To use the words of John Milton, it was a ‘strenuous liberty’ which was cherished and maintained by our Puritan forefathers, the fathers and founders of the American Commonwealth. We know with what solemnity and earnestness, with what gravity, deliberation, and foresight they entered on the long struggle against Stuart tyranny. If the Americans and we are to succeed in the coming struggle against plutocracy, an abundant measure of the high and virile qualities which characterised their forefathers and ours will be needed. Happily signs are not wanting that a spirit and character strenuous and capable of the task of reformation will be forthcoming. In all civilised countries, and especially in America, men have been accomplices in the sin of mammon-worship: success in the struggle for wealth, with its many base and unscrupulous incidents, has been far too highly esteemed. There has been, especially in America, a great moral awakening, which we may expect to have good results among all classes. As regards the working classes, we have seen how long and hard in most countries has been their discipline of privation and sorrow. The representatives of labour have for generations undergone a stern and severe training in prison and exile. In Russia to-day they have been suffering and inflicting horrors which have been far worse. But as we have repeatedly had occasion to point out in this book, their training in constructive work, in political organisation, in trade unions, and co-operative societies has been vastly more efficacious. Most promising of all; as we have seen, is the co-operative movement, because it best combines the collective use of the means of production and exchange with individual freedom and responsibility. In the vast and ever-widening co-operative movement we can see a new society rising in the midst of the old. Every year it widens and grows, and we hope it will grow and widen till the old, with all its false and base ideals, its unreason, its militarism, its mismanagement, waste, and extravagance has been put away. Hearts have been burning with the sacred fire of noble ideals in the promoting of this grand work. Imaginations have been haunted with beautiful dreams, which have not been vain. But we should prize not less the patient and persevering integrity which, through a multitude of petty and prosaic details, is bearing the movement onward to an ever higher position in the world. At Ghent and other places we may already see both in spirit and material outline the city that is to be, the new society that is rising to make life happy and beautiful for the people who have mourned so long! In the application of the co-operative principle to agriculture we can at last see an ending to the oppression of the tiller of the soil by the usurer and middleman, which has been a stain on civilisation since it began thousands of years ago in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile.