794 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



have tried to perpetuate the class distinction they should 

 have aided in removing. But time is surely remedying the 

 evil. 



Third, free libraries are arising everywhere, and while the 

 great demand at these for "trashy novels" may indicate that 

 the sensuous or cognitic is too often fostered at the expense 

 of the cogitic and spiritic, yet the reading habit of one genera- 

 tion may become the reading and thinking habit of the suc- 

 ceeding one, later still the reading and thinking and socially 

 acting one. But what previous century could ever boast of 

 having like the nineteenth, at least 300,000,000 of intelligent 

 readers.^ The present century also will have at least as many 

 thoughtful ones by its close. 



Fourth, thanks to the sanctified humanity and far-seeing 

 wisdom of Robert Owen and the Rochdale cooperators, every 

 civilized nation has become netted over with Cooperative socie- 

 ties that for the past half century have slowly been evolving 

 a better and truly social form of industry and commercialism. 

 At first merely mutual distributive groups of working men or 

 of the professional and civil workers, the movement within 

 a quarter century of its establishment took on a cooperative 

 — one might truly say a socialistic — productive character. 

 The competitors — the tigers — of commerce have tried hard 

 to undermine the growth and usefulness of both phases of 

 development, but the whole has now passed beyond the stage 

 of experiment or even of danger. The writer can never forget 

 the intense thrill of pleasure he felt, when a few years ago he 

 attended a great annual gathering and exhibition of coopera- 

 tors in the Crystal Palace, London. An imposing orchestra 

 of male and female cooperators filled the grand hall with music; 

 a cooperator's flower show was made up of about 1500 ex- 

 hibits; the display of cooperators products included finely 

 finished samples of practically every requisite for ci^dlized 

 life. Then one learned that nine perfectly equipped steam- 

 ships formed the peaceful cooperative fleet that plied between 

 Denmark, Sweden, Holland, France, and other countries, bring- 

 ing commodities direct from producer to consumer. This 



