Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/810

 790 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Mr. Benjamin Jones, speaking of the associations formed at the instigation of the Christian Socialists, says : " In these asso- ciations the men employed were supposed to elect the officers and to share the profits in proportion to the amount of their weekly wages or allowances. All these efforts failed. Then those Christian Socialists who had allied themselves to the cooperators strove to convert that steadily growing body to their views on profit-sharing. The cooperators treated the sub- ject in their usual manner. They thought over it, they discussed it, and they experimented with it. The result is that, after forty years, out of more than a million cooperators there are some forty thousand who believe in it as an expedient ; but the over- whelming majority have discarded profit-sharing altogether, and reject it, either as being a useless expedient, or as being con- trary to the fundamental basis of cooperation. It is true that cooperative congresses have, again and again, passed resolutions in favor of profit-sharing ; but in the comparatively few instances where it has been attempted to translate these resolutions into action at the business meetings of their societies, the attempts have been mostly unsuccessful."'

The struggle between these two contending factions, growing out of the antagonistic ideas, has been by no means a harmonious one. Nearly all the cooperative associations started by the Christian Socialists in the stormy period marking the middle of the century soon became extinct ; while the Rochdale move- ment hasj despite many adversities, continued to prosper and increase. But about 1 870 a new impetus was received by the productive cooperative movement, and since that time many such societies have been founded. It is among these that profit-sharing exists. It is popularly supposed that productive cooperation has been a complete failure in Great Britain, but this certainly is a misapprehension. Many cooperative enter- prises, both distributive and productive, have failed, and the phenomenal success of distributive cooperation has completely overshadowed the less spectacular development of productive cooperation. Its success, nevertheless, has been quite substantial.

'Benjamin Jones, Economic Journal, Vol. II, pp. 616, 617.