THE CO-OPERATIVE CONGRESS AT HALIFAX.

Globe, Volume I, Issue 41, 17 July 1874, Page 4

THE CO-OPERATIVE CONGRESS AT HALIFAX.

[From the “ Daily News,” April O.J The Co-operative Societies of England who have this week been holding their annual Congress at Halifax were in a very definite sense parties to the late general election. True, they had nothing to ask of the candidates or their supporters on that occasion, but for all that they were not forgotten. Their known friends were marked men, and even some candidates who were suspected without reason of favoring the cooperative principle were energetically opposed on that account. At Plymouth Mr Walter Morrison was openly opposed as a co-operator, as Mr Thomas Hughes was at Marylebone, and in at least one other great metropolitan constituency a determined set was made at a candidate because it was said that he had dealt at a store. But, notwithstanding these discouragements, the co-opera-tors have once more met to exchange greetings and unite condolences. Even apart from extraneous political accidents all has not gone smoothly with them. Trade is proverbially intractable. Successes have been balanced by losses, and there have been serious personal defections. Some concerns have not answered —here a manager has been too sanguine, and there directors have been too ambitious. Strange to say one co-opera-tive enterprise has had a strike for wages, the more skilled workmen insisting on their superiority being expressed in higher money payments. But in the face of all these difficulties and many more, co-operation is making way. as the figures adduced by Mr Brassey, M.P., clearly show. It appears by the statistics adduced at Halifax that (here are at the present lime 746 co-operalivc societies in England and Wales, with M 00,587 members, and a total share capital of £2.781.000. The money taken for goods sold last year amounted to £11,1570.000. Home of the societies may be no better than what our trans-Atlantic friends might choose to call li one-horse affairs,” scarcely a grade above village shops ; while others may approach more closely to that great Loudon store which set aside £85,000 a few weeks ago as a guarantee fund. The average takings of the 745 societies exceeding £15,000 per annum show that the new form of trade has already attained to great importance in this country, and justify the attention it has received as well from foes as from friends.

lii view of these facts, it is only natural that retail traders should ask how much further this modern encroachment upon their functions is likely to be carried, and and whether, as some friends of co-operation seem to intimate, it is to end in the extinction of retail competitive trade altogether. Fears of this kind are sometimes expressed, and that not by the half-hedged shopkeeper who has little to lose beyond vague possibilities of fortune, but by those who have achieved or inherited a position upon which their neighbors look with admiration. There can be no doubt that scores of West-end traders do, at this moment, sincerely attribute every lull of the wind of trade, every abatement of the importunity of custom, to the competition of the stores. Co-operation, ostentatious and occult, is a force which they believe to be oppressing and restraining them all the year round on the right hand and on the left. Every ill to which trade is liable is now set down to the account of this innovating principle, which accounts for all and ruins all. A large number of traders who would reject this view as exaggerated, nevertheless complain of co-operation as taking away from them a class of customers whom they can ill spare, those who pay ready-money, and as, by its show of low prices, making those who remain suspicious and discontented. It is complained that the opposition of the stores themselves is not all that the retailer has to contend with. A system of affiliating local traders to co-opera-tive societies, on the understanding that the traders so taken into connection with the societies will allow discount to their members, is cutting down prices to a great extent, and seriously interfering with profits. And yet those who most complain of this new form of competition might easily satisfy themselves that the new system has its definable limits. It will not, it cannot, sweep away the qualified retail trader, and that for many important reasons. There are many trades, and those the most profitable, which cannot be carried on by amateurs, such as co-opera-tors arc

Thc greatest success of the co-operative stores have been won by their strict adherence to the system of cash payments. That this is so is seen by the fact that in large retail houses where the same system has fair play, without being prejudiced by a credit trade done over the same counter, all the advantages of the store may bo obtained, together with that of being waited on by specially qualified assistants. No doubt the fact that a society has all its members for customers does enable it to

occupy all its capital and all its hands ; but this is true also of the well-established retail shop, and, on the other hand, the society has many serious disadvantages, What Mr Brassey said at Halifax about co-operative production is true of those departments of distribution which require special skill. The organizing faculty, combined with experience, is very rare, difficult for a society to get, and difficult for it to keep and reward when obtained. What we see going oir around us is no more might have been predicted years ago. Society is discriminating between services which are real necessaries, and those others which, mingling with the former, arc of little importance, and may perhaps be dispensed with. This separation is always going on, although sometimes in new forms which strike the attention, at others less perceptibly. When the trade in ready-made boots and clothes came in, the innovation was much decried ; but it was founded on the economical fact that among classes not emulous of elegance a certain average number of feet and figure might be fitted without a separate measurement, and it has endured. As far as many trades are concerned, co-ope-ration is simply doing a work which had to be done, and which was sure to be done by that or by some other agency.