THE NEW EARTH 



with profits for that current year amounting 

 to two hundred and forty thousand dollars. 

 Prosperity was to be seen on every hand. 

 Cooperation had transformed the people, had 

 lifted them from debt, had given them com- 

 fortable homes, had provided opportunities for 

 cultivation, had made self-reliant men out of 

 worse than slaves, had transmuted squalor into 

 comfort. 



Slowly the idea spread and took root in 

 other lands. In 1905 there were about fifty 

 thousand cooperative societies in Europe out- 

 side of Great Britain, more than eight hundred 

 thousand members of the agricultural coopera- 

 tive societies in France alone. There are in 

 England, as an outgrowth of the Pioneer 

 society of Rochdale, nearly two thousand socie- 

 ties with more than two million members and 

 nearly one hundred and fifty million dollars 

 in capital. I stood in front of the somber 

 building in Toad Lane, Rochdale, where the 

 handful of weavers met that dull November 

 day in 1844, to free themselves from pov- 

 erty. It was a building long given over to 

 other occupations, unattractive and down-at- 

 the-heel, but it should be forever preserved as 



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