In 1864 a new and important application of the principle of association was made in Manchester—a wholesale society was founded, to supply some hundred and fifty stores. No more serious difficulty had hitherto been met by small new societies than that of buying well. Often remote from the great centers of production, and purchasing in small quantities through a committee or manager of defective knowledge of qualities and prices, much hard-earned money was wasted. Now, in buying through the Wholesale, a society avails itself of the services of expert buyers, who obtain, through their vast purchases, goods at the lowest current prices. Stores are not obliged, as they used to be, to buy more goods than they immediately require, to reach the minimum prices of the market; hence they can carry on business with less capital than they needed formerly. To detect adulterations and determine the quality of wares offered to it, the Wholesale Society employs an analytical chemist. The business of this vast organization now serves more than five hundred societies; it employs buyers in eleven towns and cities in England, Ireland, France, and America. Its subscribed capital is $686,000; the shares, which are five pounds sterling each, are issued on condition that an affiliated society takes out one for each ten members belonging to it, increasing the number annually as its members increase. One shilling per share must be paid on application, on which five per cent, interest is allowed; the remainder can be paid up at once, or be paid up by accumulation of dividends and interest. The sales of the Wholesale Society for the year ending January 11, 1880, were $13,166,545; yet the managers state that these large figures could have been more than doubled had all the societies in the kingdom been joined to the Wholesale, and had they bought from it all the supplies which, with advantage to themselves, they might have taken. The Wholesale Society transacts a large banking business, and this its best advisers deem should be placed upon a separate footing, with its special board of direction. Glasgow has a counterpart to the great Manchester establishment—the Glasgow Wholesale Society has a connection of one hundred and thirty-seven Scottish societies, and during 1879 did a business of $3,066,500.
As instituted at Rochdale, and in scores of other towns and cities, cooperation has been intended by its leaders not only to save to the working-classes the sums commonly absorbed by the wastes, expenses, and profits of ordinary retail trading; it has been designed to train workmen in thrift, in thoughtfulness for the future, and by the gradual accumulation of capital to enable them either to become self-employing, or to own shares in the manufacturing or mining company which may engage them. Some of the societies have provision for building cottages for members out of the dividends credited to them. At Derby and elsewhere hundreds of homes for workingmen have been bought in this way. Coöperation has diffused much knowledge of business, and interest in it, among classes who used formerly to know
