Chapter V 

 CO-OPERATION 



If co-operation — in the sense in which that term is now commonly 

 employed — does not, as observed, cover the entire ground of what is 

 here pleaded for as " organisation," it certainly constitutes the larger 

 portion of it, and the most powerful moving factor in it. Without 

 co-operation — real and genuine co-operation, such as Rochdale 

 devised and as men like Vansittart Neale and Ludlow spent their 

 lives in labouring for — organisation, such as we require for the 

 regeneration of rural life, is not conceivable. Certainly not that 

 community building, which we picture to ourselves as a way to the 

 ideal condition of rural organisation, which is to repeople our 

 countrysides, replenish our villages and bring happiness and con- 

 tentment to the mass — now to be largely augmented, as we hope — of 

 tillers of the soil. That is because for such work unity of sentiment 

 and dovetailing of interests, close touch and general mutual con- 

 fidence are indispensable prerequisites. And there is no unifier 

 either of sentiment or of interest, no producer of mutual trust and 

 confidence like co-operation. 



Of the value and the remarkable creative power of co-operation 

 there can to-day be no occasion to speak. Those two qualities 

 stand brilliantly evidenced in the splendid and wonderful success of 

 our own co-operative distributive movement ; in the rapid upgrowing 

 of co-operation to a great power elsewhere, following on the heels of 

 emancipation, the " one hope" — in a Russian statesman's words — for 

 the resurrection of his distressingly divided country ; in the astonishing 

 success attained in India, and in the scarcely less creditable benefits 

 which co-operation has brought to agriculture and country life in 

 Germany, Austria, Italy, Denmark, Belgium, France, Sweden and 

 Norway, and already in the New World, with the Balkan States, 

 Spain and Portugal following in the wake. There has, indeed, 

 never been a Midas touch like that of this beneficent power, nor so 

 fruitful a generator of popular education, stimulating, with the 

 growth of worldly possessions, the thirst for knowledge and the 

 longing for higher treasures, and slaking it, and knitting people 

 together by a community of feeling into one enlarged family. Look 

 at those happy communities in Rhineland, united, under Raifieisen's 

 magic shaping, described by a Hungarian professor as " a world of 



