The constitution was by no means a perfect one at the outset, but it was sufficiently elastic and stable in its provisions to admit of such amendments, without danger to its substantial features, as might, from time to time, be suggested by experience. The most conservative force in society has been found to be, not the wise nor the foolish, but the majority which are neither the one or the other. These are not generally favorable to experimental legislation, and long before the establishment of the Co-operative Commonwealth Switzerland proved, by the operation of the Initiative and Referendum provisions of their constitution, that the people were disposed to accept changes in their social system with a caution that made progress slow, but retrogression impossible. The first year of the Co-operative Commonwealth was a very successful one. We had May 1st, 1898, over one thousand persons, including men, women and children, in our city of Co-opolis, two hundred and fifty substantial cottages, an excellent public hall, a good hotel, a large and sightly three-story building containing our department store, postoffice and offices for our President, Vice-President and heads of departments; an excellent schoolhouse with graded school and a corps of eight teachers, consisting of our ex-clergyman, who became first principal, and teachers who were selected from among the wives of members. All the furniture used in our homes and buildings at this time was manufactured of such lumber as we had and was somewhat crude, but sufficient in all respects. In our department store were sold vegetables produced by us, consisting of potatoes, onions, beets, parsnips and all of the hardy variety grown on the old time “breaking” on Hacket’s ranch. We had home-made preserves and a quantity of dried fruit. The meat department was well supplied from our own herds of cattle or from the surrounding country, and from our flocks of sheep, which had largely increased, partly through natural causes and partly because much of the money received for membership fees had been invested in that direction. Shortly after we had definitely settled upon a site for Co-opolis we proceeded to acquire land. This whole valley was what in the United States land office was denominated “desert land,” not because it was barren but because it was unproductive unless reclaimed by irrigation. Under the law it was permitted that each man enter three hundred and twenty acres upon declaring his intention to reclaim the same, and we had in this manner entered, up to June 1st, some sixteen thousand acres.