CONCLUSION. 481 



mission " of Inquiry — and such as we have not known since 

 the big purse bought up small yeomen's properties and 

 annexed the Common. Dull and dreary, anything but 

 exhilarating and stimulating, as our country life is now, 

 to make it attractive, to tempt people to remain or to settle 

 in the country, we want to make it bright and cheerful, 

 with subjects of interest to keep the mind busy and attention 

 active. That is only to be done by the creation — though 

 it be on old ground — of new communities, bound together 

 by a bond of common interest and a feeling of neighbourli- 

 ness, with give and take, touch and easy intercourse, the 

 maintaining of something approaching to brotherhood in it. 

 Now, to effect this, and to promote the particular kind of 

 Education which among small folk in the country we require, 

 there is nothing like Co-operation built upon the basis, not 

 of pure commercialism, and not of the pugnacious sort 

 which seeks champions to fight the cause of a political 

 " co-operative " party. It was " the world of brother- 

 hood " which he saw among the co-operative Raiffeisen 

 societies in Germany, which so much enchanted the Hun- 

 garian Professor, whom his Government employed to trans- 

 plant the Rhenish shoot into its Danubian garden, the 

 " happy union of business spirit with the sentiment of a 

 true, a practical philanthropy " (" Vheureuse union de V esprit 

 d'affaires avec les sentimens d'une veritable, d'une pratique 

 philanthropie "), which delighted the French social economist 

 Eugene Rostand. Whoever has not seen what a remarkable 

 binding together and stimulating effect this form of Co- 

 operation has, and how it excites a desire and readiness to 

 receive and assimilate instruction, technical and general, 

 how it helps to raise the character of people united by it, 

 making for sobriety, strict honesty, good family life and 

 good hving generally, finds it difficult to credit it. And 

 the effect has been the same among the comparatively 

 educated peasantry of Germany, the illiterate country folk 

 of Italy, the primitive cultivators of Serbia, and it is begin- 

 ning to have something of the same effect among the rayats 

 of India, where, as observed, leaders of the movement hope 

 by its means to provide a modern substitute for the lost, 



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