All business, until a few years ago, was done on a strictly cash basis, but recently the insidious credit system has crept in, and it may lead to serious consequences.
Last year, out of its surplus, the Union of Coöperative Societies, a federation of all English coöperativists, voted $230,000 to charity, $450,000 to education, i.e., libraries, lectures, and concerts, and $50,000 to propaganda.
The early retail societies found it hard to get good terms from wholesale houses, owing to the enmity of the private merchants. The law did not allow them to amalgamate and start a wholesale business of their own. But in 1862 the law was changed, and at once two coöperative wholesale societies were organized, the English and the Scotch. They are the models for the world. The two societies are virtually one, although maintaining different officers, rules, and stockholders. In fact, the wholesale societies are the federation of the retail and productive societies of England and Scotland. The English society requires the constituent societies to hold one $25 share for every five of its membership; the Scotch society one $5 share for every one of its members: i. e., an English coöperative shoe factory of two hundred members wishing to join the English Wholesale Society would take forty $25 shares, or two hundred $5 shares in the Scotch Society.
These Wholesale Societies are the grand Clearing House of nearly all the coöperative shops and factories of the kingdom, and the suppliers of all the coöperative retail stores.
And they are monumental institutions. In 1907 they had a membership of more than 2,615,000, a capital of more than $169,000,000, a surplus of $85,000,000. Their annual sales amount to more than $600,000,000, and their profits more than $60,000,000.
The English Society is the larger. It is a corporation that not only engages in wholesale trade but is a manufacturer, banker, importer; it packs meat, cures bacon, refines lard, binds books, grows tea, blends coffee, founders iron; it manufactures flour, butter, biscuit, sugar, pickles, cocoa, tobacco, candles, glycerine, starch, saddlery, furniture, clothing, corsets, underwear, brushes, crockery, tinplate, woolens, carpets and almost everything else that an average British home may need. It deals in coal, apricots, and wheat; has offices in New York, Toronto, Rouen, France; Denia, Spain; Copenhagen and Guthenberg, Sweden; has twenty-seven creameries in Ireland, tallow and oil works in Sydney, Australia; a "bacon factory" in Denmark, a tea plantation in Ceylon, and fruit farms in Shropshire and Hereford. Besides, it owns four steamers for the trade between Rouen and Manchester.
