AGRICULTURAL CO-OPERATION 127 



greatest service which the Raiffeisen bank renders to 

 rural society. Its greatest value lies in its educative 

 action. The co-operative credit bank is the germ from 

 which co-operation in all its varied forms most easily 

 and most often grows. Foresight and energy in the 

 people are the only solid foundations of all industrial 

 prosperity, and these virtues are not only stimulated, 

 but seem even to be created by banks of the Raiffeisen 

 type. From the modest beginnings of a bank which 

 frees them from the clutches of the usurer, the peasants 

 learn to associate to buy agricultural machinery, 

 manure, and seed at wholesale prices ; from co-opera- 

 tive buying they proceed to the conduct of co-operative 

 industries, and, having once started upon the path of 

 progress, they are ambitious of making still further 

 advance, and begin to educate themselves. When a 

 people have learned to trust in their own exertions, 

 and to be on the look-out for better methods of pro- 

 duction, their industrial future is assured. It is the 

 quickening and educating influence of co-operation 

 which has brought about the agricultural revival in 

 Europe in the last fifteen years ; and it is not sur- 

 prising to learn that since Belgium has been covered 

 with a network of co-operative agricultural associa- 

 tions, the average return from a farm of 10 hectares 

 (24! acres) has increased by £100 a year. As we find 

 in Europe usury as rapacious and indebtedness as 

 hopeless as are to be found in India, may we not hope 

 that co-operation, too, will have in India the same 

 quickening influence that it has had in Europe ? 



