ve association is a matter
of slow growth, because it requires the education of the membership in
the principles both of cooperation and of marketing, and what is equally
essential, the development of a willingness to sometimes forego the
advantage of larger profits by individual members in order to ensure the
permanent success of the association. The local association has to learn
how to conduct its business just as does the individual business man,
and it has to compete with individuals and firms who are in business for
profit and who have the advantage of experience in the existing
marketing system and the financial backing of its business connections.
In the attempt to create local selling associations rapidly so as to
secure a sufficient volume of business to ensure the success of large
marketing enterprises, there is always a tendency to encourage the local
members to believe that they will secure a considerably larger share of
the consumer's dollar, and when prices are not materially better than
under the old system they readily become dissatisfied and withdraw. The
best authorities and advocates of cooperative marketing insist that it
will be successful only to the degree that it can become more efficient
than the existing system and so effect savings and make legitimate
earnings, but that there is little prospect for large "profits"; indeed,
that the legitimate objective of cooperation is not profits, but
savings. Professor Macklin summarizes the matter as follows:

"The true cooperative organization seeks to establish and
maintain a distributing system to provide adequately and
dependably at minimum cost the essential marketing services
of which the industry and its individual members have
constant and vital need. Its justification lies in rendering
these services at a lower cost and in bringing to farmers a
higher proportion of the consumer's dollar."[34]

With the factors involved in successful cooperative selling associations
we are not here concerned, except to insist upon the point that as the
weakest link measures the strength of a chain, so the strength of the
local association determines the strength or weakness of the central
selling association. A joint stock company may afford more efficient
management than a cooperative association, and unless the local
membership is convinced of the superior equity and ultimate advantages
of a strong cooperative system, t