with an investment of $3,000,000; Wisconsin, 65 associations, with assets of $1,500,000. Massachusetts needs but few more to bring

her number of co-operative banks up to 100.

The rapid growth of these organizations has stimulated many speculative movements, one of the most active of which is the creation of the so-called "national" associations, which, instead of confining themselves to a single city, extend their membership and their loans over several States, and aspire to include the whole country. They are banking institutions, and, if well managed, will have the usual success of banks; but they have none of the peculiar safeguards of the small and local co-operative banks. They have lately organized a League of General Building and Loan Associations, the separate members of which, at last accounts, were the following companies:

The National Building Loan and Protective Union, of Minneapolis.

The American Building and Loan Association, of Minneapolis. The International Building Loan and Investment Union, of Chicago.

The National Savings Loan and Building Company, of St. Paul. The Railway Building and Loan Association, of Minneapolis. The American Savings Loan and Investment Society, of Chicago. The Interstate Building and Loan Association, of Bloomington, Ill. The Illinois Building and Loan Association, of Bloomington, Ill. The Building and Loan Association of Dakota (Aberdeen, S.D.). The National Mutual Building and Loan Association, of New York.

The Guaranty Building and Loan Association, of Minneapolis. The Interstate Building and Loan Association, of Minneapolis. The Security Building and Loan Association, of Minneapolis. The Interstate Building and Loan Association, of Columbus, Ga. The United States Savings Loan and Building Company, of St. Paul.

It will be noticed that, of these fifteen investment companies, more than half are in the two cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, and four are in two cities of Illinois. They are, in fact, real estate investment companies; and their object is to collect capital, from the East, if possible, and invest it in the newer States of the Northwest or in growing communities at the South. To this there is no objection, except that it is a business proverbially risky, and very unlike the small and domestic scale upon which the co-operative banks ought to proceed. On this point, Mr. F. A. Richards, bank examiner in Maine, well says:

The key to the almost uniform success of building and loan associations is found in the intimate relations which they hold to shareholders, and especially to borrowers. Not only do they make it possible for persons having but small incomes to build homes for themselves, by loaning money on unfinished property as the money is needed to advance the work, repaying in small instalments, but they exercise a scrupulous supervision over the interests of the borrower. The condition and situation of his property, the plans of the architect, the estimates, the character of the contractor, the building material, the work of the builder,-all are carefully inspected by competent judges and subject to their approval. The building and loan association thus forms a supervisory board whose assistance to the borrower is invaluable.

There can be nothing, or very little, of this supervision in the great "general" building associations; nor can their affairs be so strictly supervised in other respects. The more cautious experts, therefore, like Judge Dexter of Elmira and Mr. Southard of New York, pronounce against them. There are those, however, who object to the use of the term "building "in connection with the co-operative banks; and a correspondent in Rochester, N.Y., writes me as follows:

There are in the neighborhood of a hundred not half a dozen more or less-savings and loan associations (called, for short, loan associations) in Rochester, to two of which I have belonged for a long time past; and there are several building lot associations and land associations, which, however, are nothing more than combinations of individuals for the purchase of land in a large tract and its sale by lots, so that, as you see, they have nothing whatever in common with the "building associations" of Philadelphia. Our loan associations are equally far removed from that complex system; and they are sufficiently complicated as it is (no two of them, perhaps, being exactly alike), without adding the unnecessary entanglement of a building department, in which I can see no possible advantage to either party. When we sell shares of money to an individual, we take a mortgage upon a sufficient amount of real estate (unless he borrows upon "free" shares of stock already owned by him), and no one except the Committee of Appraisal cares whether his house is old or new or about to be built, or whether there is no intention on his part ever to build a house. Oftentimes, to be sure, the money is doled out to him as the house progresses, and the increased security warrants additional instalments; but the man himself builds the house: the association does not build it for him in any sense of the term, and ours is no more a "building" association than it is a horse-race association or a base-ball association.

All our associations, with one or two insignificant exceptions, have been successful. Of course, the dividends of all except the new ones have dropped to twelve or ten per cent.; but none of them are going out of business, and the few which were not originally "permanent" have become so. In the early part of this year (1889), a statement was prepared of the money loaned on mortgages by our four Rochester savings-banks and by the loan associations which may interest you. In 1886, the banks made 384 loans, aggregating $1,505,072.67; the associations, 756 loans, aggregating $970,808.80,- excess in favor of the banks, $534,263.87. In 1887, the banks made 581 loans, aggregating $1,479,648; associations, 1,254 loans, aggregating $1,795,384.70,― excess in favor of associations, $315,736.70. In 1888, the banks made 328 loans, aggregating $737,440; associations, 1,581 loans, aggregating $2,126,314.10,- excess in favor of associations, $1,388,874.10. Of course, the above has nothing to do with bank mortgages made before 1886, and still held by them, which amount to $10,000,000 or more.

The figures just given show that in some cities the new loan associations, or co-operative banks, are gaining upon and supplanting, to some extent, the old savings-banks. Perhaps this may lead the latter to establish a system of loaning to their own depositors more generally, and upon more favorable terms than they now do. As our committee had occasion to say a year ago, the general safety of our American building associations during the halfcentury they have existed is well known. No serious disaster has overtaken most of those who invested in them; and this, mainly because they were small, were carefully looked after by the investors, and did not venture into large operations. But their success has led, recently, to the formation of so-called “national" building associations, which are exposed to peculiar risk. It is to be hoped that the local building associations will maintain themselves against these intruders into their proper field, and that the noble system of Co-operative Banking will not be wounded in the house of its professed friends.

r.

2.

PRACTICAL MEASURES OF SOCIALISM IN ENG

LAND.

BY MR. PERCIVAL CHUBB, OF LONDON.

(Read September 6.)

In spite of all the fashionable writing and talking about Socialism, such false and imperfect notions of what it means are still at large, that I shall venture to preface what I have to say about the practical aims of its English advocates by a short exposition of its theory and purpose.

Socialism professes to find a clew to, and a cure for, the poverty which is almost everywhere the distressing accompaniment of modern civilization. It is but a few years back that Christendom, relying on that misunderstood saying of its founder, "The poor ye have always with you," accepted poverty as a divine necessity,- a discipline for the poor and a field of charity for the rich. Even now it is quite commonly believed that poverty, while it may be mitigated, and perhaps effectually relieved, by organized charity,i.e., charity officialized and administered with a minimum of compassion,― can never be wholly abolished. But society has from time to time been startled out of its complacent toleration of poverty by reformers who preached a seeming way of escape from it; and now Socialism, professing to base itself on science and history, affirms that poverty is a perfectly explicable disease of the social body, a disease which has its chief cause in irrational and iniquitous social laws and institutions, and is to be cured through the application of a modicum of justice, reason, and good-will to the diseased body.

That this conclusion has not sooner been arrived at must be ascribed to men's ignorance of the real condition of things. No reasonable person can face the array of statistics now available as to the facts of social life without coming to the conclusion that there is some fundamental flaw in our social system. He can hardly study those statistics thoroughly and disinterestedly without gaining some insight into the causes of the evils, and the direction in which a remedy must be sought.

Let us look for a moment at a few of the more salient facts which recent inquiry has brought to light. They shall be facts of the life of London, where I myself have lived :—

One out of four of the whole population is computed to be earning — and that irregularly-not more than a guinea a week per family; and over a third of these are receiving much less, and, says Mr. Booth, "live in a state of chronic want" (p. 33 of "Life and Labor in East London "). This corresponds to the proportion indicated by the statistics of mortality. In London one person in every five will die in the workhouse, hospital, or lunatic asylum. In 1887, out of 82,545 deaths in London, 43,507 being over twenty, 9,399 were in workhouses, 7,201 in hospitals, and 400 in lunatic asylums, or altogether 17,000 in public institutions (Registrar-General's Report, 1888, C.-5, 138, pp. 2 and 73). Considering that comparatively few of these are children, it is probable that one in every three London adults will be driven into these refuges to die; and the proportion in the case of the manual labor class must, of course, be much greater. One in eleven of the whole metropolitan population is driven to accept Poor Law relief during any one year (see p. 20), and that notwithstanding the existence of organized metropolitan charities estimated to disburse over £4,000,000 annually (Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. xiv. p. 833), and that in Middlesex and Surrey there were in 1888 1,152,189 Post-office Savings Bank accounts open, with an aggregate balance of £15,410,541 (H.C. 177 of 1889). In spite of all, 29 deaths were referred, in 1888, to direct and obvious starvation (H.C. Return, No. 136, 1889).*

It has been found that "the average age at death among the nobility, gentry, and professional classes in England and Wales was 55 years; but among the artisan class of Lambeth it only amounted to 29 years; and, while the infantile death-rate among the well-to-do classes was such that only 8 children died in the first year of life, out of 100 born, as many as 30 per cent. succumbed at that age among the children of the poor in some districts of our large cities." It has been computed that from thirty to thirty-five thousand children often go daily to school without breakfast, not to speak of those who have been only scantily fed. On an average, from twenty to twenty-five thousand dock laborers compete, which means physically struggle, for employment at the dock gates for work at 4d. (8 cents) per hour,† and that one-third of them struggle in vain. These facts clearly show

*From "Facts for Londoners," an exhaustive collection of statistical and other facts relating

to the metropolis, published by the Fabian Society, 63 Fleet Street, London. Price 6d.

+ This was written before the great strike had secured an advance in the rate of pay, which is still shamefully low.