26 



THE CliE-KEEPERS' REVIEW. 



these words: 'Shall the commercial 

 interests hold down the farmers any 

 longer? Shall the bee-keepers (and 

 bee-keeping is a branch of farming) 

 continue to crush one another? To 

 each, I say, no.' Politicians? What 

 have they to do with the matter? That 

 word stamps the whole article as so- 

 cialism in disguise. The great defect 

 of socialism is not so much in its ideas 

 (always excepting its communistic ex- 

 tremes), as in the way it would apply 

 them. It would work from the top 

 down, instead of beginning from the 

 top up. Reforms are not usually car- 

 ried through in that way. When thoy 

 are thus carried through, as in the case 

 of our civil war, they are attended 

 with terrible injustice and suffering; 

 and they may not be carried through 

 at all when attempted, yet cause the 

 same Injustice and suffering as in the 

 case of the French revolution. Not 

 oven if it could be done by the peace- 

 ful use of the ballot, should it be at- 

 tempted now. That would still be 

 working from the top down. Social- 

 ism has no rights as a political party 

 yet. When it has actually done, on a 

 small scale, what it theorizes about 

 on a large scale, when it can point to 

 farmers' associations in every town, 

 each with its town warehouse and 

 manager, and its daily freight wagon 

 for every main road, bringing in milk, 

 cream, butter, eggs, chickens, and so 

 forth, and carrying out groceries and 

 mail, when it can point to a brick- 

 layers' association in every city that 

 employs one of its own members to 

 serve as contractor, paying him the 

 wages he deserves and no more, and 

 putting in the pockets of its individ- 

 ual members the profits that contrac- 

 tors usually make, and can point to 

 similar associations of other trades- 

 then, and not before, should larger 

 combinations be attempted or thought 

 of. Not until the people are thorough- 

 ly educated by actual experience in 



co-operative lines, so that each new 

 move shall be a legitimate growth, 

 should it ever be made a political ven- 

 ture. That time may not be far 

 ahead, after all. But one thing is 

 certain, that real effectiveness on a 

 large scale cannot be secured in any 

 other way than by effectiveness on a 

 small scale first. If a few farmers 

 on each main road would organize 

 just as oiu- Honey Producers' Associa- 

 tion has done, with a warehouse and 

 manager, and capital consisting of 

 shares of stock drawing interest but 

 not dividends, dividing the net profits 

 among individual members according 

 to the actual business transacted 

 through the association by each, and 

 would let the rest of the farmers go, 

 and paj" no attention to them, except 

 when they wanted to come in one at 

 a time, they would be successful from 

 the start, without wasting time and 

 energy on that baseless political idea 

 that everybody has to be in an enter- 

 prise to make it a success, or that the 

 majority shall force everybody to act 

 in a certain way, and they would be 

 laying the surest and quickest founda- 

 tion for that future development into 

 general use and conservation of land, 

 and steel plate roads, and so forth, 

 that Mr. Daggitt so glowingly de- 

 scribes, and would not be sacrificing 

 individualism and the incentive to 

 labor for improvements by commun- 

 istic ownership of land. 



"Mr. Aikin. in the Rocky Mountain 

 Bee Journal, brings up the idea of 

 making the National marketing asso- 

 ciation a stock company. It does seem 

 as if that would be the best plan, for 

 it would provide the capital to an ex- 

 tent no other scheme can. But the 

 difficulty is, how to do so and retain 

 the intimate connection with local or- 

 ganizations afforded by the repre- 

 sentative plan? It has to be either 

 one or the other. It cannot be both by 

 any plan I can think of. A stock com- 



