458 FARM FINANCE 



Who was Herr Raiffeisen ? During the middle of the 

 last century there lived in Westerwald, a poverty-stricken 

 section of the province of Westphalia, on the Rhine, a 

 well-to-do and kind-hearted gentleman by the name of 

 Raiffeisen. Herr Raiffeisen dearly loved his neighbors, 

 who were mostly poor German peasants. He studied 

 how he could relieve their sufferings and make their lives 

 more enjoyable. He saw that these peasants were not 

 ignorant as a rule and that they knew how to farm, how 

 to sow their seeds, how to cultivate the soil, and how to 

 garner their crops. But there was distress everywhere. 

 No one doubted that, and no one seemed to know just 

 why. The poor peasants had great confidence in the 

 wisdom of Raiffeisen and for this reason they chose him 

 to be the Burgomeister of the little farming village of 

 Weyerbusch. 



Herr Raiffeisen, after having made a most careful study 

 of the causes of this widespread distress, gave it as his 

 opinion that the chief cause was lack of cooperation, espe- 

 cially in money matters. Here he saw poor German 

 women wending their weary way to a distant market, 

 each bearing a load of sufficient weight to burden a 

 horse, while a neighbor's team was standing idle, in the 

 stall. There he saw Jewish and Christian money lenders, 

 exacting their usurious and exorbitant gains from the 

 peasant farmers, farmers who individually were at the 

 mercy of these loan sharks. Each farmer was trying to 

 fight his battles alone. To add to their misfortunes a 

 famine for which the peasants were in no way responsible 

 was also upon them. This was in the years 1846 and 

 1847. 



Herr Raiffeisen's first step toward practical cooperation 

 was to establish a cooperative bakery through which the 

 peasants might buy their bread at about one half the 



