Page 394 - The_story_of_the_C._W._S._The_jubilee_history_of_the_cooperative_wholesale_society,_limited._1863-1913_(IA_storyofcwsjubill00redf) (1)_Neat

CHAPTER XXVI. A —

In the New Century.
Time and Memory—Co-operative Yesterdays— -Tlie C.W.S. Dividend—
Comparison with Joint -stock Methods—Reforming tlie Constitution
Changes at Headquarters—Manchester, Newcastle, and London—The
Architects' Department—The C.W.S. Bank and Popular Banking—Inter-
national Co-operation and the Future—Years 1899-1913.
I) AIDS on the present century already have been made in each
ij) of the eleven preceding chapters. It now remains to gather
the threads together, to review the general C.W.S. history that
distinctly belongs to the last ten or twelve years, and to see the
federal side of the " republic of consumers " as in aU its branches
and departments constituting our national institution.
Those of us born since 1870, but clearly remembering the
first jubilee year of Queen Victoria, are apt to think of the sisties
as infinitely more distant than the eighties; so present to us are
the days which we still remember, so distant is the time we have
never known. When Arnold Beimett and Edward Knoblauch in
Milestones exhibited the year 1912 as not less removed from 1885
than that date from 1860, the simple fact came to one as an idea both
novel a.nd unpleasing. Yet, once the mind is aroused to the sense
of time, the Boer War begins to seem a remote event, separating us
not only from an English electorate passionate in 1886 over Home
Rule, but also from a populace that in 1900 poured out its heart in
" The Absent-minded Beggar," " Dolly Gray," and the " Soldiers
of the Queen."
Of figm'es on the dial there are many. Pohtically, the era of
Liberahsm, the supplanting of ]\Ir. Chamberlain by Mr. Lloyd
George, the rise of the Labour Party, the Women's Suffrage revival
of 1904 and after, the Anglo-German antagonism and the Anglo-
French and Anglo-Russian understandings separate us from 1899.
Old-age pensions and the Lisurance Act, Wages Boards, the Tariff
Reform agitation, the Town Planning Act, and school chnics mark
tlie period. Economically, we have travelled through a war
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