Page 150 - The_story_of_the_C._W._S._The_jubilee_history_of_the_cooperative_wholesale_society,_limited._1863-1913_(IA_storyofcwsjubill00redf) (1)_Neat
P. 150

The Story of the C.W.S.

       for the profit-sharing and co-operative productive controversies to
       be described in Chapter XVIII., the intervening years of transition
       were occupied with  quiet  seed-sowing.  Lloyd Jones  in  1882
       prophesied a  "  junction "  of trade  unionists and  co-operators,
       "  against which no power would be able to stand," and a practical
       result of this feeling was the existing Joint Committee of Trade
       Unionists and  Co-operators,  to  arbitrate  in  disputes,  and,  as
       originally designed, to promote a mutual understanding and further
       co-operative production.  In 1882 co-operators went to Oxford, and
       Arnold Toynbee, Mr. A. H. D. Acland, and others joined  forces
       with suggestions for educational progress.  Internationalism grew
       Avith visits and return visits by English and French co-operators,
       and a Committee of Foreign Inquiry, and a suggestion by M. de
       Boyve (in 1889) for an International Co-operative AUiance. Further,
       in 1883 the  "  Women's Guild for the Spread of Co-operation,"
       afterwards  to become  the Women's  Co-operative  Guild,  was
       founded by Mrs. A. H. D. Acland and Mrs. Mary Lawi'enson of
       Woolwich, an important and significant beginning.
          In the general sphere  of working-class  life also the eighties
       on the whole formed a quiet period.  Although broken by the
       riots of the unemployed and the Trafalgar Square bloodshed of
       1S86, there existed a calm before the breezes of the New Unionism
       in  1889-90.  On the economic  side duruig the  earlier  eighties
       money wages were nearly stationary, but prices fell almost con-
       tinuously, so that real wages steadily and even rapidly increased.
       The statistics of Mr. G. H. Wood show this conclusion after allowing
       for  unemployment.  In  the  middle  eighties  the  out-of-work
       distress came near to equalling the sharp severity of 1879, while
       prevailing for a longer period.  Throughout the decade the merely
       poor were becoming more and more divided into poor and very
       poor.  The skilled workers, who availed themselves of co-operation
       and trade unionism, discovered  an  increasing  margiri between
        the cost of sheer animal necessities and the purchasing power of
        their wages.  The railway companies became aware of the greater
        spending capacity, and cheap trips multiplied.  The unskilled and
        casual labour classes, on the other hand, were  left behind, and
        largely out  of touch with  the two  great  people's  forces.  A
        missionary spirit in the co-operative movement, working both in
        town and country, since then has made the gulf much less wide
        than it threatened to become, and m this it has been aided by the
        industrial organisation of labourers, and the ideahsm that quickened
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