F 
FERDINAND LASSALLE. 
65 
subsidy, or guarantee a minimum interest to the company ? It 
would require a smaller advance for co-operative societies than 
for railways. Lassalle estimated that one hundred millions of 
thalers would suffice for Prussia, and added that it would cost 
the tax-payers nothing. According to him, there should be one 
pand central bank established, having a monopoly of the 
issue of notes, so that it could easily circulate three hundred 
million thalers upon a reserve of one-third. Thus it would 
hav^ for the purpose of loans to co-operative societies, two 
hundred millón thalers, which would have cost it nothing. 
I hese societies should first be established in the districts best 
adapted to them by reason of the nature of the trade carried 
on in them, the density of the population, and the disposition 
of the labourers. Gradually other societies would be founded 
m all branches of labour, and even in the rural districts. 
Agriculture, when conducted on a large scale, yields a 
larger net produce ; but it has this drawback, it is incompatible 
with small properties. Agricultural co-operation would reunite 
he advantages of the petite and of Úiq grande culture, and thus 
transform the entire agrarian system to the advantage of the 
whole community. With one hundred millions of thalers, the 
necessary industrial capital could be supplied to four hundred 
thousand working men, and with the annual interest, at five per 
cent., namely, five millions, the benefits of the association 
might be annually extended to twenty thousand new work 
ing men and their families. These societies would establish 
among themselves relations of joint responsibility and credit, 
Which would insure to them great solidity. Thus, after the 
apse of a short time, instead of offering a spectacle of capi- 
miists and labourers hostile to each other, the nation would be 
tirely composed of working-men capitalists, grouped together 
to n? ‘"u would by no means have 
play the part of director or contractor of industry: far less, 
eed, than it does at present in the case of the railways 
ch It works. All It would have to do would be to examine 
conf statutes of the societies, and to exercise a 
week ° Kthe funds advanced. Each 
e workmen would receive the wages usual in the