336 POULTRY CULTURE 



producers, though independent, are all engaged in " making" the 

 same line of goods and in trying to make their product of uni- 

 formly high quality ; and the middleman, dealing fairly by them, 

 increases his own profits, not by taking from the producer as large 

 a proportion of the^price as possible, but by making a fair division 

 of profits and thus encouraging the extension of the industry and 

 enlarging the volume of his own trade. 



Uniformity of product is the basis of cooperative selling. Lack- 

 ing this, no cooperative movement can be self-sustaining. With 

 uniformity of product and a sufficient volume of it, there comes a 

 strong tendency toward practical cooperation in selling, which gives 

 the producer all the advantages that he would gain by a purely 

 cooperative system of disposing of products. Given conditions 

 favorable to such cooperation, the form of the selling system is 

 of less importance than the spirit of the parties interested. The 

 case mentioned was selected as most strikingly typical. Something 

 of the same conditions may be found wherever a particular branch 

 of poultry culture is followed by many persons in a community. 



