COOPERATION 



1569 



COOPERATION 



New York City may enjoy educational advan- 

 tages by means of day and evening classes, 

 lectures, reading rooms and art and scientific 

 collections. There are courses in technical 

 science and art, stenography, typewriting and 

 telegraphy, decoration and architecture, elo- 

 quence, oratory and debating; degrees are 

 given in civil, electrical and mechanical engi- 

 neering. The building, erected at a cost of 

 $630,000, is located at the densely-populated 

 point where the Bowery divides into Third 

 and Fourth avenues. Additional gifts since 

 the establishment of the Union, including 

 $600,000 from Andrew Carnegie, have brought 

 the endowment to over $2,000,000. B.M.W. 



COOPERATION, ko op er a' shun. When the 

 first crude savages learned that two men work- 

 ing together could lift a stone which one man 

 alone could scarcely move, industrial coopera- 

 tion began. But so firmly has mankind held 

 to the distinction "mine and thine," and to 

 the idea that the only way to make mine 

 greater is to make thine less, that joint labor 

 for mutual benefit has 'until very recently been 

 classed among the schemes that sound well 

 but are not practical, beyond very narrow lim- 

 its. In the last year of the eighteenth century 

 Robert Owen, a British factory owner whose 

 story is told in these volumes, began experi- 

 ments which proved it profitable for an em- 

 ployer to regard his men as fellow-workers; 

 since his time cooperation has been success- 

 fully introduced into the industrial world in 

 many forms. In general, the word cooperative 

 is limited to democratic organizations for 

 mutual advantage in buying, in selling, in bor- 

 rowing and in producing, but the cooperative 

 spirit is evident in many other present-day 

 activities and is the basis of public ownership 

 of railroads and other public utilities. 



Cob'perative Buying. One December day in 

 1844 the dwellers in Toad Lane in the city of 

 Rochdale, England, witnessed the quiet open- 

 ing of a modest little store whose stock of 

 foodstuffs had been purchased with subscrip- 

 tions of a few cents from each of its owners. 

 To-day a visitor to Great Britain will find 1,500 

 stores, ranging in size from the smallest of 

 shops to those which do a business of a million 

 dollars a month, together operating an enor- 

 mous wholesale society, several factories, farms, 

 plantations in the tropics and a fleet of ocean- 

 going steamships all owned by the people 

 who buy the goods and all the result of the 

 venture in Toad Lane. 

 The Rochdale plan, almost exactly as out- 

 99 



lined by its founders, is the guide not only for 

 the British stores but also for a few hundred 

 stores in the United States and Canada and 

 thousands in other countries. Its distinctive 

 features are that no member can hold more 

 than one share of capital and that dividends 

 are paid in proportion to the value of goods 

 purchased, not the amount invested. In Eng- 

 land one share of capital is worth five pounds, 

 but to join one needs to pay but a shilling. 

 At the end of the year this stockholder re- 

 ceives interest on his share, and if he has 

 spent a hundred pounds at the store he will 

 be given back perhaps six pounds of it. At 

 first this will be applied to the sum owed on 

 his five-pound share, but afterward it comes in 

 cash and so reduces the cost of living. 



Cooperative Selling. No other country has 

 applied the principle of cooperation so exten- 

 sively as Denmark. In this land of prosperous 

 small farmers it would be difficult to find a 

 farmer who is not a member of at least one 

 '.cooperative society. The cooperative dairies 

 ' export more butter than all the dairies in any 

 other country, and return profits to each farmer 

 in proportion to the value of the milk he con- 

 tributes. The Londoner at his breakfast may 

 have fruit, fresh eggs and bacon, beet sugar 

 and honey, all with their quality certified by 

 Danish cooperative societies. In a little more 

 than thirty years cooperation has transformed 

 Denmark from a poor nation to one of indi- 

 viduals uniformly prosperous. 



On a smaller scale other countries have met 

 with success in cooperative selling of farm 

 products. Not many years ago the fruit grow- 

 ers of California were unable to get the full 

 value of their crops because of the profits 

 taken by the middleman the person who 

 bought their fruit and marketed it in the East. 

 To-day, through cooperation, the growers 

 themselves get these ' profits, and the fruit 

 comes to the public in better condition than 

 before. The farmers of the grain belt had a 

 similar experience. Now farmers in the United 

 States have several thousand cooperative ele- 

 vator societies (though in 1911 there were only 

 300), and grain growers in Saskatchewan and 

 Alberta are organized into strong and profit- 

 able provincial associations. These are but 

 two of many such instances. 



Cooperative Banking. If a man of small 

 means needs to borrow money he will find it 

 difficult, but if several men join together the 

 affair is made easy. Similarly, a man with a 

 small amount of money to invest is at a dis- 



