ORGANISATION. 167 



in Italy, farming their 800 and 1,000 acres each, consider 

 themselves every bit as good as their landlords. And our 

 very successful Eastern Counties Farmers' Co-operative 

 Association is for the most part composed of large farmers 

 in those counties. From what will still be said it will, 

 I think, appear that large farmers, like small, are likely to 

 find their account in Co-operation. Indeed, there are cases 

 in which simple Co-operation, in one Union, is scarcely 

 found sufficient. That was so when the farmers of Germany 

 felt it to be their interest to combine in overwhelming 

 numbers to defeat the unfairly profit-seeking scheme of 

 the associated owners of potash deposits. To vanquish 

 them — as they eventually did — the existing specifically 

 " co-operative " unions, with their millions of members, 

 found it advisable to combine, not only among themselves, 

 but also to call in the aid of other great associations of 

 farmers, the great Agricultural Society, and the powerful 

 Federation of Farmers. 



As already indicated. Co-operation — which is Organisa- 

 tion — has taken a somewhat different shape in its develop- 

 ment among industrial workers from what is required in 

 the service of Agriculture. The industrial worker Hiys. 

 He produces nothing except the work which is paid for 

 according to arrangement. The aim of his Co-operation 

 is, to buy cheaply and to buy genuine goods, in order to 

 be able to lay by and so attain economic independence. 

 Among those labouring men who make up the mass of 

 our industrial Co-operation it is, accordingly, the distributive 

 side which has claimed first attention and for the time 

 carried the field. At the outset it was not so. When the 

 late J. M. Ludlow brought the doctrine of working men's 

 Co-operation, engendered by the spirit of the French 

 Revolution, across to our country, the great aim of the 

 movement was proudly owned to be the emancipation of 

 the workman, the raising of the wage earner to Ihe position 

 of a self-employer, the liberation of Labour, not as a consum- 

 ing but as a producing force. The new doctrine was 

 enthusiastically taken up by Denison Maurice, Kingsley, 

 Vansittart Neale, Huglies, and some more, who succeeded — 



