The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-05-03

lONDON, May 2.-tSpecial )-In
 this country, where close on
 100000 persons, representing not only the working but also the professional and middle classes, are members of cooperative trading societies the recent announcement by the United States Steel corporation that 1t will run . cooperative farm for its employees has been received with uncommon interest.
 Here in it's birthplace, if anywhere, has cooperation been weighed in the bal ance and not been found wanting. About one-sixth, in fact, of the population of these islands have their wants supplied in whole or in part by cooperative stores, and in many sections of Great Britain, practically every shop that meets the travellers eye is ''co-op" of either one or two varieties-i. c.. shops which supply only those who hold shares in them, and those open to the community at large. Of perpetual interest to Americans, too, are the two great and.famous cooperative enterprises in London, the army and navy and the civil service stores, each of the capacity of an American department store. but each carried on by and re SidoSCo which they derive their names. Every year, moreover, one reads the delibera- tions of the cooperative congress. repre- senting over 15o0 societies. with a mem bership of 1,414,15S. with share capital of $160OO, 900, with sales of $26o0oO.OOO and a net profit of $25,OO0OOO.
 It dates back close on a century, does this cooperative movement the pr,n- ciple of which is, of course, we'll known. It means, in a word, the association of work-people for the management of their own industrial interests in store. work shop or other undertaking. and the equit- able distribution of profits among those who earn them It's chief apostle wAa Robert Owen, the reformer. whose later socalistic theories worked out so lament ably when put into practice by his own son at New Harmony, Indiana. but before Owens time, or as far back as 17S4. cc-operative society was founded in OK fordshire by shute Harrington Bishop Ut Durham.
 Probably few persons living today re- alike in what depths of misery the toll CTS of England were sunk in these. the last days of the eighteenth, and the open- ing ones of the nineteenth century. A new industrial era was opening with what seemed like catastrophe. Works and coal pits almost equalled in the nor TOTS of their conditions the worst silver mines of old Peru. Four cents per day was the average pay in the smaller VII lages Women in the coal pits, almost naked, were employed to drag trucks through low, wet galleries. Children, from five years old, worked underground, 30 hungry that occasionally they were known to eat the collser's candles. An editor. going home at clock on March morning. found a seven-year-oId child sitting patiently by the gates of factory Her mother had no timepiece. and on the day before the child had been beaten for being late. These and similar tales were familiar [. the old co-opera- tors. one of whom tells how his mother contracted a fatal flll.esr while working at her hand loom. The holes in the earth floor of her cotfaGe, underneath the treadies. could not be Kept free from water, into which her feet spla ohed at every downward movement. MQkhers, the onmo man addsv commonly eavo thetr