By putting productive property into the hands of those who now possess little or nothing, co-operation promotes social stability and social progress. This statement is true in some degree of all forms of co-operation, but it applies with particular force to those forms which are carried on by the working classes. A steadily growing number of keen-sighted social students are coming to realise that an industrial system which permits a comparatively small section of society to own the means of production and the instrumentalities of distribution, leaving to the great majority of the workers nothing but their labour power, is fundamentally unstable, and contains within itself the germs of inevitable dissolution. No mere adequacy of wages and other working conditions, and no mere security of the workers' livelihood, can permanently avert this danger, nor compensate the individual for the lack of power to determine those activities of life which depend upon the possession of property. Through co-operation this unnatural divorce of the users from the owners of capital can be minimised. The worker is converted from a mere wage earner to a wage earner plus a property owner, thus becoming a safer and more useful member of society. In a word, co-operation produces all the well recognised individual and social benefits which have in all ages been evoked by the "magic of property." Finally, co-operation is a golden mean between individualism and Socialism. It includes all the good features and excludes all the evil features of both. On the one hand, it demands and develops individual initiative and self reliance, makes the rewards of the individual depend upon his own efforts and efficiency, and gives him full ownership of specific pieces of property. On the other hand, it compels him to submerge much of the selfishness and indifference to the welfare of his fellows which characterise our individual economy. It embraces all the good that is claimed for Socialism because it induces men to consider and to work earnestly for the common good, eliminates much of the waste of competitive industry, reduces and redistributes the burdens of profits and interest, and puts the workers in control of capital and industry. At the same time, it avoids the evils of an industrial despotism, of bureaucratic inefficiency, of individual indifference, and of an all pervading collective ownership. The resemblances that Socialists sometimes profess to see between their system and co-operation are superficial and far less important than the differences. Under both arrangements the workers would, we are told, own and control the means of production; but the members of a co-operative society directly own and immediately control a _definite amount of specific capital_, which is essentially _private_ property. In a Socialist régime the workers' ownership of capital would be collective not private, general not specific, while their control of the productive instruments with which