Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/766

746 and care very little about it. The committee and general meetings are usually well attended, and often give scope and opportunity to ability which might without coöperation have lain dormant. Many useful suggestions in times of difficulty have been made by men and women whose only school has been that of hardship and penury.

Societies which strictly follow the Rochdale type set apart annually a portion of their profits for educational purposes, and as a result free libraries and news-rooms are attached to some of the larger stores; the love of information, however, is sometimes wanting in a society whose constant habit is to declare fat dividends. Such societies have averted from them the upward-looking countenances of true coöperators, who regard the lack of food for the mind as demanding at least the ample relief bestowed upon physical hunger.

The citizens of the great metropolis of England have not been ready learners of the men of Rochdale. In the vast extent of London workmen usually live at a distance from their workshops and factories, and the variety of industries is so great that the combinability of the workmen in a town of moderate size and tolerably uniform manufacturing production finds no parallel in London. Then, too, the varied excitements and amusements of the modern Babylon are held to make its work-people more volatile than their provincial brethren, and therefore less susceptible of becoming united and working together. Whatever may be the causes, the fact remains that coöperation scarcely exists in London among the poor, and is mainly confined to the vast associations of the middle and upper classes. The chief of these conduct the Civil-Service stores, the first of which was founded in 1864 by the Post-Office employees. Since 1864 other departments of the Civil Service have joined their confrères of the Post-Office, and the business transacted at their warehouses has become enormous. The principles of the London stores are essentially different from those of the provincial ones. In stores of the Rochdale type, capital as such receives no share in profits, it obtains only its interest at five per cent.; in London, subscribers to the capital stock of the Coöperative Associations need not be buyers at all, yet they share in the profits of the business; the plan being to set prices upon the goods sold as much below those of ordinary retailers as will enable the working expenses to be paid and give a reasonable return to the capital embarked. There is no provision in these associations for the accumulation of the sums saved by buying of them, and the underselling of the shopkeepers is direct, and not indirect, as in the provincial stores, where the current retail prices are charged, and the saving comes in the shape of a dividend every six or twelve months. The shopkeeping interest has been much more resentful of the London stores than of provincial ones. In dispossessing shopkeepers of their business, and subjecting them to hardship by employing the economical methods of coöperation, the factory operatives of Lancashire and Yorkshire had the justification of their