be their food to-morrow, the husband boycotted all round in his little town for his part in the paper, and the wife supporting the family by sewing, and such a situation lasting for years, until the family would retire, without a word of reproach, simply saying:  “Continue; we can hold on no more!” I have seen men, dying from consumption, and knowing it, and yet knocking about in snow and fog to prepare meetings, speaking at meetings within a few weeks from death, and only then retiring to the hospital with the words:  “Now, friends, I am done; the doctors say I have but a few weeks to live.  Tell the comrades that I shall be happy if they come to see me.”  I have seen facts which would be described as “idealization” if I told them in this place; and the very names of these men, hardly known outside a narrow circle of friends, will soon be forgotten when the friends, too, have passed away.  In fact, I don’t know myself which most to admire, the unbounded devotion of these few, or the sum total of petty acts of devotion of the great number.  Every quire of a penny paper sold, every meeting, every hundred votes which are won at a Socialist election, represent an amount of energy and sacrifices of which no outsider has the faintest idea.  And what is now done by Socialists has been done in every popular and advanced party, political and religious, in the past.  All past progress has been promoted by like men and by a like devotion.

Co-operation, especially in Britain, is often described as “joint-stock individualism”; and such as it is now, it undoubtedly tends to breed a co-operative egotism, not only towards the community at large, but also among the co-operators themselves.  It is, nevertheless, certain that at its origin the movement had an essentially mutual-aid character.  Even now, its most ardent promoters are persuaded that co-operation leads mankind to a higher harmonic stage of economical relations, and it is not possible to stay in some of the strongholds of co-operation in the North without realizing that the great number of the rank and file hold the same opinion.  Most of them would lose interest in the movement if that faith were gone; and it must be owned that within the last few years broader ideals of general welfare and of the producers’ solidarity have begun to be current among the co-operators.  There is undoubtedly now a tendency towards establishing better relations between the owners of the co-operative workshops and the workers.

The importance of co-operation in this country, in Holland and in Denmark is well known; while in Germany, and especially on the Rhine, the co-operative societies are already an important factor of industrial life.(11) It is, however, Russia which offers perhaps the best field for the study of cooperation under an infinite variety of aspects.  In Russia, it is a natural growth, an inheritance from the middle ages; and while a formally established co-operative society would have to cope with many legal difficulties and official