The Maccabaean

THE last international Zionist Congress took a step that is likely to prove of much significance for the future of the Zionist movement. It endorsed the proposition of Dr. Franz Oppenheimer to lend its authority and the credit of the National Fund for the purpose of establishing agriculture communities in Palestine on a co-operative basis. The Zionist Organization is to buy land with money drawn from the Fund and a colonizing association is to lease this land and sub-let it to its members, who are to cultivate it co-operatively. This, however, is not to be an experiment in communism, but in co-operation. Dr. Oppenheimer, the promoter of the plan, has writted a book of over six hundred pages to prove that agricultural co-operative communities always have succeeded and by their very nature are fitted to succeed. The book was written not at all with a view to Zionist requirement, but as a contribution to the solution of the labor problem, especially of agrarian conditions in Germany. Being interested in the practical testing of his ideas, rather than in their academic discussion, Dr. Oppenheimer has at length persuaded the leaders of the Zionist Organization to give them a trial.

Few people have an adequate conception of the vast proportions the co-operative movement has actually attained both in Europe and America. In this country the mention of co-operation usually suggests a few idealistic failures like Brook Farm and New Harmony. It is not commonly

known that the great majority of co-operative experiments, perhaps 90 per. cent., on agricultural and distributive lines have been successful. The co-operative stores of Great Britian now do business amounting to over half a billion dollars, and this vast movement, which some years ago was estimated to be increasing at the rate of 40 per cent. in five years, began with the classical experiment of the Rochdale weavers in 1844 who with a capital of a few dollars opened up their co-operative store on a back street of their town. A not very recent estimate gives the number of members of co-operative societies in the United Kingdom as two million. In Switzerland the number of stores grew in five years (according to the same not very recent authority) from 14,000 to 22,000, or nearly 80 per cent. A magnificent co-operative store in Milan does a business of $1,250,000 a year. This form of co-operation, in short, has spread to nearly every civilized country and has been uniformly successful.

Similar success, though not on such a large scale, has attended agricultural co-operation, and especially in the dairy industry, In Denmark four-fifths of the milk produced in the country is handled by co-operative creameries, which make $35,000,000 worth of butter a year. The most interesting examples of success in this form of co-operation, however, exist in the United States. Six-sevenths of all the creameries in Minnesota are co-operative. A large proportion of the creameries of Wisconsin,