Page 392 - 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.

endorsed the animadversions in leading articles, so that press
and platform were ranged against the Wholesale Society. In
September, 1900, the C.W.S. rephed by exhibiting " only where
the Society's own productions and those of productive societies
for which we are sole agents are shown." It is sometimes safer to
hit a big man than a small one—at any rate, in public. Onlookers
admire the pluck. They conclude that the giant must be in
the wrong, and, anyhow, it would be unfair for him to retahate.
Usually the federation had occupied this unfavourable moral
position; but in this case there was a rally. At the C.W.S, Quarterly
Meetings it is true delegates urged that " with its great heart " the
Wholesale Society " could afford to let these thmgs go by." Yet
those who took this view were equally frank in their opinion of
the critics. There was much talk of " gilded nobodies." Mr.
Greorge Hawkins voiced a general feehng when he said " he had
met one of these individuals, who had got a coronet, and had told
him that if he would serve for six months on the committee of
a co-operative society he would know more about co-operation
than he did then." Mr. Llewellyn, of the Sheffield Cutlers and the
then Productive Committee of the Co-operative Union, "decidedly
objected " to the C.W.S. being described as non-co-operative. The
Committee's view was that while they did not object to criticism,
the opening of an exhibition of co-operative productions was not the
proper occasion for denouncing a chief exhibitor, and they preferred
not to recognise an exhibition where this might occur. In this
attitude they were supported by a very large majority of the
delegates. One from Pittington in Durham " mclined to think that
the C.W.S. was the co-operative movement, and anything not
included in that ' we ' was something outside and antagonistic
to it."
The decision caused the Co-operative Union to intervene, and
early in 1901 an agreement was arrived at, which subsequently was
endorsed by the Congress of that year at Middlesbrough. The
agreement provided for the control of all joint exhibitions (except
the Congress Exhibition, which had never been in question) by
a joint committee of the Co-operative Union and the C.W.S. And
under this arrangement the Wholesale Society and the copartner-
ship societies have shown their productions side by side amicably,
although there never has been a hall available for a joint exhibition
which the C.W.S. could not have filled of itself.
With this echo of an old controversy the history of the
312