xvi PEEFACE 



philanthropists ; it threw out some straggHng shoots m the 

 shape of small supply stores among the labouring classes in 

 a few small towns and soon withered away. |But the agri- 

 cultural population, without any inducement from outside, 

 took up the idea^formed first a number of co-operative distribu- 

 tive societies, thereby learned the lesson and then apphed it 

 with ever increasing force to almost all the various branches 

 of their work. Only quite lately has the industrial to"v\Ti 

 population in Denmark shown signs of waking up to the in- 

 fluence of the movement. In England, on the other hand, it 

 is only recently that co-operation has taken hold in agricultural 

 districts, and that co-operative societies have been formed for 

 the furtherance of purely agricultural pursuits. 



That the work of the Kochdale pioneers found no followers 

 among the town labourers of Denmark was probably due to 

 the fact that these were without organisation, and that, at 

 the time, the number of them in any town outside Copenhagen 

 was hardly large enough to support and manage co-operative 

 societies, considering that only a proportion of the labourers 

 could be expected to join them. The conditions among the 

 teeming industrial workers in England with their elaborate 

 organisations were quite different. But why did co-operation 

 thrive in Danish agriculture and leave English agriculture 

 cold ? I beheve the explanation is to be found in differences 

 in their respective conditions in two directions, viz. a difference 

 in the system of rural tenure, and a difference in the social and 

 educational conditions. 



tUi the first place, nearly all agricultural holdings in Den- 

 mark are freehold properties worked by their owners ; and the 

 average size of holdings is smaller, being about two-thirds of 

 the average size of the holdings in England. Large estates 

 cover only about one-ninth of the cultivated area, one-ninth is 

 made up of small holdings ; more than two-thirds of the culti- 

 vated land in Denmark are the freehold property of yeomen 

 farmers and peasants cultivating their own land. jOf the total 

 number of Danish agricultural holdings over 90 per cent, are 

 freehold, while in England the corresponding figure is, I beheve, 

 somewhat less than thirteenTj The conditions in Denmark in this 

 respect are very much as they were in England in Cromwell's 



