THE CO-OPERATIVE INDUSTRIES OF BRITAIN.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 413, 23 October 1889, Page 6

THE CO-OPERATIVE INDUSTRIES OF BRITAIN.

Very few people bub those directly interested are aware of the great importance of the co operative industries of Grea Britain, and the enormous sums of money dealt with by those institutions. There i what is known as a Co-operative Union in Great Britain, with which is incorporated the majority of the various artisans' cooperative societies and three of the largest Civil Service stores. The objects of this Union are thus defined : — "This Union is founded to promote the practice of truthfulness, justice and economy in production and exchange. 1. By abolishing false dealing either directly by representing any article produced or sold to be other than what it is known to the produ ;er or vendor to be, or indirectly by concealing from the purchaser anyiacb known to the vendor material to be known by the purchaser to enable him to judge of the article purchased. 2. By conciliating the conflicting interests of the capitalist, the worker, and the purchaser through an equitable division among them of the fund commonly known as profit. By preventing the waste of labour now caused by unregulated competition." The societies are divided into three kinds. There are 1,200 distributive societies or retail stores, with a membership of 640,000. I The share capital of these amounts to £6,000,000, and the annual sales amount to £18,000,000. Groceries, bread, coal, meat, drapery, etc., are all sold from these stores on the old Rochdale system. The ordinary ruling market price is charged, and the profits are divided between each member according to his purchases at the end of every quarter, and vary from Is 6d to 2s 6d in the pound. All members must be shareholders, but at the outset this need only co&t them one shilling for a pound share, the accumulating dividends being devoted to paying the balance. Another class of societies are the wholepale, of which there are two, one in England and the other in Scotland. These are, so to speak, federations of the distributive stores. Expert buyers are employed by these two stores in all parts of the world, and they supply the retail establishments with whatever they require. The value of the sales of the British wholesale store is four and a-half million pounds annually, and of the Scotch one million and a-half. Then come the productive or manufacturing societies, the five corn mills at tached to which do a business of £1,300,000 a year. The other productive societies do a business of a quarter of a million. The three Civil Service stores which belong to the Union do an annual business between them of £2,500,000. The business done by these co-operative societies in the last twenty years amounts to the grand total of £250,000,000,thenetprotitsonwhich reached £20,000,000, the whole of which nearly has gone into the members' pockets. Besides benefiting financially by this system of co-operation it has been found that its educational advantages are of the greatest value ; it has inculcated in the working classes lessons of tolerance, forethought, and self-restraint, and shown them the great power and value of united organisation. They have encouraged each other to aim at a high standard of morality in business, and they now realise what a power they possess not only for commercial but for political purposes. One of the greatest questions of the day is to solve the problem of the proper distribution of wealth, without interfering with the rights of individuals. Mr Gladstone nearly half a century ago said : "It is one of the sad sides of the present social order in our land that the steady increase of wealth of the upper clashes and the accumulation of capital should be attended with a diminution in the people's power of consumption, and with a larger amount of privation and suffering among the poor." Speaking in the House of Commons many years afterwards, in 1862, he said : " From 1842 to 1853 the receipts from the inconce tax increased 6 per cent, in England. From 1853 to DB6l they increased 20 per cent. It is an astonishing fact, but nevertheless true, that thia prodigious increase of wealth benefited solely the well-to-do classes." In 1872 Professor Fawcebt said : " Production has increased beyond the most sanguine hope, and yet the day when the workman shall obtain a large share of this increase is as distant as ever, and in his miserable abode the struggle against want and misery is as hard as ever it was." Many political economists have made the rather funny mistake of assuming, as a matter of fact, that the surplus profit ot the year's work of a nation is distributed in •some sort of manner between the landowner, capital and labour. The utterances of Mr Gladstone and Mr Fawcetfc and every day experience shows that this is nob so.

In Great Britain the national wealth of the country in ten years, ending 1875, increased by £2,400,000,000. This was the surplus after paying cost of production, wages, rent and interest each year. But the fact remains that labour having received its wages, received no share whatever bf these surplus profits. Ib all went to Capital and to landowners. Labour, the jproducer, is clearly entitled to its fair share fof the profits and this not being recognised, fully accounts for the state of affairs remarked on by Mr Gladstone. It stands to ■reason that under such conditions, labour Icould not improve its social posiiion, but jmust continue always to simply exist on ibaro subsistence wages, and until the time (arrives when somehow or another a fair distribution of this surplus wealth is arrived •at, the wealthy must continue to got •wealthier and the poor poorer, because in ithe case of the latter their continual natural jincrease of numbers must cause the keenest •competition for employment. ' " Auckland Star," October 16.