It is particularly regrettable that co-operative societies have not always had sufficient regard for their employees. There can be little doubt that the contrast between producers and consumers, and between the centralising and de-centralising tendencies in organisation, will long be a difficulty among co-operators, who do not thoroughly understand the new system to which they belong. Yet it should also be said that many of the objections raised by the critics of the movement are really due to the fact that they do not understand its real nature, and imagine that they find old things where really they meet only old names. The noblest embodiment of the co-operative idea is to be found in one of the oldest seats of industry in Western Europe. This is the Vooruit (Forward) Society, which was founded at Ghent in a season of scarcity by Edouard Anseele and a few weavers in 1873. It was started with a capital of 84 francs and 93 centimes, about £3: 8s., at first naturally as a bakery, and has grown till it embraces the economy and life of about 100,000 out of the 165,000 inhabitants of the city. Besides the enormous and splendidly-equipped bakeries, it has huge stores and the largest cotton factory in Ghent, with an eight-hours’ day. It has its own printing works, a daily and weekly press, its own system of life insurance, and old-age pensions. It offers to its members at its People’s Palace the means of education and of wholesome recreation and it encourages art. This is a great achievement in a country where Church and State, landlord and capitalist, have so long combined to keep the workers in the lowest ignorance and degradation. The Vooruit has been a model to similar co-operative enterprises not only in Belgium, but in France, Holland, and Germany. 4. Of all the recent movements for the better ordering of society in England, we believe the co-operative movement to be the most hopeful, because the most thorough and practical, but it is only one of many. During the last half-century we have seen a long succession of efforts, partially successful, towards a new organisation of society rendered necessary by the changes due to the industrial revolution. In all spheres the watchword of the new era has been freedom, the removal of restraint. But it has been found that positive measures of reconstruction were also necessary. Factory legislation carried in opposition to the prevailing economic theory, trade-unions, employers’ combinations, industrial partnerships, boards of conciliation, the co-operative system,—all these are real, if partial, endeavours towards a new organisation of society suited to the new conditions. They are all modifications and limitations imposed on the competitive system, and to them the progress of the last sixty years is largely due. Socialism claims to be the comprehensive scheme of organisation which embraces in a complete and consistent unity all these partial efforts.