also receive a share of profit as a
dividend on their wages, and elect their representatives on the
committee of management. By means of these societies the party has a
press, buildings, and the funds to fight elections and support members
in parliament. In France, where the store movement has been of an
individualistic, and often middle class, tendency, the socialists have
lately imitated the example of Belgium, and seem to be winning more
success than the older French stores.

In the United States there has long been much important agricultural
co-operation, and there have been many much-advertised attempts to
establish Rochdale co-operation, but there have so often been failures
and even dishonesties that co-operation has had a bad odour in the
country, and the developments come and go with such rapidity that it is
difficult to speak with confidence of its stability. The branch of
co-operation which has been a great success in the United States
consists of the great co-operative building societies, but building
societies are not considered part of the co-operative movement in Great
Britain.

Co-operation of all kinds is greatly developed in Italy, but one form is
specially notable. The _Societa di lavoro_ are co-operative labour gangs
of great importance. They are counted by hundreds, and are found among
navvies, builders, masons, carriers, stevedores, agricultural labourers
and other workmen, and have carried out very great works in Italy and in
foreign countries. They have, for instance, drained lands in the
Campagna and made a railway in Greece. They differ from productive
societies markedly in that they have comparatively little to do with
capital or material, but contract mainly for labour.

The Slavonic races seem to have a special aptitude for grouping together
co-operatively: it is said that men meeting casually on a journey will
do so for the brief time they are together. In countries like Servia we
see this ancient, and more or less customary, loose and unstable
co-operation meeting the modern contractual, permanent co-operation of
banks and other registered societies. So in Russia, where so large a
part in the national organization is played by the _Artel_ (see RUSSIA),
which may be a transitory co-operative group of workmen undertaking a
particular piece of work, e.g. to build a house, or a permanent
association like that of the bank porters combined together to guarantee
one another's honesty.