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A REPUBLIC OF CONSUMERS

How Cooperation Is Revolutionizing British Industry. By WALTER E. WEYL.

Reprinted by courtesy of the Saturday Evening Post. (Continued from February.)

HE success of cooperative wholesale trading having been established, the cooperative stores began to dream of new worlds to conquer. The original idea of the consumer was that he could not only sell to himself but produce for himself at his own risk and for his own profit. The cooperative stores, therefore, began to push out into the field of productive cooperation.

Productive cooperation is of two types: it may be carried on for the benefit either of the producer or of the consumer. Workmen may unite, borrow capital, sell their product at market prices and divide profits -or losses-among themselves. On the other hand, consumers may start a flour mill or a boot factory, pay the current rates for capital and labor, and distribute the profits either in lower prices or in dividends in proportion to sales. Both the wholesale and the retail societies have gone into the business of cooperative production. It is a new profit to the consumer. The consumer, having absorbed the profits of the retail and wholesale trader, reaches out for those of the manufacturer.

Let us take the shoe business. John Doe goes to his retail cooperative and buys his wife a pair of shoes, manufactured at the English wholesale boot and shoe works, at Leicester. In the first instance, John Doe pays the regular retail price; but at the end of the quarter, when he receives his dividend, he shares in three savings, all made on this pair of shoes. The ordinary retailer's profit, the wholesaler's profit and the manufacturer's profit all go to the cooperative society-and through it to John Doe. On a two-dollar pair of shoes there may be a profit of perhaps four cents in manufacturing, five cents in wholesaling and twenty cents in retailing-or of about twenty-nine cents altogether.

Production by cooperative stores is rapidly expanding. Already the cooperative wholesales are annually producing goods to the value of some forty million dollars; and the cooperative retails are producing an equal amount. Much of this production is in the preparation of food, especially the baking of bread, the milling of

wheat and the slaughtering of cattle. The cooperative wholesales are also engaged in the textile industry-in tailoring, shirtmaking, dressmaking, millinery, boot and shoe manufacturing, in wood-working, in soap, candle and starch making, in printing and allied trades, in the manufacture of cigars and cigarettes, and in innumerable other productive enterprises.

Business for the Sake of Consumption.

The cooperative store societies are lending money to their members to help them to buy houses; and they are even going into the business of building houses themselves. More and more the organized consumers are producing for themselves as well as selling to themselves.

It is because they have their own known demand to begin with that the great cooperative societies have been successful in production and so astoundingly successful in distribution. Almost without knowing it, the cooperative distributive society -the store-has reversed all the ordinary processes of trade.

In ordinary business, a manufacturer produces goods on a gamble. He makes a shrewd estimate of the probable demand and his profit or loss depends upon whether he has guessed well or badly. The wholesaler, in buying from the manufacturer, has to guess at the probable demand of the retailer; the retailer, in buying from the wholesaler, has to guess at the probable demand of the consumer. The guessing, on the whole, is well done; but it remains guessing. Our many business failures, our vast stocks of almost useless misfits, our frequent production of things for which there is no real demand, commonly result from a failure to guess correctly at some point.

The cooperators do not have to guess. They start with their own known demand and they organize their own stores to meet this known demand. When they are selling to themselves a few tens of millions annually they organize great wholesale cooperatives to meet the known demand of their own retail stores. If they start a boot factory it is to supply themselves. They know exactly how many thousands of

shoes they can use each week before even the plans of the factory are put on paper. The tremendous advantage of the cooperative over the competitive store lies in this known demand. It is business for the sake of consumption. It is a business in which there is no serious risk of being overstocked or of losing your custom. The cooperator has his customers before he has his goods. He starts with a demand; whereas the private business man has to start with a supply.

There are a few enthusiastic members of the cooperative distributive societies who hope that the store will conquer the whole industrial world. Soon, they believe, all men will buy for themselves and will produce for themselves. Production and selling for profit will grow smaller and less important, until profitmaking will become a mere vestige. Industry will be socialized. The cooperative store will end in a cooperative commonwealth.

There are limits, however, to this development, and these limits are fixed and impassable. The cooperative store creates a democracy of consumers, but this democracy cannot be as wide as the nation or as wide as industry.

In the first place, the cooperative store does not attract all customers. There are vast numbers of wealthy and fastidious people who prefer variety to cheapness, and are willing to pay for bowing and scraping and wreathed smiles, and for a certain obsequiousness that is pleasantly lacking in cooperative stores. There are British agricultural laborers who are too isolated or too abject to maintain cooperative stores. There are other millions too poor to economize and too wretched to unite-men to whom a penny today is more than a shilling tomorrow. There are sweated, casual laborers, as well as drunkards, incapables and wastrels, without the material or moral resources necessary to cooperators. In the great cities, thousands of nomads are without neighbors or fixed abode. Although the British cooperative stores have relaxed their former strict rules against the giving of credit, and although they have conducted a long-continued campaign against drunkenness and have always refused to sell alcoholic beverages-there still remain millions of people who do not aspire to cooperative trading, just as there are millions who will not condescend to it. In the vast republic of consumers, prince and pauper alike are invited to become citizens. Nevertheless, both prince and pauper remain outside the pale.

Cooperation in This Country.

There are economic limits as well as social and psychological ones. Not all cooperative production by consumers is successful. The British cooperative stores cultivate some ten thousand acres of land, but the results have not been gratifying. Production on the very largest scale-the manufacture of steel, the building of steamships, the running of railways-is beyond the powers of these cooperators. The stores are successful at production only when they are meeting their own known demand for articles of common use.

Probably the cooperative store, wholesale as well as retail, will eventually find a place in the United States. It was tried in America too soon. It failed because, as a nation, we were still too mobile; because we were penny-foolish-and, perhaps, pound-wise; because we were more interested in making than in saving. Even today our conditions are vastly different from those of the English, Scotch and Welsh districts, in which the cooperative store has been so pre-eminently successful. Our country is wider, more varied, with more different racial stocks. Our population is more dispersed. We have more great cities and more large agricultural areas with sparse populations. We have fewer and weaker traditions and much less of the narrow, but useful, spirit of neighborliness. On the other hand, Americans show a genius for coming together into voluntary organizations. Our railroads, our telegraphs, our rural free delivery, our rural telephone, our expected parcels-post, are uniting us, despite our great distances, into a union far closer than any union that existed in England in 1844, when the Rochdale Pioneers opened their first cooperative shop. Agricultural cooperation has begun and will be carried out on a large scale. Distributive cooperation is equally possible. We may come to have in America a great number of retail cooperative societies united into one great national wholesale cooperative society as soon as the consumer, taught by the higher cost of living, begins to discover himself.

"A LITTLE SUN, A LITTLE RAIN." A little sun, a little rain,

A soft wind blowing from the westAnd woods and flelds are sweet again,

And warmth within the mountain's breast. So simple is the earth we tread,

So quick with love and life her frame; Ten thousand years have dawned and fled, And still her magic is the same.

A little love, a little trust,

A soft impulse, a sudden dreamAnd life as dry as desert dust Is fresher than a mountain stream. -Stopford A. Brooke.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLT AT LAWRENCE

Where the American Melting Pot Has Boiled Over.

By RICHARD WASHBURN CHILD, in Collier's.

URING these eight weeks in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a strange and wonderful picture has been painted.

Upon the little canvas, woven on the looms of social and industrial development, are now spread the half-sombre, halfglaring colors of human instincts and emotions. In the foreground one of our American melting pots, having failed to produce an alloy of many metals, has frothed, sputtered, and boiled over; in the background is the indistinct gray swirl of economic forces rushing by-out of history-into eternity. If there is an awe-inspiring quality in this picture, it is because some day it may be reproduced in great bold strokes across the whole expanse of American life.

Lawrence is drab. In the winter dusk the huge rectangular prisms of the textile mills, black and sullen against the sky line, lie along the shores of the Merrimac River, and, behind them, like a progeny of badly begotten offspring, crowding in a hungry herd, are the countless other rectangular prisms of human habitations.

Systematic and Organized Misrepre-
sentations.

Standing on a street corner, one sees suddenly that this crowd that moves along the street of shops is a congress of nations. He sees the faces of oppressed peoples, ninetenths timid and patient, one-tenth of the stuff that makes mobs. The marching feet of a company of soldiers fill the cold, damp air with the grim, scuffling sound of military without music. At every street corner a pacing sentry, who is clad in wool cap, greatcoat, and leggings, lurches back and forth like a huge bird deprived of liberty. His bayonet flashes in the light from the store windows.

"Move on!" said one of them to three men who stopped to cut pipefuls of tobacco on the street corner. He was a boy, and, like the rest, young with the flash of impulse in his eye and unrestraint showing in the youthful fullness of his lips. None the less he stood the torrent of abuse that met his command. "Haven't I got a right to stand here?" snarled one of the men. "Who are you working for-me or William Wood?" Wood is the financial head of the largest mills.

"Go on now," said the boy threateningly, then turned to the stranger, who was smiling because he had recognized in the soldier the driver of a laundry cart at home.

"Rotten job," said he, rubbing his cold ears; "rotten for all of us. Most of us is dead sorry for the strikers. They haven't done much anyhow. The newspapers have lied about 'em, somethin' fierce. There hasn't been anything much here. The mill men turned the hose on 'em first, that day they broke the windows, and the woman they say was shot by 'em might have been shot by. anybody. They've paraded down the street. It's funny to hear that 'Boo-boo-boo' they make. It sounds ugly, and, of course, a gang of 'em might make trouble. But I've seen 'em salute the flag as it went by and holler 'Hooray for de milish!' at a troop of cavalry. Then if a striker opens an umbrella, it gets into the papers that there's been a riot. The strikers get the worst of it, but the people of this State are with 'em."

The boy in uniform was not mistaken. The strikers, dangerous as they might become if restraints were removed, have suffered from systematic and organized misrepresentation. The mill owners have suffered, too, no doubt. In spite of the fog of rumors and the turbulence of partisan accusation, it is time that the truth was told about the Lawrence strike. The truth ought to be told by somebody.

He

"I have foretold the trouble for years," said one of the business men in the region. "Lawrence once was a manufacturing town where the manufacturer lived himself. had a friendly daily intercourse with his help. They were Irish, English, and Scotch, and contented enough. The man at the head of a textile mill was a manufacturer and not a so-called financier. He was more interested in his laborers and his machinery and methods than in watering the stock of his corporation or trying to make profits out of combinations.

The Game of Consolidation and Promotion.

He went on to explain the process by which most of the directing heads of the textile industry became no longer manufacturers, primarily because their first interest was the market rather than the mill. He traced the development correctly. The cap

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