out of other sources 

 of income, would be a hardship upon him rather than a 

 help. 



Such considerations in themselves will show how greatly 

 different is the financial atmosphere in agricultural credit 

 and in ordinary banking ; and, incidentally, how unsuit- 

 able in the majority of cases is an overdraft as a method of 

 borrowing. It is because longer time is in almost any case 

 required in agricultural credit than in ordinary, that co- 

 operative banks in Italy habitually allow a longer term 

 than the three months usual for commercial credit, namely 

 six months and in some cases nine, after which period the 

 loan is, on approval, renewable, on condition of a certain 

 proportion of the original sum being paid off. It is the 

 uncertainty of repayment, as regards time, which practi- 

 cally justifies the particular method adopted by Raiffeisen, 

 of which more will presently have to be said, which design- 

 edly operates more with liability than with ready cash, 

 such as would " eat its head off " while waiting for employ- 

 ment. The liability pledged is turned into cash by means 

 of a central institution, expressly formed to deal with it. 



The point of time is, however, not the only difficulty to 

 be overcome. Persons engaged in agriculture are, as a 

 matter of fact, generally honest and trustworthy — down 

 to the humblest — and more specifically so when they are 

 liable to men of their own class and their own neighbour- 

 hood. In the little peasant banks of Italy poor people 

 who had had to emigrate have most scrupulously repaid 

 from transatlantic countries what they owed. They would 



