Many years passed before the example of the “poor inhabitants” of Hull was followed.  It was only in 1847 that the co-operators of Leeds purchased a flour-mill, and in 1850 that those of Rochdale did the same; since which time they have manufactured flour for the benefit of their members.  The corn-millers of Leeds attempted to undersell the Leeds Industrial Society.  They soon failed, and the price of flour was permanently reduced.  The Leeds mill does business amounting to more than a hundred thousand pounds yearly; its capital amounts to twenty-two thousand pounds; and it paid more than eight thousand pounds of profits and bonuses to its three thousand six hundred members in 1866, besides supplying them with flour of the best quality.  The Rochdale District Co-operative Corn-mill Society has also been eminently successful.  It supplies flour to consumers residing within a radius of about fifteen miles round Rochdale[1].  It also supplies flour to sixty-two co-operative societies, numbering over twelve thousand members.  Its business in 1866 amounted to two hundred and twenty-four thousand pounds, and its profits to over eighteen thousand pounds.

[Footnote 1:  Its history is given in the Reports above referred to, p. 269.]

The Rochdale Corn-mill grew out of the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society, which formed an epoch in the history of industrial co-operative institutions.  The Equitable Pioneers Society was established in the year 1844, at a time when trade was in a very bad condition, and working people generally were heartless and hopeless as to their future state.  Some twenty-eight or thirty men, mostly flannel weavers, met and formed themselves into a society for the purpose of economizing their hard-won earnings.  It is pretty well known that working-men generally pay at least ten per cent. more for the articles they consume, than they need to do under a sounder system.  Professor Fawcett estimates their loss at nearer twenty per cent. than ten per cent.  At all events, these working-men wished to save this amount of profit, which before went into the pockets of the distributers of the necessaries,—­in other words, into the pockets of the shopkeepers.

The weekly subscription was twopence each; and when about fifty-two calls of twopence each had been made, they found that they were able to buy a sack of oatmeal, which they distributed at cost-price amongst the members of the society.  The number of members grew, and the subscriptions so increased, that the society was enabled to buy tea, sugar, and other articles, and distribute them amongst the members at cost-price.  They superseded the shopkeepers, and became their own tradesmen.  They insisted from the first on payments in cash.  No credit was given.