The Low Countries. Jaargang 6

Extract from Happy Humanity
by Frederik van Eeden

The Scheme for America

In giving the details of my new plan for realising Happy Humanity, after the failure made in Holland, I hope the reader will allow me to point out its significance.

[p. 140]

The new organisation will be called the Coöperative Company of America, or some such name. The title indicates that it is a business concern. No creed or political doctrine will be associated with it, except the creed that every normal human being holds - that of honesty and fairness.

We will start with a group of market-gardeners, and the land selected for that purpose lies in North Carolina, near the city of Wilmington. The opportunity there is exceptionally favourable. Colonisation has been tried there, for several years, with much success. Italian, Dutch, and German settlers have there attained prosperity by truck-gardening. It is a great strawberry-raising country, and the soil is fit for the culture of the most varied plants and vegetables. The climate is like that of Italy, and the rainfall abundant. Excellent fast trains, with refrigerators-cars, place the country within easy reach of the greatest markets of the whole continent.

The preliminary work for colonisation, which would have given us great expense, is already done, and we can take advantage of the experience of others.

Here, if anywhere, are lines of least resistance, and we have secured an option on about twenty-thousand acres of land at a price of from $15 to $20 an acre. After a few years of cultivation the value should increase to $200 or $300 an acre, and more.

Our intention is to select a group of high-class gardeners, experts in intensive farming, and let them have this land as tenants. We shall be able to select twenty-five families, of the very best, and locate them next to one another on plots of about ten acres each.

These people should be immigrants, as yet unspoiled by contact with city life. Since Hollanders have a high reputation as intensive gardeners and generally excellent qualities for settlers, it was considered best to select this advance guard from my own country. And I know now, after some months of investigation in Holland, that I can get hundreds of families, willing and eager to come. In fact, a little group of half a dozen first-rate men have already answered my call and have settled there at their own expense. They will do excellent work as prospectors and advisers.

They will pay no more than a fixed rent, which will never be increased to them. The settler will have the full reward of his efforts. When, after one or two years, he proves to be a desirable member of the new organisation, he will become a conditional owner and stockholder of the company.

Therein lies the essential and vital point of the whole experiment. This is the one feature which distinguishes it from all similar enterprises and its effect has to be tried.

The usual form of colonisation is simply to sell the land to the settler, the price to be paid from his earnings in a certain number of years. Then the man becomes a landlord, and is left entirely to his own devices, his own sense of justice and responsibility. What this means, with the raw material of immigrants annually let loose on American soil, is shown clearly and sadly enough by the immense waste and reckless spoliation of the vast resources of this rich country.

From Happy Humanity. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1912, pp. 141-143.