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