96 AGRICULTURAL CREDIT BANKS 



(b) Persons known to be sober, honest, and hard-work- 

 ing eligible for membership. Poverty no bar. 



(c) No entrance fees or shares. 



(d) Members jointly and severally responsible for re- 

 payment of all sums lent to or deposited in the bank. 



(e) Deposits bearing interest received from members 

 and outsiders. 



(/) Loans made only to members and only for pro- 

 ductive and economical purposes. 



(g) Period of loan sufficiently long to admit of its 

 object being attained before repayment is demanded. 



(h) The borrower must produce two sureties. <* 



(/) No division of profits. They must be credited to a 

 reserve fund. 



(&) Complete equality of members, the officials being 

 elected at a general meeting. 



(/) No payments to officers, an exception being some- 

 times made in the case of the Secretary. Raiffeisen was 

 in favour of combining credit and trading functions in a 

 single society, and this combination is often a feature of 

 German rural banks. 



The Schulze Delitzsch type of bank is very different. 

 Large areas are preferred. Shares, which nowadays are 

 often pretty large, are held by the members, dividends 

 are paid, and the percentage which may be allowed as 

 the return to shareholders is not limited. Since the 

 German law permitted limited liability the Schulze 

 Delitzsch banks have mostly adopted it. Loans are, as a 

 rule, granted for short periods. Service is not gratuitous. 

 These banks, therefore, approach far more closely to the 

 ordinary business bank, and there is always a risk of 

 their becoming commercial undertakings pure and simple. 

 They are not poor men's banks in the sense that 

 Raiffeisen banks are. There is no reason why a farmer 

 should not be a shareholder in a Schulze Delitzsch bank, 

 and in Germany many farmers are. But the Raiffeisen 

 bank meets far more fully the needs of the small peasant 

 landholder, and to-day we may confine attention almost 

 entirely to pure or modified examples of that type. Since 

 1889 shares have by law become a necessary feature of 

 co-operative credit in Germany, but most Raffeisen banks 



