st
important branch of co-operation; and the source and mainstay of
agricultural co-operation are the _Syndicats Agricoles_. These are not
technically co-operative societies; they are rather trade unions, not
indeed of wage-earners only, or mainly, but of cultivators. They cannot
legally trade, being constituted for the study and protection of the
general interests of the members, the spread of information, and so
forth. Their principal object however, seems in many cases to be to
combine their members for the purchase of all farm requisites and
especially of chemical manures. This they do by collecting, sorting and
passing on orders. They cannot usually manage selling in common without
the intervention of a society specially registered for that object.
Beginning only in 1893, their number long ago ran into thousands and
their membership into hundreds of thousands, drawn from all classes of
cultivators and landowners, great and little. Among much other good work
they have led to the formation of a large number of strictly
co-operative societies for all the purposes of agriculture, except
cultivation in common. Thus there are two thousand agricultural banks,
besides butter factories, distilleries, associations for threshing, for
sale of fruit and vegetables, for wine-making, oil-pressing, and so on,
amounting altogether to some hundreds. There are also societies, mostly
of ancient date, engaged in making Gruyere cheese: a few years ago these
numbered 2000, but they are dwindling. Lastly, there are some eight
thousand mutual insurance societies organized as agricultural
syndicates.

Everywhere the main features of this agricultural movement are similar
to those we have seen in Denmark and Ireland; it is supplementary to
individual cultivation; hardly ever does it appear as associations for
cultivating in common, and, speaking with certain important exceptions,
it has no very ideal aims, but seeks chiefly to give the farmer a better
profit. In England there are a number of farms worked by stores, and
several large associations for the supply of farm requisites; but the
typical agricultural co-operation, based on small village societies and
federations of such societies, has only recently been made known and
begun to take root.

France and co-operative production.

It is notable that while the _Syndicats agricoles_ are almost exactly
what Fourier, the Robert Owen of France, foresaw as the next stage of
social develo