Page 395 - The_story_of_the_C._W._S._The_jubilee_history_of_the_cooperative_wholesale_society,_limited._1863-1913_(IA_storyofcwsjubill00redf) (1)_Neat

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Figures on the Dial.
" boom " and a resultant trade depression, a revival, and again a
falling off, and finally a world-wide " boom " producing greater
accumulations of capital, vaster opportunities for capitalists in the
field of foreign investment, great struggles of the underpaid to
secure a minimum level of subsistence, especially for "unsldlled"
labour, and an advancing cost of living. To deal miscellaneously,
in the main it is the last dozen years which have given us motor
cars, aeroplanes and dirigibles, submarines, pictiue theatres, electric
traction, pianolas, day trips to Paris, garden villages, cheap copy-
right books, Labour newspapers, Ruskin College, the Workers'
Educational Association, the Brotherhood movement, repertory
theatres, Bergson's philosophy, SyndicaUsm, "rhythm" in art,
Russian dancing, Sunday goK, and the attainment of the North Pole
and the South—a queer mixture of things not all unrelated. In
1873 it was a matter of public interest that a man had ridden a
bicycle from London to John o' Groats at an average of sixty miles
daily. About the same time a friend of Ruskin, Carlyle, and
Tennyson (the poet, Coventry Patmore) was genuinely if morbidly
convinced that the Reform Bill of 1867 marked the beginning of
England's decHne. To a sympathiser he wrote :
The bank holidays, as you say, are a prodigious nuisance. The whole
population of England seems now to be chronically drunk every Saturday,
Sunday, and Monday, feast. day or fast. It is very lucky. Nothing l^ut
universal drunkenness among the labouring classes can keep them from
making use, i.e., abuse, of their new political power. It will be an unliappj' day
for England when the mechanic takes to becoming a sober, respectable man.^
Evidently it is not prudent either to exalt the novelties of the day
or to see in them the end of all things.
The co-operative movement both has reflected the outer events
of the new century and within this short span has witnessed
changes of its own. The Co-operative Congress in 1903 approved a
Er-ee Trade pohcy, and re-affirmed the decision in 1904. In 1905 it
was in favour of co-operative representation in Parliament ; in 1908
it endorsed the pacific Women's Suffrage movement, which had been
reinforced in 1904 by the Women's Guild, and in the same year, as
again in 1907, it advocated Wages Boards. In 1907 it commended
the town plarming and garden village movement ; in 1909 it called
for an Anglo-German treaty; in 1910 it lu-ged the State control of
railways, and the democratisation of the universities; and with a

^Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore. by Basil Cliampneys (1900';
Vol. II., p. 105. The extract is undated, but bank holidays were a novelty in 187-.
315