THEIR CIIARACTKi; AND OIJ.IKIT. 1:55 



Cooperation develops in each country accordiuf^ to the local 

 necessities of that country, which will invariably indicate the 

 line of least resistance. The conditions attending fruit- 

 growing in California have been such that the cooperative 

 element among fruit-growers was at once plunged into the 

 most difficult of all cooperative undertakings, which it was 

 compelled to attack without experience in cooperation, and 

 witii little or no knowledge of the art of marketing. The 

 movement, with many ups and downs, has proceeded steadih- 

 from the first, the co-operative fruit* sales in 1898 having 

 reached, in round numbers, the sum of $5,000,000. While no 

 one can safely predict its immediate future, its work up to this 

 time, which has attracted no attention from any writer upon 

 cooperative afFairs,t has been such as to warrant a brief 

 description. 



When one once becomes impressed with the law that 

 necessity, and necessity alone, will induce cooperation, and 

 that the unit of cooperative life is the industry, and not the 

 locality, it at once becomes interesting to note and compare 

 the spasmodic outbreaks of the movement in different and 

 distant countries. While cooperation, when once established, 

 has more or less tendency to spread from established centers, 

 it is, after all, always the result of social pressure, and is sure 

 to appear when the pressure is sufficient. The British artisan 

 suffered under the oppression of the retail dealers in the 

 necessities of life, and the result was the magnificent svstem of 



*I do not include cooperative dairying, for the reason that, with a good 

 deal of effort, no one has ever been able to gather statistics whic'- are even 

 approximately correct. 



t Mr. Charles H. Shinn wrote, in 1888, a brief monograph entitled 

 "Cooperation in California," which was published, among other studies in 

 cooperation, by the Johns Hopkins University Press. My good friend Mr. 

 Shinn, whose information is very wide in most things, was apparently so 

 interested in the literary possibilities of some picturesque attempts to found 

 cooperative colonies of the Brook Farm order, that he entirely overlooked a 

 substantial cooperative business concern that, even as he wrote, was selling 

 nearly a million dollars' worth of fruit each year, and which had been promi- 

 nently discussed in the press since 1885. 



