Page 101 - The_story_of_the_C._W._S._The_jubilee_history_of_the_cooperative_wholesale_society,_limited._1863-1913_(IA_storyofcwsjubill00redf) (1)_Neat

The Keep of the Castkc
Quarterly Meetings. But it was met there by Mr. Mitchell, now
chairman of the C.W.S. He killed it by definition. It was a proposal,
he said, to create two executives for the control of one capital. The
support of a few prominent co-operators, led by E. V. Neale, could not
save the scheme from a crushing defeat. Other alterations of rules
were carried, however, designed to facilitate the banking business,
and bring it within the letter as well as the spirit of the law. Although
the agitation for a separate co-operative bank was maintained for
many years onward, with more or less hope, the C.W.S. Banking
Department was never afterwards in any real danger.
It must not be supposed that disinterested and public-spirited
men like Hughes and Neale cherished the slightest ill-will toward
the C.W.S. They were animated by a warm idea of a great, friendly
financial institution giving a hand of equal comradeship to every
working-class movement, the Wholesale Society included, and they
thought such a tower of strength should stand by itseK. Mitchell,
Nuttall, Allen, and their supporters, however, saw in that tower the
very keep of the C.W.S. castle. " It is not your money," said Mr.
Greening to the C.W.S. Committee, "it is the money of the move-
ment." But the C.W.S. was the movement, or the main body of it,
in its most united aspect; and the money ivas the Committee's
money in the sense that they, and not their critics, were responsible
to the societies for it. And Mitchell and the others saw how this
money within the C.W.S. would draw together and strengthen the
whole store movement, while in the hands of a separate body it
would have created a division between the mercantile and the
manufacturing and the financial powers, leaving it within the
authority of the latter to starve, stunt, or positively forbid C.W.S.
development.
On this ground began the long controversy between the individual
and the federahst or collectivist schools of co-operation. There
began, also, a still more intimate and more painful movement.
Hughes and Neale especially had watched over and helped the
infant North of England Society from its bkth. It was not easy for
them now to reahse that the child was growing to youth and man-
Yet, represented
hood and they felt their guidance necessary still.
;
by such men as Mitchell, the Wholesale Society more and more
discovered itself, and the need of advancing the purpose and mission
mherent within itseK, even at the cost of perplexing or alienating its
fosterers. Those battles of the seventies, in which so many
dehghted, were not without sadness for a few.
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