mpions could have desired. Such is the picture presented by
Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb in the following glowing terms:

"The organization of industry by Associations of Consumers offers, as
far as it goes, a genuine alternative to capitalist ownership, because
it supersedes the capitalist power, whether individual or joint-stock,
alike in the control of the instruments of production by which the
community lives, and in the absorption of the profits, which otherwise
support a capitalist class. The ownership and control are vested in, and
the profits are distributed among, the whole community of consumers,
irrespective of their industrial wealth. Through the device of dividend
on purchases the Cooperative Movement maintains an open democracy,
through the control of this democracy of consumers it has directly or
indirectly kept down prices, and protected the wage-earning class from
exploitation by the Credit System and from the extortions of monopolist
traders and speculators. By this same device on purchases, and the
automatic accumulation of part of the profit in the capital of each
society and in that of the Wholesales, it has demonstratedly added to
the personal wealth of the manual working class, and has, alike in Great
Britain, and in other countries, afforded both a valuable financial
reserve to the wage earners against all emergencies and an instrument
for their elevation from the penury to which competition is always
depressing them. By making possible the upgrowth of great business
enterprises in working class hands, the Cooperative Movement has,
without divorcing them from their fellows, given to thousands of the
manual workers both administrative experience and a well-grounded
confidence; and has thus enabled them to take a fuller part in political
and social life than would otherwise have been probable."--_New
Statesman_, May 30, 1916. "Special Supplement on the Cooperative
Movement."

Indeed the success of the consumer's cooperative movement in European
countries has been marvellous, even measured by bare figures. In all
Europe in 1914, there were about 9,000,000 cooperators of whom one-third
lived in Great Britain and not less than two and a half millions in
Germany. In England and Scotland alone, the 1400 stores and two
Wholesale Cooperative Societies controlled in 1914 about 420 million
dollars of retail distributive trade and employed nearly 50,000
operatives in processes of production in their own worksho