explained to them, as their manager says, that if the business is to
serve them properly it must grow, and in order to grow it needs all the
surplus earnings for expansion. And so, because the members are
industrious and far-sighted, they have foregone their dividends. The
cleanliness of their stores, too, is an inspiration not only to their
membership but to hundreds of others who have visited their plant. This
is one of the biggest business assets they possess.

These virtues have enabled the Finnish group in Brooklyn to build
cooperatively a three-story modern business block, to run therein a
wholesale bakery, a retail bakery, a meat shop and grocery store, a
cooperative restaurant and a cooperative pool room, to build adjacent to
this two modern cooperative apartment houses and to lay the foundations
for a third now under construction. Outside of the housing venture the
business done last year was $175,000 and today there are nearly two
thousand members.

Although these undertakings are practically a part of the same group
there are three separate corporations. The largest of these is the
Finnish Cooperative Trading Association, Inc. The restaurant is operated
as the Workers' Cooperative Restaurant, Inc., and the housing
association as the Finnish Homebuilders' Association, Inc.

The restaurant is the oldest. Seven years ago a group of Finns in this
locality boarded together. Their capital was a hundred dollars which
some one had loaned to them. They ran their little business on a
cooperative basis, paying for the meals and putting back any surplus
into a reserve. No one contributed anything, but before long they paid
back the one hundred dollars. Early in 1922 they incorporated. They then
owned a fine modern restaurant, had done $70,000 worth of business in