Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: important rules, a co-operative movement worthy of the name may, without doubt, be expected in this country. The people of Great Britain and of practically every advanced country of Europe can no longer declare with any sincerity that the working class has never shown its ability to conduct its own industrial affairs. The co-operative movement is a monumental example of the workers' ability to do this. Will the workers of America furnish a similar example? Will they provide for themselves the training needed to understand the complexities of modern industrial life? Are they possessed of sufficient imagination, sufficient practical executive ability, sufficient stick-to-itiveness, sufficient will to carry through this important experiment in industrial democracy? The future alone can tell. Judging, however, from the signs of the co-operative spirit which are now appearing thick and fast on the American horizon, the writer is convinced that these questions require an answer in an emphatic affirmative. PROGRESS OF THE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT IN GREAT BRITAIN1 The signing of the armistice has stimulated a new interest in the co-operative movement throughout Great Britain, where there already were some 2,500 industrial co-operative distributive and productive societies in operation, with a membership of three and one-half million persons, a total share, loan, and reserve capital of over $375,000,000, a total trade (distributive and productive) of just over $1,000,000,000, and a total profit in 1916, before deduction of interest or share capital, of about $90,000,000. On the whole the war has had a favorable effect on the progress of co-operation in Great Britain. Controlled prices have helped rather than hindered the movement, since in the case of the controlled commoditi...