Abstract

It is these and other better class of landholders that must begin to improve their relations with their tenants, and the rest will follow their lead. Co-operative societies must be established everywhere, where the landlord and the labourer must sit as equals and conduct the business of the society. To gó into the possibilities of co-operation would be to go astray. But I will quote a few sentences from an address of the Hon. Dewan Bahadur L. D. Swamikannu Pillai at the 3rd Agricultural Conference of the Union. A resident landlord "can best help his tenant by establishing a co-perative society, where they as well as he will be members. There is another way in which a landlord can do good to his tenants through co-operative societies, that is by investing his money in the societies, to which his tenants belong." It is by co-operation that most of the foregoing improvements will be thoroughly effected. "For the indirect and immediate effects of co-operation, its diffusion of knowledge, its remarkable educational capacity, its powerful stimulation of thought and which among them teach men to cultivate better, to select the most paying crops for each particular use, to turn their produce to more profitable account, to settle in groups, promoting well-being all round, to make the country prosperous and happier, and its immeasurable value as enabling us at length to make the rural social reform, so long fondly dreamt of, so often attempted, a palpable reality, by producing once more a peasantry comfortably and permanently settled on the soil, ought certainly not to be left out of account."‡

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