PEOPLE’S SAVINGS BANKS
The German farmer has achieved democratic banking. The 13,000 little coöperative credit associations, with an average membership of about 90 persons, are truly banks of the people, by the people and for the people.
First: The banks’ resources are of the people. These aggregate about $500,000,000. Of this amount $375,000,000 represents the farmers’ savings deposits; $50,000,000, the farmers’ current deposits; $6,000,000, the farmers’ share capital; and $13,000,000, amounts earned and placed in the reserve. Thus, nearly nine-tenths of these large resources belong to the farmers—that is, to the members of the banks.
Second: The banks are managed by the people—that is, the members. And membership is easily attained; for the average amount of paid-up share capital was, in 1909, less than $5 per member. Each member has one vote regardless of the number of his shares or the amount of his deposits. These members elect the officers. The committees and trustees (and often even, the treasurer) serve without pay: so that the expenses of the banks are, on the average, about $150 a year.
Third: The banks are for the people. The farmers’ money is loaned by the farmer to the farmer at a low rate of interest (usually 4 per cent. to 6 per cent.); the shareholders receiving, on their shares, the same rate of interest that the borrowers pay on their loans. Thus the resources of all farmers are made available to each farmer, for productive purposes.
This democratic rural banking is not confined to Germany. As Henry W. Wolff says in his book on coöperative banks:
“Propagating themselves by their own merits, little people’s coöperative banks have overspread Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Belgium. Russia is following up those countries; France is striving strenuously for the possession of coöperative credit. Servia, Roumania, and Bulgaria have made such credit their own. Canada has scored its first success on the road to its acquisition. Cyprus, and even Jamaica, have made their first start. Ireland has substantial first-fruits to show of her economic sowings.
“South Africa is groping its way to the same goal. Egypt has discovered the necessity of coöperative banks, even by the side of Lord Cromer’s pet creation, the richly endowed ‘agricultural bank.’ India has made a beginning full of promise. And even in far Japan, and in China, people are trying to acclimatize the more perfected organizations of Schulze-Delitzsch and Raffeisen. The entire world seems girdled with a ring of coöperative credit. Only the United States and Great Britain still lag lamentably behind.”