remarked: "Herb, you've made just $15,000 for me" "but he never offered to give me a red cent of those thousands: that wasn't his style."

Then followed fifteen kaleidoscopic years: cook, motorman, clerk in a large wholesale provision-house, worker in his brother's country butchery, partner, owner of his own business, a prosperous employer, worth some thousands of dollars, suddenly a bankrupt, ruined by the treachery of the one nearest to him, beginning life again alone with a capital of five dollars as grocer's clerk, manager of the store, partner again, selling out to incompetent associates, in charge of another storeruined by the dissipation of his generous backer, a brief partnership with "a snake," and once more a fresh start.

He was now manager of the coöperative store from which I had seen him emerge, and which, with 160 stockholders and 200 customers, had in a year's operation increased its business from $25 a day to nearly $150, making a surplus of $300 in this hardest first twelvemonth, and

with bright prospects of a substantial dividend the following year.

In spite, or possibly because, of his unfortunate experience with human nature as employer and partner, he was a profound enthusiast on coöperation as the neglected secret in America of eliminating waste, reducing the cost of living, raising the producers' profits, and increasing the practical, everyday application of the brotherhood of the human race, which is the foundation of real democracy and true religion.

Thus, in an idle half hour, I suddenly came upon one of the most vital and significant movements of our time-a movement of the utmost importance to me personally, as farmer and consumer, but of whose existence I had been unaware.

Indeed, had anybody asked me about Coöperation in New England," I should have replied like the Irishman when he first saw a giraffe, "there ain't no sich animal." I knew of the incredible things being done abroad through this means: the nearly three million members of

coöperative associations in England (representing probably twelve million human beings), owning $275,000,000 of goods, land, buildings, machinery, and investments, doing an an annual business of $500,000,000, and making $60,000,000 profits a year; of the equally amazing achievements in Scotland, where Mr. William Maxwell, head of the Scottish Wholesale Society, conducts a $50,000,000 business on a salary of $38 a week, and where many members save enough on their living expenses to pay their rent and

of the most impressive "people's palaces" of Belgium, with their free club-rooms, libraries, concerts, theatres, and parks, and the vast expenditures for free medical aid, old-age pensions, maternity subsidies, day nurseries, and sickness and death benefits-all representing the Socialist application of savings made by the members of coöperative societies; of the rapid extension of this idea in Russia, France, Germany, Hungary, Bohemia, Spain, Bulgaria, Servia, India, Japan, South Africa, Argentina, Canada-till to-day 50,000,000

leave them a balance of cash every year; of the practical regeneration of hopeless Ireland in twenty-two years through the coöperative dairying and the joint buying of Sir Horace Plunkett's Agricultural Organization Society; of the complete transformation of Denmark in a century, from a waste of sand dunes and a strip of impoverished farms to the wealthiest country of Europe in proportion to its population - through the most highly perfected system of coöperative selling and buying the world has yet seen;

consumers all over the globe are represented at the International Coöperative Congress - the most tremendous world association that the human race has yet developed.

I knew, too, that in our own country the huge citrus fruit and apple industry of the Pacific Coast had been made possible by coöperation; that the farmers of Wisconsin and Minnesota were fifty years ahead of the East in joint planting, harvesting, seed-purchasing, and the like; and a number of sporadic efforts in other

picturing what his hearers could do by combining), when asked what he thought of it all: "Let 'em blow: they can't hurt me noan." And I should have said that the apostle of human brotherhood, even when using the primary argument of saving money by working together, had a long career marked out when he came to proselyte in New England.

But mighty is an Idea, if it happens to be the truth. Dr. James Ford, in his admirable book recently issued, "Coöperation in New England," lists twenty-seven coöperative stores, of native Americans or English emigrants, in cities and towns of Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, with about 13,000 members, doing a yearly business of more than $1,500,000, and (unrelated and each working alone as they are) saving perhaps $150,000 a year for those who buy through them.

More than half of these have been started in the last decade.

Dr. Ford found, also, thirty stores in Massachusetts and one in Vermont, serving 5,000 or more Swedish, Belgian, French, German, Lithuanian, Finnish, Hebrew, Polish, and Italian workingmen, and saving a small percentage on the million or so dollars of yearly purchases.

Moreover, largely through the granges, there exists to-day some form of coöperative production (like creameries), or marketing, or buying among farmers in almost every township of western New England, there being, for instance, 125 joint creameries (probably 25 of them of the purely democratic type); strong organizations for the selling of fruit, cranberries, potatoes, flowers, and market garden produce; supply associations for wholesale buying of grain and fertilizers in every one of the six states; besides many stores and purchasing clubs, chiefly among the 150,000 grange members.

In addition to these, there are numberless semi-democratic associations, who buy jointly from the Harvard Coöperative Society (which has effectively served its members for a quarter of a century, and which last year did a business, in books, clothes, furnishings, furniture, stationery, coal, and wood, of $393,000saving 9 per cent. besides large contri

butions to reserve and building funds) down to the little informal clubs of six to a dozen men at the state colleges, who pool their grocery orders, buy at wholesale rates, and cut off 20 per cent. of the cost.

And even these surprising figures are undoubtedly far from the whole story; for Dr. Ford discovered, in gathering his statistics, that with the single exception of one bulletin in 1907 on "Distributive Coöperation in New England" by the Massachusetts Labor Bureau there has been no official cognizance whatever of this whole movement. In only one of the six states did the state department of agriculture know more than a handful of the cooperative organizations among its farmers!

I venture to predict that the next five years will see some most far-reaching changes and developments in this matter. There are unmistakable signs of an awakening consciousness in our democracy of the potency of this principle of combination, which has in England created the monster coöperative movement (above referred to), whereas we, by neglecting the keystone fact of modern life, have permitted our captains of industry to use it for their own aggrandizement and pile up billions of dollars in the hands of a few trust organizers and directors.

Among these significant facts are:

(1) The creation by the new United States Secretary of Agriculture of a Bureau of Rural Organization, under the direction of Prof. T. N. Carver, of the Harvard Department of Economics, one of the ablest and most constructive social philosophers of our generation. This new bureau is to study and develop coöperative buying and selling among the farmers, following out the recommendation of Mr. Roosevelt's Country Life Commission. The time is about ripe for a federation of all these associations for agricultural buying, management, production, and selling, which would be the first step toward revolutionizing farming in the United States.

(2) Conferences were held at Plymouth, Mass., and Attleboro, Mass., in April by twenty-five delegates from successful coöperative stores the associations of Plymouth, Greystone, North Dighton, Attleboro, Lynn, and Jamaica Plain, with the

Palmer Coöperative Store of Boston, the Coöperative Association of Bank Men, the Interstate Coöperative Union, and others that will probably result in the immediate formation of a central wholesale buying society, which, by purchasing for all these societies and other affiliated ones, will greatly increase their savings.

This is the first trembling step here along the path blazed in Great Britain, where since 1902 the English and Scotch wholesale societies have been combined, so that in 1909 this central body acted for nearly 1,500 wholesale societies in purchases aggregating more than $160,000,000. This advance is due largely to the initiative and enthusiasm of Dr. Francis F. Whittier, of Boston, head of the Consumers' Coöperative Company, and founder of the Interstate Coöperative Union, an organization for spreading education on this subject, directed by such men as Dr. Whittier, Dr. James Ford, Mr. Harry C. Bentley, head of the Boston School of Commerce, Mr. John Stone Allen, assistant editor of the Youth's Companion, Mr. George H. Brown, of Brown & Nichols's School, and others. Dr. Whittier is a physician, who, after a successful professional career (and as founder of the New England Baptist Hospital), has for nearly three years spent his time in helping the coöperative idea in the Eastern United States. He came to it through the church: his professional work twenty-five years ago among the poor of New York and Boston, and his effort to work out what he calls "applied Christianity." He started a dispensary in Boston in connection with the Ruggles Street Baptist Church; and in casting about for other means of alleviating the human misery which confronted him, he gradually saw that the best way to help these unfortunates was to teach them their power to help themselves the principle, of course, applying as well to a professional man making $20,000 a year as to a laborer at $2 a day. (An additional impetus was given to his thoughts in this direction, by the way, through an article in the WORLD'S WORK on the prodigious success of coöperation in some of the Western States.)

About a year ago he started the Consumers' Coöperative Company, at 149 Tremont St., Boston, which, with a membership fee of $5, sells to its members "standard goods at standard prices," from pianos and automobiles to watches, stoves, clothing, nursery stock, and whatnot. The member pays full price in advance, and half the discount secured from the manufacturer is at once credited to his account (so that the initial $5 is usually wiped out on the first $25 worth of purchases), there being also a probability of a future dividend from the other half of the discount.

This company is not purely coöperative, in the democratic sense, because the stock is not all held by the members on a oneman-one-vote plan; but its founder plans, when the public is sufficiently educated and the society is strong enough, to turn it into the straight Rochdale type. Meanwhile, he stands as one of the foremost working figures in the New England coöperative movement.

(3) Another tremendous advance was made last year by the Producers and Consumers' Exchange of Maine. As I have said. many of the special New England crops have strong selling organizations: the flower-growers of Eastern Massachusetts have for twenty years coöperated to some extent, and the Boston Coöperative Flower Market is to-day an effective association for joint leasing and purchasing; the Market Gardens of Hartford also purchase jointly and sell in uniform association boxes; the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers' Association has for twenty years tested, graded, packed, and sold its members' product; the Maine Potato Growers' Exchange, started in the summer of 1911, had sold for its 500 members, by January, 1912, 667,000 bushels of potatoes; and last July nine farmers' unions federated at Bangor for the purchase of machinery and fertilizer and the sale of potatoes on a commission of only one cent a bushel; four associations of Maine and Massachusetts fruit-growers were planning, in 1911, a New England Fruit Growers' Union; since 1907, the New England Cranberry Sales Company has been grading and packing, advertising,