APPENDIX. THE DISCOVERY OF THE CONSUMER. not itself manufacture, merely because its membership consumes too small a proportion of the output to enable it to produce that fraction as cheaply as the manufacturers who supply the whole market. With every approach towards universality of membership and complete loyalty of the members to the movement, this limitation, as the actual experience of the past quarter of a century abundantly demonstrated, is to a great extent removed. On the other side is the limit set, as it seems, by the superior efficiency of the individual producer over any largescale enterprise. We see this in peasant agricultureat any rate, in the olive and the vine. We recognise it in the work of the artist in every sphere. The independent practitioner, "on his own," calling no man master, but serving a succession of customers, will always have his exceptional sphere. International Trade. But what about the export trade? The friends, as well as the critics, of the co-operative movement are always pointing out that the very origin and purpose of Associations of Consumers is production for the use of their own members, and not for sale to outsiders at a profit; and it is to this all-important characteristic that they owe alike their practical success and their theoretical justification. It was one of the unforeseen developments of the war that it made students realise that democracies of consumers, far from being limited to trade within their respective countries, may be found to furnish the solution of THE DISCOVERY OF THE CONSUMER. hence, I am inclined to predict, school text-books and learned treatises will give more space to consumers' co-operation, its constitution and ramifications, than to the rise and fall of political parties or the personalities of successive Prime Ministers. For, unless I completely misinterpret the irresistible ground-swell of British democracy, it is this consumers' co-operation, in its twofold form of voluntary association of members (in what we now know as the co-operative society) and obligatory association of citizens (in the economic enterprises of national as well as Local Government) -all of them in organic connection with an equally ubiquitous organisation of the producers by hand or by brain (in trade unions and professional associations) which will constitute the greater part of the social order of a hundred years hence. |