Labor procession in the streets of Charleroi, Belgium, during the strikes of 1902.
There are nearly two thousand co-operative societies in Belgium, with a million consumers. Fully one-seventh of the total population belong to these institutions. They are flourishing institutions, too, showing good management and important economic results. The Maison du Peuple, in Brussels, is one of the most important of these coöperative organizations. It is a sort of people’s palace; it contains libraries, concert halls, theatre, and lecture-rooms, as well as the coöperative stores for furnishing every kind and variety of supplies. There are attached to the institution doctors, dentists, and oculists. It covers practically every department of life, and is more comprehensive than the greatest of our own department stores. Some of these institutions administer life-insurance funds and sick benefits with success.
Women’s manifestation in favor of universal suffrage at Jolimont, Belgium, in 1902
All the members of the workmen’s party are members of some coöperative organization, so that the coöperative and the political movements have gone hand in hand. In the small villages the first co-operative establishment is generally a bakery, and this becomes the nucleus of a large coöperative industrial company later. There is successful coöperation, too, in the purely agricultural communities, in the form of associations for buying supplies and for selling the produce of the farms. The farmers believe that a central control over the marketing of their products has greatly
