Probably the lack of adequate leadership has played as important a part as any.  It is peculiar to America that the wage earner of exceptional ability can easily find a way for escaping into the class of independent producers or even employers of labor.  The American trade union movement has suffered much less from this difficulty.  The trade unions are fighting organizations; they demand the sort of leader who is of a combative spirit, who possesses the organizing ability and the “personal magnetism” to keep his men in line; and for this kind of ability the business world offers no particular demand.  On the other hand, the qualifications which go to make a successful manager of a cooperative store, namely, steadiness, conservatism of judgment, attention to detail and business punctuality always will be in great demand in the business world.  Hence, when no barrier is interposed in the form of preempted opportunities or class bias, the exceptional workingman who possesses these qualifications will likely desert his class and set up in business for himself.  In England, fortunately for the cooperative movement, such an escape is very difficult.

The failure of consumers’ cooperation in America was helped also by two other peculiarly American conditions.  European economists, when speaking of the working class, assume generally that it is fixed in residence and contrast it with capital, which they say is fluid as between city and city and even between country and country.  American labor, however, native as well as immigrant, is probably more mobile than capital; for, tradition and habit which keep the great majority of European wage earners in the place where their fathers and forefathers had lived before them are generally absent in this country, except perhaps in parts of New England and the South.  It is therefore natural that the cooperative spirit, which after all is but an enlarged and more generalized form of the old spirit of neighborliness and mutual trust, should have failed to develop to its full strength in America.

Another condition fatal to the development of the cooperative spirit is the racial heterogeneity of the American wage-earning class, which separates it into mutually isolated groups even as the social classes of England and Scotland are separated by class spirit.  As a result, we find a want of mutual trust which depends so much on “consciousness of kind.”  This is further aggravated by competition and a continuous displacement in industry of nationalities of a high standard of living by those of a lower one.  This conflict of nationalities, which lies also at the root of the closed shop policy of many of the American trade unions, is probably the most effective carrier that there is to a widespread growth of the cooperative spirit among American wage earners.  This is further hindered by other national characteristics which more or less pervade all classes of society, namely, the traditional individualism—­the heritage of puritanism and the pioneer days, and the emphasis upon earning capacity with a corresponding aversion to thrift.