Happily there are signs that, in Indian agriculture at least, the transition period is working itself out and that conditions may soon be on the mend. Both the British Government and the native princes have vied with one another in spreading Western agricultural ideas and methods, and since the Indian peasant has proved much more receptive than has the Indian artisan, a more intelligent type of farmer is developing, better able to keep step with the times. A good instance is the growth of rural co-operative credit societies. First introduced by the British Government in 1904, there were in 1915 more than 17,000 such associations, with a total of 825,000 members and a working capital of nearly $30,000,000. These agricultural societies make loans for the purchase of stock, fodder, seed, manure, sinking of wells, purchase of Western agricultural machinery, and, in emergencies, personal maintenance. In the districts where they have established themselves they have greatly diminished the plague of usury practised by the "banyas," or village money-lenders, lowering the rate of interest from its former crushing range of 20 to 75 per cent. to a range averaging from 9 to 18 per cent. Of course such phenomena are as yet merely exceptions to a very dreary rule. Nevertheless, they all point toward a brighter morrow.[231] But this brighter agricultural morrow is obviously far off, and in industry it seems to be farther still. Meanwhile the changing Orient is full of suffering and discontent. What wonder that many Orientals ascribe their troubles, not to the process of economic transition, but to the political control of European governments and the economic exploitation of Western capital. The result is agitation for emancipation from Western economic as well as Western political control. At the end of Chapter II we examined the movement among the Mohammedan peoples known as "Economic Pan-Islamism." A similar movement has arisen among the Hindus of India--the so-called "Swadeshi" movement. The Swadeshists declare that India's economic ills are almost entirely due to the "drain" of India's wealth to England and other Western lands. They therefore advocate a boycott of English goods until Britain grants India self-government, whereupon they propose to erect protective tariffs for Indian products, curb the activities of British capital, replace high-salaried English officials by natives, and thereby keep India's wealth at home.[232]