The bakery now does almost $1,000,000 worth of business a year; it makes 110,000 loaves a week. The eight thousand members of "Vooruit" have six drug stores, coal yards, many grocery stores and meat shops, a dry goods store, and other industries. All done by workmen in thirty years, workmen who were never highly paid and who trained themselves to do these things.
They meet every year, the eight thousand members, and vote on the price of bread. Sometimes it is one cent higher than the commercial rate, but their dividends more than cover this.
In Brussels is the famous "Maison du Peuple," the House of the People. It, too, began with a small bakery, employing two men and turning out five hundred and fifty-two loaves the first week. Today the "Maison" has twenty-five thousand members, two great bakeries, six warehouses, four butcher shops, twenty-five grocery stores, and numerous shops where various articles are made.
This "House," standing on Rue Joseph Stephen, cost $375,000 and was paid for by the Brussels workingmen out of their coöperative funds. The café, seating eight hundred people, is an animated place; every one seems content. The office of the savings bank is doing a rushing business, women and children bringing in the savings of the family for the week; the committee rooms are full of workmen planning some new enterprise. In the evening the lecture hall or theatre is crowded, the two thousand five hundred seats all taken, to see a play produced by an amateur company, all members of the "Maison."
All this, and more, in the form of coöperation. In 1907-8 the "Maison" made a profit of $134,000; of this about three-quarters was distributed as personal dividends to shareholders. The rest was spent on social benefits and a reserve fund.
In Belgium, then, you find all the coöperative activities united in each city under one general management. It includes groceries and clothing, medical aid, insurance, savings bank, clubhouse privileges, lectures, libraries, entertainments.
There are one hundred, and sixty-one distributive societies with 119,581 members; sixteen productive societies with 1,583 members. The Productive Societies include weaving, printing, cabinetmaking, tobacco and cigars, hardware and bakery. The total coöperative business is $6,800,000 a year, a large amount when you consider the diminutive size of the country and the poverty of the people.
The fact that in all of these countries coöperation is growing at a rate of increase of 20 per cent to 40 per cent proves that a need for it exists.
Now, Uncle Sam, we are starting these coöperative stores here, and the question with us and the one we are constantly asking, is what protection are we going to have from the trusts and monopolies which can, if permitted to do so, destroy us with low prices at any point, while they rob the people at some other point, to make up the losses, while ruining us. What we must have is legislation, to protect us, and if we can get it into this bill, I want it.