Page 83 - The_story_of_the_C._W._S._The_jubilee_history_of_the_cooperative_wholesale_society,_limited._1863-1913_(IA_storyofcwsjubill00redf) (1)_Neat

The Living Environment.
John Stuart Mill, a young Oxford man, Arnold Toynbee by name,
went to spend his summer holidays with the Rev. (afterwards Canon)
Barnett in Whitechapel, and so came the University Settlement
movement and much more besides. Among religious movements
with social tendencies the Salvation Army was in genesis from 1865
to 1878, and the Guild of St. Matthew in 1877 became the forerunner
of advanced causes within the national church. The co-operative
movement was one of the first to admit women on equal terms with
men, and we may, therefore, notice also that in 1867 the women's
suffrage movement commenced, and that a number of legal improve-
ments in the economic and social position of women quickly followed,
while in 1874 the Women's Trade Union League began to organise
women for their industrial betterment.
To some persons this may seem an unmeaning catalogue of events
and dates. But although any one of these facts, standing by itself,
would hardly concern us, taken together they create a living picture
of democratic and social movement. The history of the institution
with which we are immediately occupied gains by becoming a chapter
in the larger, and still unwritten, story of the common people. From
the churches (Nonconformist especially), and more widely from the
temperance movement, co-operation drew no small part of its
intellectually it was indebted to popular
spiritual and moral force ;
educational activities on every side ; and all its moral allies gained
indirectly by its economic service. Moreover, in the web of human
life there is no thread too remote or too dissimilar to have relation
with another. When John Woolman in 1743, in the course of his
employment as a clerk, protested against writing the bill of sale
transferring a slave, the gentle American Quaker struck the first
blow in a civil war that only culminated in the bloodshed of 1861-66.
And this ultimate deadly strife so impressed English co-operators
that, in their peaceful issue of federal versus independent co-operative
action, some of the most effective arguments were drawn from the
"
larger sphere. The Americans, during their late war to maintam
the integrity of their republic," said an advocate of the Wholesale
" never entertained the idea
Society in a conference paper of 1872,
that their territory was too extensive or their interests too varied
to be managed by one government. Like them, we must adapt
ourselves to the exigencies of our onward movement and conquer
all difficulties in the path of success. The American repubUc
affords an admirable model which we might adopt in building our
co-operative structure."
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