1 18 AGRICULTURAL INDEBTEDNESS 



tions of two men — Schulze Delitzsch and Raiffeisen — 

 who worked independently upon slightly different 

 lines, but upon practically identical principles. The 

 work of Schulze Delitzsch lay chiefly among the 

 artisans and small tradesmen of towns, and that of 

 Raiffeisen among the peasants of the rural districts. 

 It is the latter which throws the most suggestive light 

 upon Indian problems, and of which, therefore, a brief 

 account will be given here ; but the whole story of 

 these two philanthropists and their followers should 

 be read attentively in Sir F. Nicholson's luminous 

 report. 



Raiffeisen was a man of slight estate, of very poor 

 health, with no particular property, but of unbounded 

 energy. He was forced by ill-health to retire from 

 public service in i860. Though sick and nearly blind, 

 he then devoted the remainder of his life to this work, 

 dying in 1888 after his societies formed an established 

 and successful system. 'He was the burgomaster of 

 a village — afterwards of a group of villages — in one of 

 the poorest parts of Germany — the Westerwald. It 

 had but a barren soil, scanty means of communication, 

 bleak surroundings, indifferent markets. Nature had 

 proved a very stepmother to this inhospitable bit of 

 territory, upon which the half-starved population — 

 ill-clad, ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-brought up — by hard 

 labour eked out barely enough to keep body and soul 

 together, with the support of the scanty produce of 

 their little patches of rye, buckwheat, or potatoes, and 

 the milk and flesh of some half-famished cattle, for the 

 most part ruinously pledged to the Jews. That refer- 

 ence indicates a peculiarly sore point in the rural 

 economy of Western and Southern Germany, which 

 led Raiffeisen to become an economic reformer. In 

 this country we have no idea of the pest of remorse- 

 less usury which has fastened like a vampire upon the 

 rural population of those parts. Even the gombeen- 

 man cannot compare with these hardened blood- 



