Page 290 - The_story_of_the_C._W._S._The_jubilee_history_of_the_cooperative_wholesale_society,_limited._1863-1913_(IA_storyofcwsjubill00redf) (1)_Neat

The Story of the C.W.S. —

business by supplying individual members. Among the latter there
were private traders—for whatever might be said by their official
journals about co-operation, the traders were not at all loth to take
advantage of the system when they had the opportunity. Indeed,
more than one whose only investm.ent had been £5 was obUged to
draw out the dividends on his purchases again and again, simply to
keep the total credit balance within the legal limit of £200.
Yet all the thirty or forty co-operative corn mills scattered over
the country, whose careers Mr. Ben Jones has faithfully noted, had
to face an extraordinary combination of circumstances against
them. Three different sets of changes were operating with cumula-
tive force during all the nineteenth century, to the end of radically
altering all the conditions of the industry. First there was the
change in methods and machinery. Steam entered into this and
largely made it possible; but there were other causes than the
introduction of steam. From the time when women or slaves first
rubbed out corn between stones, or pounded it in mortars, humanity
has desired a finer and a cleaner flour. Obedient to the force of this
desire came the improved millstones of the wind-power and water-
driving period, the sifting of flour by machinery in the eighteenth
century, the substitution of silk gauze for the coarse " bolting
"
cloth in this machinery about 1850, and improved methods of
cleansing the wheat. But it was the Austro-Hungarian system of
roller mills which revolutionised milling machinery. Wliere the old
mills sought to pulverise the wheat at one operation, the new
system meant a gradual reduction by various steel rollers, admitting
" purification," or winnowing by air, between each stage of the
of
grinding. This system was originated and developed on the
Continent—in France, Austria, Hungary, Gtermany, and Italy
between 1820 and 1840. After 1860 it was largely adopted. Flour
in increasing quantities was now exported from the Continent to
England instead of wheat—we have seen that in the early days of
C.W.S. shipping the importation of flour by C.W.S. boats from
Hamburg was a sore point with the co-operative milHng societies.
But the results of the Continental system could not be denied.
OnAvards from 1882 the more enterprising British millers in quick
succession began to change their methods. They rejected the old
millstones and installed roller plants, altered to deal with the wider
varieties of wheat which a policy of free trade enables us to import,
and to grind successfully in our damp English climate. But,
obviously, only large and strong mills could face the expense of the
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