As for Seattle, it had long been inclined to co-operation. Its business men and citizens had been for years struggling against every conceivable disadvantage and were completely at the mercy of trusts and combinations of the most unconscionable character. They had been approaching closer and closer to bankruptcy day by day until our “Three Brothers,” as they called the hotel, department store and amusement hall, received them into their fraternal arms. Since Seattle became a co-operative city it has grown to be the great Pacific seaport of the co-operative world. Its widened avenues, its magnificent parks, its comfortable cottages, its great wharves and piers, its forest of masts, its magnificent Industrial Army, its schools and institutions of learning all bespeak a prosperity which is the pride of her citizens. And this pride is all the more excusable because the Seattle of to-day is the property of all her citizens and not the property of a few. CHAPTER XXIV. CHARLIE WOODBERRY ASKS QUESTIONS. We were seated on the veranda of my house on Salem Avenue. It was a summer evening after tea in 1912. My wife sat by my side and her brother, Charlie Woodberry, a young man about twenty-two, sat with us. My little daughter and a number of children about her own age played upon the lawn in front of the house. The day had been an exceedingly hot one—such a day as the farmers say is excellent for corn—but the evening was cool and delightful, as all the evenings are in Idaho. We were engaged in watching the children as they played and listening to their merry laughter. As the evening wore on and the dusk deepened into darkness, when the little girl, tired of play, came and sat in her little chair on the veranda, our conversation took a more serious turn. Charlie was a visitor from Fall River, Massachusetts, and in that city was employed in the office of a large factory in the capacity of bookkeeper. I think his salary was at that time about eighty dollars per month. He was spending his three weeks’ vacation with us. “Mr. Braden,” said he, “I learned to-day that your book ‘Co-operative Economy’ is probably responsible for your being Governor of Idaho and President of the Association. I have never read it, but my two days’ visit in Co-opolis makes me anxious to read it.” “Yes,” I replied. “Probably the book did have more to do with my selection than anything else. I certainly hope you will read it, because I have endeavored in that book to explain the whole co-operative system as industrially applied in this state, and, while you will hardly read it for pleasure, you will understand our system better if you study it.”