Rural Credit 289 



other acceptable forms of security, by mortgage on the 

 land, or in some cases by an unsecured personal note. 

 The greatest security, however, lies in the collective in- 

 terest of the members in the banking system, the interest 

 of every member in the financial affairs of his neighbor, and 

 of the great financial strength that comes to an institution 

 that is founded on a mutually cooperative rural banking 

 system in which the character of every member and the 

 purpose of his loans is known and passed upon by every 

 other member. 



The Federation of the Raiffeisen Banks 



There are two kinds of federations in Germany with 

 which the Raiffeisen banks are identified. The coopera- 

 tive societies of different kinds formed in a province on 

 the Raiffeisen plan usually join and organize a provincial 

 federation, and these in turn are federated into the Na- 

 tional Federation of Darmstadt, Germany. The object 

 of these federations is to look after the general questions 

 that affect all of the associations alike, to protect their 

 mutual interests, and to develop the cooperative move- 

 ment among the rural classes by propaganda and educa- 

 tion. In 1910 the National Federation in Germany 

 was composed of forty-one provincial federations, and 

 they in turn included, on June 1, 18,962 cooperative so- 

 cieties of which 12,894 were cooperative credit asso- 

 ciations. 



In addition to the federations mentioned in the preced- 

 ing paragraph, the banks of a province are federated into 

 a central bank for strictly banking purposes, and the 

 provincial banks are again federated into two national 



