CO-OPERATIVE FARMING.* As a people we are not fond of
co-operation, and hate a bureau in any form. The one touches the Englishman's feeling of independence, and the other tends to red-tape. In this country we limit our co-operation to games, such as cricket and foot- ball, and no nation understands better what loyalty to the rules of a game or unselfish play means. To any other co-operation, except the brilliant examples of the democratic Co-operative Stores of the North and the Midlands, we are singularly un- sympathetic. We blame everything and anybody—the railways mostly—but ourselves. The railways are often unjustly abused with regard to rates. They will not forward small retail parcels at wholesale prices—business principles have to be applied to railways as to other concerns—but they will meet a co-operation of farmers who would send regular consignments in bulk. We may quote as one of the advantages of co- operation that whereas an Irish railway will carry one ton of artificial manure seventy-eight miles for 10s. ld., it will carry fifty tons for 5s. 10d. per ton. An English railway con- veys stable manure seventy-eight miles at 4s. a ton, and the waggons cannot be used for any load on the return journey. Several railways have made great efforts to induce farmers to send regular consignments, and by lumping them to secure better terms. This is just what your independent man dislikes doing. He hates to be tied down to do anything ; though if the farmers near a certain railway station grouped their consignments together till they reached a ton, instead of paying 8d. for a 20 lb. hamper they would pay 1fd. The conclusion arrived at by some of the railway companies was that agricultural distress did not exist at all in many dis- tricts, and that combination was not agreeable to the English character. To one or two carefully thought out schedules of rates not a single answer has ever been made.
On the Continent there is no country except Spain that has not very much bettered its agricultural trade, and the means and social condition of its agricultural population, by Co-operative Societies. In France a Professor at Blois, a certain M Tauviray, conceived the idea of getting the farmers of the district to group their orders for artificial manures, and from this they went on to buy implements and seeds whole- sale. The agricultural syndicates of France have spread all over the land, and have even formed a party in the Chamber of Deputies. Let us take another example of co-operation of a quite informal kind, of which a species of higgler is the principal agent. Blackberries grow profusely round St. Malo, and last autumn the women and children turned out on certain days and picked them. Then some village trades- man who had a cart bought them for 8 centimes a pound and took them to St. Malo, and the St. Malo exporters sent to England 773 tons of blackberries. Economical, with a keen eye to the main chance, and penurious to a degree as he is, those who know the French peasant well enough will
• The Organization of Agriculture. By Edwin A. Pratt. London : John rdurray. DEN net.]
not be surprised at these figures,—either the tons or the centimes. One has heard of the dalesmen collecting mush- rooms for a penny a pound; but picking mushrooms is not picking blackberries, and 8 centimes do not make a penny. Mr. Pratt says, " Why not Cornwall ? " Some one objected that the railway rates made it impossible. This theory was soon exploded. Well, it might be done in Cornwall and in other counties, when the landlord is not driving partridges.
Denmark offers the most brilliant object-lesson of a country, reduced by war to a very low ebb, recuperating her energies and prosperity by a sustained and plucky co-operation. The moors and heaths were reclaimed, and though the first co- operative dairy was not started till the "eighties," contem- porary with the birth of the French agricultural syndicates —and, indeed, with most of the Continental agricultural syndicates—almost every village has its dairy to-day. The bacon-curing industry was due to the political jealousy of the Liberals, mostly small farmers, who took the oppor- tunity of Germany closing her ports to Danish pigs to start bacon factories of their own to spite the big dealers. Denmark is not the only country which owes a thriving industry to political exigencies. Even the Danish bacon success cannot compare with the extraordinary growth of agricultural societies in Belgium,—a movement dating from 1890. The clergy having for some time viewed with alarm the advance of Socialism, insisted on the cures interesting themselves in the spread of improved methods of agriculture, the use of fertilisers, and co-operation. The result has been an astonishing success, for the Belgian agri- culturist, who might have been such excellent material for the Social Anarchists to work upon—witness the typical Belgian Socialist of the big towns—became an equally good member of the local agricultural guild; and to this day the Socialists have no holding at all in the country. Belgium has applied the co-operative system to the insuring of cattle, of horses, and of goats, and even to the grouping of fire insurances, to obtain cheaper premiums. The whole movement was due to private enterprise. A Flemish farmer complained to the cure of his wheat crop, and the cure, the Abbe Mellaerts, gave him some chemical manure, started a " Peasants' Guild " when the man had tried the contents of the sack with great success on some potatoes, and finally succeeded in organising agricul- tural co-operation in Belgium.
To Germany, but more especially to Austria-Hungary, Servia, and Italy, the credit banks have• literally brought a new social era. Formerly the Hungarian peasant was at the mercy of the moneylender, as the Servian was debtor to the local innkeeper; and even the Jewish moneylender, as Mr. Pratt says, is a moderate man com- pared to the Greek innkeeper. Now the peasant borrows his little loan, a few pounds, gets free of debt, drinks less, and sees more of his friends than he did. The great leaven which, starting in Germany as the result of the struggle between agrarians and industrials, has literally made the bread of the Continental peasant, is the local credit bank organised on the Raiffeisen system. The peasants them- selves constitute the bank, and the work is entirely honorary ; they all know each other, and every member is responsible, so that the loans are .necessarily strictly defined, and con- sequently negotiated with borrowers well known to the officials. The peasant gets not only money but advice, and his implements are bought for him. There may or may not be a more purely agricultural kindred society, resembling the " Societe des Agriculteurs " of France, but often the bank itself undertakes to teach. The Savings Bank of Parma lends out a travelling Professor. Most of us know the poverty of the Italian peasant, or have heard of it, so that it needs no imagination to conceive the social benefit and raising of the sordid standard of his life conferred on him by the credit bank. Nor does the national benefit stop here. The French peasant is a miser,—we have heard of his wealth which he invested in " Rentes " or the Panama Canal. The Italian townsman invests his savings in people's banks, which lend in their turn to the village banks, and so the wheel goes round, and does not roll away to America, to the Argentine, or to New York.
Ireland has its village banks. The fact may surprise some ; but the Irish peasant is just the man for such co-operation, once convinced of its genuineness. It has restored, says Mr. Pratt, his old sociability, which the Land League and the boycott had so cruelly destroyed. He gets his loan-23 or £4 to £10—at 5 per cent., the village bank borrowing the money reasonably from the joint-stock bank—which the peasant never oould do—and the attitude of the joint-stock banks is generally friendly. In Wales the farmers have their Federa- tion and associated stores, which are most successful, whereas, as we know, the late Lord Winchelsea's Produce Association was singularly unlucky.
And now we come to England. Mr. Pratt has a very interesting chapter which starts with a discussion of Dr. Hermann Levy's article on " English Agriculture." Dr. Levy, while his compatriots thought our agriculture ruined, sees in the increase of our stock production and dairying a new era. The reason we have not developed rapidly on the lines of co-operation is explained by most of the farmers being tenants, and therefore seldom associated long with any particular district, the number of large estates, and the desire of the wealthy to have landed property. Dr. Levy's explanations cover the ground fairly well, but not completely. English farms are mostly large,—larger than the peasant- proprietor's holding in France, for instance. They are mostly tenanted by a class that exists nowhere else, men whose ideas may be narrow, but who live in a large, careless way, and sometimes take broad views of life. Browning once spoke of them as the salt of the earth. Sandwiched in between large parks and other estates highly farmed by enthusiasts and "gentlemen farmers," they are never in such numbers as to constitute a body of men of entirely level interests. Dr. Levy speaks of the "gentleman farmer," as opposed to the working farmer, as being extinct, but the number of men who do their farming from horseback, and make it pay, is still large. What room among all the many shades and degrees is there, then, for the little man, the peasant-proprietor ? The truth is, he does not exist in England, or barely exists, as the Frenchman said of the moufflon in Corsica. The paysan, the Magyar of the great Hungarian wheat plain, the Italian peasant, and the Siberian peasant, towards whom the heart of the authorities yearns so tenderly, have no counterpart in England, nor can one compare them to the Scotch crofter, the Irish peasant, or the little Welsh farmer with his inextricably mortgaged farm.
The feudal system, which lost its objectionable features so early in England, and broadened and altered, without losing its grip on the land, in a fashion quite English but wholly in- explicable, still retains a strong bold on English acres. The ancestral estate is still here. On the Continent it has in many cases been swept away ; in France it went " by the board," as a sailor would say. That is why we have not a credit bank on the Raiffeisen system in every village. The man—the small peasant-holder—cannot be found, and the pig and cabbages of the labourer scarcely give him scope for the smallest loan.
Yet we have agricultural credit banks—there are already a do: en of them—the co-operative system has got its foot in, and there are enough small men in certain districts whose crops are sold before they are ripe, to whom these banks should be helpful, besides the " three-acres-and-a-cow " man. We once had a communal system ; it may one day live again in a very different outward form. But village banks never can have the growth they have had abroad till the class they cater for is numerous enough to support them. This, and the natural disinclination of the Englishman to " pool " his ideas and his experience, are the real reasons that co-operation is slow in coming. It is not the fault of the railways altogether.
' They have done something ; they carry a gallon of milk a hundred miles for a penny, and some of their rates cannot reasonably be lowered. But some think they might do more. Nor can one expect a tender interest from them for every pet scheme. We would say to the small farmer,—Group your purchases and your consignments where possible. The rail- ways will not be common carriers of brown-paper parcels.
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