366 HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL. 



at the cost of laying them down here and handling. The people will 

 thereby be able to make their money go farther towards paying the 

 expenses of the farming effort." It is found that they can pay all 

 expenses of handling the goods with a profit of five per cent, and they 

 commence selling the brethren at that margin. Immediately all other 

 stores in that county drop to the same price, and sell many leading 

 articles even lower, and open a bitter war on the Alliance store and its 

 manager. They undersell him and get the trade ; they slander him and 

 ridicule his methods. It is found, at the end of the year, that his sales 

 have been so small that the store has lost money, and stories are circu- 

 lated that the manager has swindled the stockholders. A careful exami- 

 nation, however, fails to show any evidence, and all know in their hearts 

 that they are false ; but the store is regarded as a failure, and its enemies 

 advertise it as a fraud. The stockholders have made nothing, perhaps 

 not even interest on their stock. They may have lost a part of the 

 original investment. Thus far this comparison has shown what is 

 usually published in regard to these two systems, but simple justice 

 demands that the investigation be pursued a little further, in order to see 

 the effect of both upon agriculture. 



As has been shown, the gross effect of the Rochdale plan was a divi- 

 dend of $50, on an average, to each of the one hundred stockholders, 

 making an aggregate gain of $5000. The gain from the business of the 

 Alliance store accrued to the general public in the shape of reduced 

 prices ; and, as nine-tenths of the people of that county were farmers, 

 nine-tenths of the gains accrued to agriculture. This gain consisted 

 in the difference between five per cent and twenty-five per cent on the 

 $800,000 worth of goods purchased from the merchants of that county. 

 That is to say, under both systems the gross purchases of the merchants 

 of the county were $800,000. Under the Rochdale system, they sold 

 the goods during the year for $1,000,000, and under the Alliance store 

 system they sold the same goods for $840,000, making a clear gain to 

 the people of that county, on their purchases, of $160,000 ; and if nine- 

 tenths were farmers, the gain to the farming interests of the county would 

 be $144,000 in a single year, as a result of the Alliance store. Subtract 

 from this the five thousand, as gross gains of the Rochdale store, and it 

 shows the difference to be $139,000 in a single county, in one year, in 

 favor of the Alliance store, as a benefit to agriculture. 



The stockholders, however, were not perceptibly benefited, and not 

 disposed to perpetuate a store that perhaps fulfilled the divine injunc- 

 tion, and benefited its enemies. It was impossible to make the people 

 generally understand that it paid to run a store that was a failure. They 



