Co-operation is the best check to democracy. Co-operation has for its object the getting a maximum of skill, a maximum of remuneration, and a minimum of waste. To attain the first, you must tolerate superiority; to attain the second, you must have competition; to attain the third, you must have discipline. Will democracy allow superior intelligence, superior experience, to assert themselves? Will it allow full play to individual exertion? Will it listen to the voice of science, and not to the voice of passion? We have had a struggle between the aristocracy of birth and the aristocracy of intellect. We are witnessing in many countries a struggle between the democracy of thought and the democracy of pure and simple aversion to what exists. Co-operation is one of the highest forms of intellectual democracy." I believe in association as the sole means we possess of realizing progress, not merely because it multiplies the action of the productive forces, but because it tends to unite all the various manifestations of the human mind, and to bring the life of the individual into communion with the collective life of the whole. I believe that man should be able to cat and live without having every hour of his existence absorbed by material labour, so that lie may be able to cultivate the superior faculties of his nature. . . . . I listen with dread to those who invented the formula of 'each man for himself,' for they knew that it would increase egotism, and that there is but one step between the egotist and the slave " (MAZZINI).

Co-operation is one of the attempts to remove poverty and