number of building societies in England to-day is estimated at
about 3000, their membership at about 600,000 members with L52,000,000
of funds. The history of these societies has been marked by a large
number of failures, and they have lacked the moral elevation of the
cooeperative movement in its other phases. The codifying act of 1894
established a minute oversight and control over these societies on the
part of the government authorities while at the same time it extended
their powers and privileges.

The one feature common to all forms of cooeperation is the union of
previously competing economic classes. In a cooeperative store,
competition between buyer and seller does not exist; and the same is
true for borrower and lender in a building and loan association and
for employer and employee in a cooeperative factory. Cooeperation is
therefore in line with other recent movements in being a reaction from
competition.

*89. Profit Sharing.*--There is a device which has been introduced into
many establishments which stands midway between simple competitive
relations and full cooeperation. It diminishes, though it does not
remove, the opposition between employer and employee. This is "*profit
sharing.*" In the year 1865 Henry Briggs, Son and Co., operators of
collieries in Yorkshire, after long and disastrous conflicts with the
miners' trade unions, offered as a measure of conciliation to their
employees that whenever the net profit of the business should be more
than ten per cent on their investment, one-half of all such surplus
profit should be divided among the workmen in proportion to the wages
they had earned in the previous year. The expectation was that the
increased interest and effort and devotion put into the work by the
men would be such as to make the total earnings of the employers
greater, notwithstanding their sacrifice to the men of the half of the
profits above ten per cent. This anticipation was justified. After a
short period of suspicion on the part of the men, and doubt on the
part of the employers, both parties seemed to be converted to the
advantages of profit sharing, a sanguine report of their experience
was made by a member of the firm to the Social Science Association in
1868, sums between one and six thousand pounds were divided yearly
among the employees, while the percentage of profits to the owners
rose to as much as eighteen per cent. This experiment split on the
rock of dissension in 1