Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/809

 PROFIT-SHARING AND COOPERATION 789

and failure, the merits and defects urged for and against it, can be presented.

The cooperative movement which originated in France about the time of the revolution of 1830 had this feature as one of its essential elements. So also with the one of 1848, abnormally stimulated by the government.' During both periods the socie- ties founded were very numerous ; and an enumeration of them would be an enumeration of such institutions practicing this form of profit-sharing — and, it might be added, an enumeration of the failures of this plan. The more recent cooperative move- ment has been largely distributive cooperation, and profit-sharing has been less uniformly incorporated into the plan. The Inter- national Cooperative Alliance, growing out of the International Cooperative Congress held in Paris in 1895, attempted to force the acceptance of this plan upon all cooperators by restricting membership to those who practiced profit-sharing as an essential feature of their system. While this was unanimously supported by the French cooperators, it was not insisted upon, since the great majority of English cooperators would thus have been excluded. The congress, however, did resolve, with practical unanimity, that the true cooperative principle required "all cooperative associations employing labor to assign to their work- men a fair share in the profits."

The situation in England has been a very complicated one. Cooperation in England sprang from two distinct sources. From Robert Owen, through the "Rochdale Pioneers," has come the influence creating the great movement of distributive coopera- tion which now includes more than a million families, almost one- eighth of the population of Great Britain. On the other hand, the productive cooperative movement was fostered by the Chris- tian Socialists, and was an imported idea, though since then largely developed aside from their influence. Such establish- ments now number almost two hundred, with more than twenty- five thousand workmen employed. The former, as a rule, reject profit-sharing both in their productive and distributive depart- ments ; the latter, as a rule, incorporate it as an essential element,

■ Three million francs were granted by the government for this purpose.