428 Progress of Agricultural Co-operation. [Aug., 



THE PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURAL 

 CO-OPERATION IN ENGLAND AND 

 WALES SINCE THE ARMISTICE. 



E. H. Carr, 

 Director-General, Agricultural Organisation Society. 



Englishmen are by instinct and tradition a race of indi- 

 vidualists, averse from combination except in the face of common 

 dangers against which individual action is palpably of no avail, 

 and proverbially given even then to " muddling through " 

 rather than to systematic and well planned organisation. The 

 communistic spirit, innate in certain other races, is singularly 

 lacking in the Enghsh character, and there is perhaps no 

 section of the community so markedly non-communistic as the 

 agricultural. It is not therefore surprising that agricultural 

 co-operation, autogenous in Denmark and some other countries, 

 has been in this country a plant of slow and sporadic growth, 

 and that its cultivation in the earlier stages of the movement 

 involved the most unremitting energy on the part of the culti- 

 vators with results which were frequently disappointing and 

 invariablv patchy. 



Furthermore, it follows that, the national genius being prone 

 rather to action than analysis, the development of the co- 

 operative movement in agriculture has received scant attention 

 from the public and even from many of those who are most 

 concerned with agricultural interests. Now that the movement 

 has attained maturity — fully one-third of the farmers in Ercc- 

 land and Wales are at present members of co-operative societies 

 — it is high time that a careful record should be comDiled of 

 its birth, boyhood and adolescence. Lecturers and students at 

 agricultural colleges have not unreasonably complained thnt. 

 wdiereas there is no lack of literature respecting the corr^jspond- 

 ing movements in other countries, there is no available I'ecord or 

 text book concerning the movement in this country. It is not 

 possible here to attempt more than a rapid and necessarily 

 superficial survey of progress during the past few years. The 

 Agricultural Organisation Society, however, contemplates the 

 issue at an early date of a book which, it is hoped, will to some 

 extent repair the omission which has been indicated. 



Early Years of the Agricultural Organisation Society — 



From its formation in 1901 down to 1917 the Society was 



