Page 378 - 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.
co-operative organisations the capitalist already is subdued,
wherefore emerges there the problems of a more advanced state.
Such problems, however, the Irish agricultural organisers at that
period simplified for themselves by troubling about one set of
factors only. In Sir Horace Plunkett's words, they "nov/here
advised or encouraged the founding of co-operative stores on the
English plan." It was, at any rate, a plain and unmistakable
position.
The C.W.S., however, was not so unembarrassed. There was
no Ii'ish C.W.S. to whom the English (and Welsh) federation could
have handed over the entire question, as the interests of consumers
and producers in Scotland are left to the Scottish Wholesale Society.
Yet the western isle was not quite innocent of a store movement.
The Belfast Society, which has since grown so great, was in existence,
and other societies elsewhere. But this Irish distributive movement
was far from being at the stage of federating, and conducting
creameries, and supplying Glasgow and Manchester. Therefore, in
the interests of the seK-supply of both English and Irish consumers,
the C.W.S. , in companj^ with the S.C.W.S. in the North, was, for the
time being at any rate, very naturally and properly at work in
Ireland. Moreover, that strain of philanthropy, that passion for
doing good, which so many logical Irish and Continental critics of
the illogical English are so ready to lampoon as native hypocrisy,
was genuinely present in the leaders of the C.W.S. A very large
part of their motive was to help a distressed country. Of this there
can be no question. The conviction was uttered as strongty in
it was borne out by a hundred facts, and now
private as in public ;
and then was admitted in Ireland. The report of the I.A.O.S. for
1901 said:—
It is right to state that the objects of the C.W.S. in starting creameries in
Ireland appear to have been in the first instance to assist the Irish farmer by
developing his dairy business, and, of course, incidentally to supply themselves
with a certain quantity of butter of the quality which their customers required.
Yet, under the special circumstances of an undeveloped country,
that which was a democracy of consumers in England, where any
C.W.S. employee or supplier can become enfranchised with the rest
by joining a co-operative store never far away, could not be other
than a kmd of imperialism in the West of Ireland. Mr. Plunkett,
therefore, had just this fragment of excuse when at the Congress
of 1895 he spoke of the C.W.S. creameries as being practically
proprietary instead of co-operative. It was but a fragment, for
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