Page 393 - The_story_of_the_C._W._S._The_jubilee_history_of_the_cooperative_wholesale_society,_limited._1863-1913_(IA_storyofcwsjubill00redf) (1)_Neat

The Real Virtue of the Store Movementc
productive works of the C.W.S. concludes. At the end of 1912
these departments represented an invested capital of £2,590,218, a
volume of suppHes worth £7,556,821 at net factory prices, and
a body of employees numbering 13,370. Further, they stand
for an industrial democracy—a direct service of working-class
consumer by working-class producer; and they embody the
persistent efforts of four generations of co-operators to find and fix
a reahsation in this world of the Owenite dream. For it A\'as Owen
who gave the stimulus, if not the method; while, although the
structure is not as the prophet desired, still it is one which, in its
main outhnes, if not in every detail, has proved itself as best
answering to natural facts and ordinary human nature. And this
family of industries has been cradled and trained entkely by
industrial folk and men elected from their own ranks — people for
whose names you would look in vam in Who's Who and the Dictionary
of National Biography. It is a fact of more than passing moment
that (with the notable exception of Mrs. Sidney Webb) the middle and
upper class sympathisers with co-operation, from the first beginning
in 1872 down to the present day, have been almost, if not quite,
unanimously hostile to the C.W.S. principles of production. Some
common instinct, interest, or outlook has led them to look for the
glory in the position of the employee, and to exalt the labour at the
expense of the consuming poor. Yet the glory has been chiefly, if
not entirely, in strengthening and binding the store movement, in
aiding its work of making life richer and easier for the co-operating
masses, and in placing productive powers at the service of a brother-
hood built upon common human needs and open to all. That store
movement is not perfection. At a hundred points it is open to
improvement; but the bettering must come less from outside than
from those who do not scorn to take its goods into their homes, who
are glad of its opportunities for education and recreation, and who
are not too prosperous to value its dividends. Labourers and miners,
artisans and clerks, and their mothers and wives are those chiefly
who have Hnked store to warehouse and warehouse to workshop and
workshop to farm, and have thrown around all the bond of a
voluntary collectivism; and it is for them, with those of other classes
who will co-operate with them rather than patronise, to stand by
and further enrich their own, until the store movement sufficiently
responds to all the nobler human necessities as well as to the
commonest.

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