Consumers' Cooperative Societies in New York State

The Tenth International Cooperative Congress, held in Switzerland in 1921, disclosed the fact that since the last Congress, in 1913, the number of cooperators in the twenty-five countries represented had increased from approximately eight million to thirty million and that cooperative trade had increased correspondingly.

Today in Great Britain the cooperative societies number more than four million members, nearly one-third of the entire population being represented in these societies. Switzerland, in 1920, boasted three hundred and sixty-two thousand members and a third of the Swiss people bought goods through their own societies. Cooperation is still alive in Russia in spite of its unsettled economic conditions. In 1920 there were twenty-five thousand societies with twelve million heads of families. In the same year the German cooperative societies were two million seven hundred thousand members strong.

In the United States cooperation has had an erratic development.