and selling this product, immeasurably raising the standards, and doing for its 253 members a business of $622,000 in 1910-11 (including more than half of the Cape Cod crop) at a ridiculously small cost. Another most interesting new plan is the Middlesex Coöperative Garden Company, organized at Hudson, Mass., in 1910 which has spent $15,000 in preparing its 1,000 acres for growing asparagus and apples, on the basis of common ownership, operation, and, ultimately, selling and buying, aiming to educate its members to the last pitch of agricultural science and to produce an ideal community farm.

But beyond all these, in some aspects, is the action of the Producers and Consumers' Exchange, of Brunswick, Me., which proved a failure, owing to the old, old cause of poor business management, but the idea of which is practical. This coöperative concern cut loose from the grange and opened its membership to all farmers, with the aim of becoming "the sole middleman between the Maine farmer and the Boston consumer." Its more than 2,000 farmer members could ship their produce in carload lots to the potato house which the Exchange had in Boston, fronting on the railroad track, or they might send goods in lesser bulk to the society's store - the Exchange having decided to take city consumers into membership and to sell at retail as well as wholesale. The plan was to secure for the farmer wholesale prices (much more than he now gets), sell to the consumer at 10 per cent. advance on this (much less than he now pays), and distribute profits, out of the 10 per cent. above expenses, to both producer and user.

Here we have the Big Thing which is bound to come as soon as the man who grows something and the man who uses it realize what each pays for the present absurd, cumbersome, wasteful method of getting this something from one to the other. And here is where the Government's new bureau can be of inestimable service. Consider, for an instant, some details of the present method:

(a) A few months ago a truck farmer hauled a load of lettuce five miles into

the Boston market. There was a glut of lettuce just then. Several dealers would make no offer at all. At last one offered him 5 cents a crate (holding 18 heads) which, of course, wouldn't pay for the crate alone. The farmer turned away, declaring he'd haul his lettuce back home and feed it to his hogs. Yet that very day thousands of heads of lettuce were being bought by consumers in that very city for from 5 cents to 8 cents apiece!

(b) Dr. Whittier, of the Consumers' Coöperative Company, purchased recently a lot of fine parsnips for 20 cents a bushel — the wooden box alone being worth about half that. On the same day his household bought parsnips at retail at 5 cents a pound.

(c) A case of personal experience: last fall the apple market went bad, and from our Maine farm we hauled 100 barrels of our crop of beautiful Baldwins to the railroad station and dumped them into a freight car at $1 a barrel — perhaps one tenth of a cent an apple, net. Yet apples no better were retailing in the city five miles away for from 2 to 5 cents apiece.

(d) The Consumers' Company received an order for a set of dining room furniture in high-grade quartered oak - six chairs, sideboard, and china closet. A big manufacturer made a price of $450. It seemed high. The next man quoted $375. The company at once took the order themselves at $275, had the furniture built, duplicating the stock quoted on, to the purchaser's entire satisfaction—and made a profit of $85 on the transaction.

One could fill this magazine with similar absurdities. Of every dollar which you, the consumer, spend, I, the producer, receive about 35 cents. The 65 cents goes to a series of middlemen, occasionally in excessive profits, but far more frequently in waste between them and in their hands. Investigation into the causes of the high price of meat, for example, has shown clearly that producer nor wholesaler nor retailer was making exorbitant profits: the main trouble was that there were too many retail butcher shops, each doing too small a business, maintaining expensive stores and delivery service, and duplicating one another's delivery expense.

It comes back mainly to that character

istic American crime of waste, the elimination of which by shrewd individuals has been the major element in founding many of our greatest fortunes as when Mr. John D. Rockefeller built the Standard Oil pipe lines; or when P. D. Armour, noticing a stream of dirty water from a pipe in one of his slaughter-houses, demanded what was in it and was assured it was "only bristles from the hogs" that dirty bristle-water being at present the basis of a great industry employing thousands of men.

So the question becomes: How long are the American people (with the objectlesson before them of Great Britain-whom we laugh at as slow and old-fogeyish as well as almost every other civilized country), how long are we going to continue to whine about the High Cost of Living when we are throwing away millions of dollars every day in preventable wastes, which could be saved by simply applying the principle of democracy to such everyday matters as buying what we use and selling what we produce?

If the consumer can save 20 per cent. and the farmer get 20 per cent. more by getting together, isn't it about time they got together?

There isn't any question nowadays about the coöperative supply store. Any group of a score or more consumers, homogeneous enough to work in unison, can reduce the cost of much of what they use from 10 per cent. to 20 per cent. by applying ordinary good business management and the principles which have been tested for nearly seventy years. That little group of flannel weavers at Rochdale, England, who met in 1844, out of work and in desperate straits, to consider how they might jointly better their condition, by some miracle corrected the practical errors in the plan of Robert Owen, the pioneer of coöperation, and formulated basic principles which have carried hundreds of coöperative stores to success.

These were:

1. Capital should be of their own providing and bear a fixed rate of interest.

2. Only the purest provisions obtainable should be supplied to members.

3. Honest measure should prevail.

4. Market prices should be charged and no credit given or asked.

5. Profits should be divided in proportion to the total amount of purchases made by every member (with deduction for dividend and education as herein noted. See I and 8).

6. The principle of "one member, one vote" and the equality of the sexes in membership should obtain.

7. The management should be in the hands of the officers and committee, elected periodically.

8. A definite percentage of profits should be allotted to education.

Every failure recorded, and there have been hundreds, has been due to poor management (which will ruin anything, from a church to a saloon), lack of coöperation, or a departure from these rules.

There is no possibility of failure to-day with the exercise of the same intelligence a man would use in any ordinary business. A society of workingmen, of farmers, of clerks, of professional men, of anything, has this modern discovery at its command, if it will but use it.

And let us face the truth about the most discussed question of our day in this country: that the trust problem is what it is, is our own fault. We have failed in the democratic, in the Christian, ideal, by failing to work together, and leaving to a few forceful individuals the powers of this tremendous force of Combination the primary recognition of which was man's first step toward civilization, but whose full development in business and industry has come only in our own time.

That is to say, we have permitted a few men to combine us, or deal with us separately, for their profit, instead of combining ourselves for our own profit.

Police legislation may have been needed, may still be needed, to cope with the concentrations of industry and wealth; but the effects of such political and legislative efforts are as nothing compared with the simplest exercise of the collective power of the consumers. You, as an individual, may receive scant notice from a railroad president, a banking magnate, a great manufacturer, a trust manager controlling a necessity of life;

but you or I, as the spokesman of a hundred, or a thousand, or a million users of that gentleman's product, can rectify any abuses in the twinkling of an eye.

Of course, the true aspect of the thingmuch larger than these animosities, however justified is that a man who eliminates waste adds to the world's wealth.

And surely the nation which ought to lead in a movement of the people, by the

people, for the people, ought to be that one in which the theory of democracy is being tested on the largest scale the world has yet witnessed.

The "effete monarchies" across the water are a generation ahead of us in true democratic coöperation. They have taken the brunt of the pioneering, shown us the way, left a plain blazed trail to success. What are we waiting for?

T

HE Copper Country of Michigan is in the upper peninsula that pokes its nose out into chilly Lake Superior away up near Minnesota. It contains not more than 120,000 people, but it boasts the world's greatest copper mines, that have paid in dividends more than $250,000,000.

In the earlier days in the Copper Country the miners were Cornishmen, Irishmen, and Germans. As the mines burrowed deeper and deeper, and there came a call from "back East" for more and more rock," a scarcity of labor was experienced, and some mining captain established a precedent by importing a carload of Finns. The old-timers called them "roundheads." The name was applied to the first Finn who descended the gangplank from the little steamer which, in former days, plied between L'Anse and Hancock. It referred to his headgear a flat, round cap of leather and astrakhan, very serviceable at home, but an object which compelled attention in the new America and it soon became a token of scorn among all the acknowledged lords of the mining camps. The opposition arose not to aversion to the Finns doing the dirty worktramming, timbering, etc. for no miner

would stoop to such menial and unexpert toil; but to the fact that the Cousin Jacks and the Irish and the Dutch and the Canucks saw in these stolid, indefatigable toilers, who learned slowly but thoroughly, future competitors in their own field. Therefore to "beat up a roundhead" became legitimate sport which for several years was indulged in with little check.

This was the situation when Maggie Walz - one of the first roundhead girls to "settle" in the Copper Country arrived in Hancock in the early 'seventies after her long and terrifying journey from Ofvertornea - the little Swede-Finn village on the banks of the river Tornea, where she was born seventeen years earlier. Maggie came alone, and her store of American money was small, her knowledge of the tongue even smaller. She came to a strange, and, for her people, an inhospitable land. Even her sturdy brothers, with their broad chests and mighty expanse of shoulder, had found it difficult to "hang on." Small wonder then that young "Kreeta," as her mother had christened her, stood staring, roundeyed and afraid. "Kreeta" had been away from home before. Like all other subjects of King Oscar, she had been compelled to attend the Swedish public

schools, which in her case were half a Swedish mile, or three and a half American miles distant. Therefore her winters were spent among strangers, even when she was only a child of seven. But they were strangers who spoke her own tongue and served the same king. America, of which glowing tales had come to the land of the midnight sun, was very different.

She was soon to find, too, that there was little for girls to do in her new home. Women clerks were not looked upon with favor in the mining camps: women were in the minority, and only a few vocations were generally open to them. Kreeta, after countless rebuffs, finally persuaded a good woman to take her into her household as a domestic. In the afternoons, after her housework was done, Kreeta sold sewing machines and pianos and organs. Her evenings she divided between night school and a store where she acted as an extra clerk. Kreeta's ways were not the ways of her mistress; she misunderstood orders and made many mistakes, but she finally mastered the American speech and American mannerisms, and after five years of household service she persuaded William Condon, a pioneer merchant of Hancock, to give her a place in his establishment. She soon showed remarkable ability as a saleswoman. Her influence over her countrymen was marvelous, and it was not long before Kreeta became to all intents and purposes the political leader of the Copper Country, so far as her people, who now numbered thousands, were concerned. Politics was not a new game to Kreeta. In Finland equal suffrage had long been established; in America, she studied the laws and the constitution of her state and Nation, and she advised her countrymen wisely. In financial affairs, also, Kreeta became a counselor. She acted as banker and broker, husbanding and investing the funds which her countrymen placed in her hands. And now Kreeta addressed herself to the moral welfare of her people.

The Finns as a race are not addicted to dissipation, but the temptations of easy money and ready access to liquor shops had proved too much for many of them in their newfound independence. Kreeta

recognized in this tendency to drunkenness one of the causes of the stigma which had unjustly attached itself to her race, and she set about to counteract it. Her first thought was to strike at the evil through the wives and mothers, and the organization of the first Finnish equal suffrage society in America was the result. This led to the publication of Michigan's first paper devoted to the cause of women's suffrage - the Naisten-Lehti (Ladies' Journal), whose editor and proprietor Kreeta became. A Finnish temperance society, the "North Star," was organized, with a large charter membership, and an active campaign was begun against the saloon. In all these activities Kreeta assumed the leadership, and her efforts in this capacity were as effective as they were original.

The progress made, however, was not rapid enough to satisfy Kreeta, and at last she conceived the idea of founding a colony, where her people could be removed from temptation and be given an opportunity to become independent. Thus originated her Drummond Island project, through which she is perhaps best known.

"I found I could not take the saloon from the man, so I took the man from the saloon," said Miss Walz, in speaking of her colonization scheme.

Securing permission from the receiver for the United States land office at Marquette, Miss Walz began eight years ago the colonization of Drummond Island, lying at the head of Lake Michigan. When word of her plans went forth, appeals to be allowed to join in it came from every Finnish settlement in America, from Massachusetts to Montana. More than three hundred applied for homesteads, but Miss Walz accepted only those whom she regarded as best fitted for the hardships of frontier life and as most deserving of assistance. Most of her colonists were men of fifty or older, who had found it impossible with increasing years to support their large families from their earnings in the mines. Only one or two of her pilgrims possessed more than $100 with which to embark for their new home; a majority had not sufficient morey to pay the freight upon their few usehold

goods. Some of the homesteaders came, with Miss Walz's assistance, from Ohio, where a strike was in progress and scores were threatened with starvation. The motley band gathered at Sault Ste. Marie. and there embarked on a steamer chartered by their benefactress. Rude shacks were erected on Drummond Island, and a little ground was cleared the first fall. The long, northern winter was a trying one. The settlers longed for the comparative luxuries which they had enjoyed in their cities and their mining camps. There was little to eat, and the children cried for toys and sweetmeats. Silencing the grumbling of their elders by the example of her patient fortitude, Miss Walz tapped maple trees and made candies for the little ones; gathered the sap of spruce trees that they might have gum; and molded them marbles from clay. Spring came at last, and with it new hope and new determination. The success of the colony did not long remain in doubt. To-day there are four prosperous settlements on Drummond Island, with a total population of nine hundred. During the last few years fourteen of the early homesteaders have "proved up" their claims, and others will become landed proprietors in the near future. A majority of the colonists have their citizenship papers and are making good use of their franchise. Fine cattle and thoroughbred horses are the rule. Comfortable houses with every convenience have replaced the original log huts, and every family has its private bathhouse, for with the Finns what is popularly known as the Finnish bath is a sacred institution. Drummond Island abounds in small fruits and grapes. Its soil is especially adapted to the sugar beet, the culture of which Miss Walz has encouraged. A trial field of roots last season produced 25 per cent. more than Michigan had ever before recorded.

There are three post offices on the island at Drummond, Maxton, and Kreetan. Five schools are maintained throughout the winter months, and the attendance runs as high as sixty. The Kreetan school is probably the only public institution in America, and perhaps in the world, which is attended solely by

Finnish students engaged in learning the

English language. English language. There are four religious congregations and two houses of worship - one a Catholic Church, attended principally by the earlier settlers of the island, and the other used jointly by the Congregationalists, Methodists, and Apostolic Lutherans. Three lumber mills contribute to the industry of the island, and a fine hotel has been erected at Kreetan for the accommodation of travelers. Ten lumber camps were in operation last winter, furnishing employment for everyone who is able to work. In fact, the demand for labor on Drummond Island is so great that it has drawn large colonies from Saginaw and Bay City.

Miss Walz is among the original homesteaders, and, in addition to the 160 acres which she secured from the Government, she has purchased forty acres. She has a beautiful summer residence upon her homestead there. During her residence upon the island, since 1881, she became the godmother of 150 tow-headed, roundeyed Finnish babies, by which it may be surmised that the colony is not destined to die an early death. The colonists are healthy, happy, and contented, realizing the full meaning of independence for the first time in their lives. Boats from De Tour and other places touch daily during the season of navigation, and the people are offered an excellent opportunity of marketing their abundant produce. No intoxicant is sold upon the island.

After seeing her pet scheme well launched, Miss Walz again turned her attention to the Copper Country and its needs. While giving careful attention to her own comfortable fortune, she has found time to participate in the work of twenty-two women's reform organizations; to fill the post of state superintendent over foreign peoples for the Michigan Woman's Christian Temperance Union; and to continue for several years an active contributor to and directing head of the Naisten-Lehti, which she kept on its feet at a considerable financial sacrifice, until a suffrage society was ready to take it over. She is thoroughly in sympathy with the demands of her sex for equal