As for children, if they are members of the Educational department and
are left orphans they are allowed the father’s portion until they arrive
at age, when they enter the Industrial Army. These provisions are
necessary to co-operative success. To permit a man to leave his
accumulations to his son or daughter takes from them the incentive to
labor. They cease to be useful or acquire a superiority which nature did
not give them.
We insist that all should be equal in the start, and that they have no
advantages which they cannot create for themselves.
The competitor claims that this removes the incentive for action. This
is not true. It removes one incentive out of many, and the worst and
most injurious one.
It is an incentive which makes robbers, thieves, murderers and tyrants
and produces a host of evils.
The competitor says it is unjust because it takes from wife and child
their support. It does not. We give the wife a chance to be useful and
an income for her use equal to the income of any.
We give the child his education and an opportunity equal to the best
when he becomes a man. We insure these things and the husband and father
is relieved from all worry on their account while he lives. Is not this
worth many times the riches of the competitor which are so ready to
vanish and leave wife and child in the ranks of abject and despised
poverty.
The twentieth year of the Co-operative Commonwealth is indeed a proud
one. The great state which we occupy is entirely under the control of
the Co-opolitan Association. It contains four million people and two and
a half million active members of the Industrial Army. Its inhabitants
are all in cities, but no city is greater than one hundred and fifty
thousand persons, except Idaho Falls and Shoshone, where the great water
power, generating electricity, gives exceptional advantages for
manufactures. Idaho Falls contains three hundred and fifty thousand
inhabitants and Shoshone two hundred and twenty-one thousand. In
Shoshone are the great flouring and woolen mills, but nearly every
needful and useful article is also produced through the medium of its
marvelous electric power. Idaho Falls is more famous for its cotton
mills, and other cities are numerous which are devoted to manufactures
of various kinds. The city of Rokybar is the Pittsburg of Idaho and the
Association steel works at that city are the largest in the world.
Laselle is the producer of beet sugar, and all the sugar used by our
department stores in Idaho is supplied from our factories there. There
is little necessity for the importation of anything into this state, so
varied and abundant are its resources and productions.
These cities of Idaho are all laid out and conducted on the plan of
Co-opolis. Each one of them covers an area nearly three times as large
as that of any competitive city. The streets are all one hundred and
fifty feet wide, consisting of two driveways fifty feet wide and a park
of equal width separating them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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