FOOTNOTES: 

[10] The National Labor Union came out against Chinese immigration in 1869, when the issue was brought home to the Eastern wage earners following the importation by a shoe manufacturer in North Adams, Massachusetts, of Chinese strike breakers.

[11] There were many cooperative stores in the eighties and a concerted effort to duplicate the venture of the Sovereigns was attempted as late as 1919 under the pressure of the soaring cost of living.

[12] Where Consumers’ Cooperation has worked under most favorable conditions as in England, its achievements have been all that its most ardent champions could have desired.  Such is the picture presented by Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb in the following glowing terms: 

“The organization of industry by Associations of Consumers offers, as far as it goes, a genuine alternative to capitalist ownership, because it supersedes the capitalist power, whether individual or joint-stock, alike in the control of the instruments of production by which the community lives, and in the absorption of the profits, which otherwise support a capitalist class.  The ownership and control are vested in, and the profits are distributed among, the whole community of consumers, irrespective of their industrial wealth.  Through the device of dividend on purchases the Cooperative Movement maintains an open democracy, through the control of this democracy of consumers it has directly or indirectly kept down prices, and protected the wage-earning class from exploitation by the Credit System and from the extortions of monopolist traders and speculators.  By this same device on purchases, and the automatic accumulation of part of the profit in the capital of each society and in that of the Wholesales, it has demonstratedly added to the personal wealth of the manual working class, and has, alike in Great Britain, and in other countries, afforded both a valuable financial reserve to the wage earners against all emergencies and an instrument for their elevation from the penury to which competition is always depressing them.  By making possible the upgrowth of great business enterprises in working class hands, the Cooperative Movement has, without divorcing them from their fellows, given to thousands of the manual workers both administrative experience and a well-grounded confidence; and has thus enabled them to take a fuller part in political and social life than would otherwise have been probable.”—­New Statesman, May 30, 1916.  “Special Supplement on the Cooperative Movement.”

Indeed the success of the consumer’s cooperative movement in European countries has been marvellous, even measured by bare figures.  In all Europe in 1914, there were about 9,000,000 cooperators of whom one-third lived in Great Britain and not less than two and a half millions in Germany.  In England and Scotland alone, the 1400 stores and two Wholesale Cooperative Societies controlled in 1914 about 420 million dollars of retail distributive trade and employed nearly 50,000 operatives in processes of production in their own workshops and factories.