made available to the effort to organize the fruit and other productions of California. In all the course of development of plans and conceptions into concrete operation, which covered several decades, there was a prevalent feeling of equality and mutuality among participators, whether their property holdings were small or large. The principles of true coöperation, which they sought to understand and apply to the settlement of questions of profitable production, exerted a strong influence on their attitudes and relations towards each other. Long and persistent effort toward coöperation, reason and fair play, not only attained these ends but constituted also an adult school in humanity and citizenship which has profoundly influenced the quality of California rural life.

During the first quarter of a century of production of special products for distant marketing (except in the dawning of great ideas of commercial independence for agriculture which have been noted), effort was naturally centered on cultural problems. About 1885 there arose to common view the imperative need (which previously had been dimly discerned) of beginning correspondingly strenuous and systematic effort on the commercial side. It then began to be clear that such great production of fruits as natural conditions favored and human enterprise and industry were capable to attain, could only encounter financial frustration unless the producers' ideal, of the greatest volume of production with reasonable profit, could be substituted for the traders'

ideal of the greatest profit from the least volume of production. The producers' plan was to use all suitable land and supply a world of consumers; the traders' purpose was to sell as much fruit as few buyers could pay high prices for, so that their margin would be greatest and his risk and investment least. There is, of course, an irrepressible economic conflict between these plans and the views and purposes which underlie them. It was in 1885 that the man who was then selling most California fruits in Chicago declared that "New York could take so little that it could be easily sent on by express from Chicago." It was poor prophecy, for in 1917 the carloads both of deciduous fruits and oranges which found a terminal in Chicago comprised only about one-sixth of the total shipments, five-sixths going east of Chicago. The declaration of the traders' conception of the opportunity for distant shipment in 1885 shows how futile would have been the effort to build up large production for distant shipment if growers had not discerned their commercial needs and taken steps to secure them for themselves.

It required many faltering steps to make any headway at all. In 1885 the first serious effort was made to attain self-marketing by growers, which the pioneers had declared fifteen years earlier would be the only solution for producing problems. In October, 1885, the Orange Growers Protective Union was organized in Los Angeles, and in November following the California Fruit Union was established in San Francisco. Neither of these organizations lived long

nor accomplished much, but after about thirty years of evolution in organization, not less than 75 per cent of the fresh and cured fruits are sold and distributed coöperatively by the growers thereof. In this thirty years' war California has not only rendered sure her own future in large production, but has set the pace for similar movements in all the large fruit regions of the United States. This attainment is the culmination of more than sixty years of broad conceptions, of clear foresight, of sustained and resolute effort and of investment of everything which makes for cultural and commercial success. Some measure of the attainment can be found in the facts that the fruit industries of California cover not less than one-fourth of the total value of the fruit industries of the United States and that California's output of all fruits and fruit products is much larger than that of any other single state.

This achievement would have been altogether impossible if the traders' point of view had not been resolutely rejected by the producers. The effect of one concrete fact is indisputable: five leading fruitgrowers' organizations expended $1,780,000 for promotive publicity purposes in 1919, thereby developing a consuming demand which engendered prices beyond expectation.

METHODS OF COÖPERATIVE ORGANIZATION

Readers who study the list of coöperative organizations for agricultural purposes in Appendix J (page

383) will appreciate that no detailed analysis of principles, methods and materials can be undertaken in this connection. Details of ways of handling such diverse products as the very names of the associations indicate would fill a volume of close technical information. Usually readers who desire to know details about particular products can secure them by correspondence with the headquarters of the organizations covering them, which are located in the list especially prepared for this book, up to the date of publication. Discussion of the principles of coöperation which are applied in the operation of the California organizations is also apart from the purpose of this writing; nor is reference to them in detail at all necessary because careful treatises on the subject are available. Other methods of organization are given in detail in the reports of the California State Market Director, an officer charged by law with promotion of producers' marketing organizations.

It will readily be inferred from the fact that three whole books and five reports, in addition to continuous popular publication, are required to outline and discuss them, that the policies and methods of California coöperative organizations are neither simple

1 "Coöperation in Agriculture" by G. Harold Powell. New York. Also by the same author, "Fundamental Principles of Coöperation in Agriculture." Circ. 222, Calif. Exp. Sta., 1920. "Cooperative Marketing: its advantages as exemplified in the California Fruit Growers Exchange" by W. W. Cumberland. Princeton University Press, 1917. "Cooperative and other Organized Methods of Marketing California Horticultural Products," by John William Lloyd, University of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, March, 1919. Also by the same author, "Coöperative Marketing of Horticultural Products." Ill. Exp.

Sta., Circ. 244, 1920.

nor uniform. It is also true that no universal formulas for organization and operation can be drawn from their experience because the organizations are still proceeding confidently in their several ways, each holding that its own way best meets the conditions of its own membership, the nature of its materials or the requirements of the trade therein. California organizations are, in fact, in spite of the immense volume and value of the products they successfully handle, still going through a period of experimentation with organic principles and methods and no one can confidently prophesy whether the final outcome will prescribe uniformity or diversity as the better policy.

Without undertaking to determine how far existing organizations claiming to be coöperative embody the principles of true coöperative organization of producers to do business for themselves, it may interest the general reader to know that two leading types of organization have been for several years in operation on a large scale. One is the non-profit incorporation legalized by a California statute of 1909, and given the same legal powers in carrying out its purposes as a capital stock incorporation, by a statute of 1921. The other is a capital stock incorporation, which, in its latest and best form, limits the holding of the stock to actual producing members and limits the reward of the stock-holder to reasonable interest on his investment and distributes all excess earnings among members as producers and not as holders of capital stock. Capital stock organ