74 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 cooperation 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 an- 

 nually 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 socie- 

 ties have averted from them the upward-looking countenances of true 

 cooperators, 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 manufac- 

 turing 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 there- 

 fore less susceptible of becoming united and working together. What- 

 ever may be the causes, the fact remains that cooperation 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 con- 

 duct 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 confreres 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 pro- 

 vincial 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 Cooperative 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 provi- 

 sion 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 dis- 

 possessing shopkeepers of their business, and subjecting them to hard- 

 ship by employing the economical methods of cooperation, the factory 

 operatives of Lancashire and Yorkshire had the justification of their 



