Page 42 - 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.

get the child to rest, she thinks it is getting worse. When the husband comes
home she tells him how sickly the child is, and that he ought not to have gone
to the meeting—indeed, if he had any thought for the child he could not go.
He tells her he has come home as soon as the meeting was over, but he cannot
persuade her that he ought to have gone at all. He believes the child will be
better in a few days, and promises to help her to nurse and take care of it till
it is so. These, or many similar incidents, will have occurred to most persona
engaged in promoting social or other reforms. But it must not be said that the
women are opposed to co-operation. No; they are, and ever have been, as
much interested and as zealous of its success as the men. There are many
instances where the husband was lukewarm, and the wife could not prevail on
him to join the co-operative societies, but she was not to be baffled, so she
enters the co-operative societies herself.
Marcroft's Ups and Downs: Life in Machine-making Works and
other writings of his possess a similar atmosphere, which again is
found in Holyoake's History of the Pioneers, and, indeed, in many
pictures of contemporary working-class life in Rochdale, Oldham,
or Manchester. With all their differing individuahties, there was
a remarkable bond of common character between all these
founders of the C.W.S. Independence with them was a passion.
If they wanted money it was not for lucre's sake, but that they
might enjoy freedom. They were serious readers. They sought
for culture, so far as they felt their deficiencies. But their minds
were strong rather than fine or subtle. Common sense was their
intellectual test. They were social by instinct; to combine with
their fellows, and obtain for others what each desired for himself
was in their blood. They were children of a severe day, reared in
a hard school; but behind them lay a long ancestry of racy vigour
in their fathers, and of God-fearing, sensible, right-doing in their
mothers. This mating in them of qualities derived from the soil
and from Christian ethics was to be represented by the matter-of-
fact yet idealistic structure they now meant to build.

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