d
co-operative agriculture in Denmark. But industry on a large scale
requires large capital, efficient management, capable, interested
workmanship, and elimination of waste in material and human life. To
this end it needs the good-will of all parties and the assistance of
government. Unemployment, for instance, may be taken care of by giving
every worker a good industrial education and doing away with
inefficiency, and then establishing a wide-spread system of labor
exchanges to adjust the mass of labor to specific requirements.
Industry is such a big and important matter that nothing less than the
co-operation of the whole of society can solve its problems.

This co-operation, to be effective, requires a genuine partnership, in
which the body of stockholders and the body of working men plan
together, work together, and share together, with the assistance of
government commissions and boards that continually adjust and, if
necessary, regulate the processes of production and distribution on a
basis of equity, to be determined by a consensus of expert opinion. In
such a system there is no radical derangement of existing industry, no
destruction of initiative, no expulsion of expert management or
confiscation of property. Individual and corporate ownership continue,
the wage system is not abolished, efficient administration is still to
be obtained, but the body of control is not a board of directors
responsible only to the stockholders of the corporation, and managing
affairs primarily for their own gain, but it consists of
representatives of those who contribute money, superintendence, and
labor, together with or regulated by a group of government experts,
all of whom are honestly seeking the good of all parties and enjoying
their full confidence. Toward such an outcome of present strife many
interested social reformers are working, and it is to be hoped that
its advantages will soon appear so great that neither extreme
alternative principle will have to be tried out thoroughly before
there will be a general acceptance of the co-operative idea. It may
seem utopian to those who are familiar with the selfishness and
antagonism that have marked the history of the last hundred years, but
it is already being tried out here and there, and it is the only
principle that accords with the experiences and results of social
evolution in other groups. It is the highest law that the struggle for
individual power fails before the strug