The statistics of the Co-operative Congress, read at the annual
meeting at Derby on Tuesday, are worth noting. The distributive work is exceedingly .profitable. In the year 1882, the latest for which there are complete returns, there were in the United Kingdom 1,346 societies,;with 661,000 members, and a share capital of £7,432,000. They did business to the amount of £26,616,000, and earned a profit of E2,112,000, or about 26 per cent. The tradesmen may well grow furious ; for these sums, though insignificant as compared with their business, may repre- sent the cream of it. It now remains to test the principle in pro- ductive business, which, in spite of some remarkable special examples, has not been done yet. It will be found, we believe, when the trial is fairly made, that the difficulty is-the method of management. The societies do not yield to dictatorship readily, and elective committees require a margin of profit. They are liable to be plundered. It is one of the least explicable facts connected with the Societies that while they are extremely popular with buyers, and well served by manufacturers—allowance being made for a certain preference for second-class goods, rendered necessary by the close paring of their usual customers—they are not well served by their own employs. They have, in London at least, to prosecute too often. We wish Mr. T. Hughes, —whose immense services to the cause have been recognised, we see, by a memorial fund, which now reaches 21,800, and is to provide a Scholarship at Oriel College, Oxford—would look into this. We have a suspicion that the shareholders do not quite recognise the scale of their own businesses, and are not altogether willing to pay salaries adequate to such immense transactions. If a man is to buy, or control buyers of a million, he ought to be paid like the junior partner in a great house. "Muzzle not the ox that treadeth out the corn," is good political economy as well as Scripture.
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