356 REPORT ON COOPERATION IN AMERICAN EXPORT TRADE,

In addition to the special features of this society’s domestic buying
 and manufacturing activities, it has a large wheat-buying depot
in Winnipeg, Canada, consisting of 13 elevators.!
The Cooperative Wholesale Society, Ltd.—This organization has
had an extraordinary development. Starting as wholesale buyer
and commission merchant, it soon branched out into cooperative
insurance and in 1872 was authorized to enter the manufacturing
business.” The announcement in its 1916 Annual comprises a
remarkably wide range of products and lines of activity. A partial
list of these reads as follows:
Wholesale general dealers, manufacturers of over 40 products,
bankers, insurers, millers, printers, stationers, bookbinders, boxmakers,
 lithographers, architects, engineers, builders, shipowners, butter
 factors, lard refiners, bacon curers, fruit growers, drysalters, spice
grinders, curriers, iron founders and tinplate workers, tea growers,
blenders, packers, farmers, importers, and fellmongers, dealers in
oroceries and provisions, drapery, woolens, ready-made clothing,
boots and shoes, brushes, crockery, carpets, furniture, coal, hides,
skins, bones, etc?
At the end of 1914 the number of retail societies holding shares
was 1,193, representing a membership in those societies of 2,336,460
persons. Its capital resources were $45,673,626, its total sales for
the year amounted to $169,997,090, and its net profits were $3,444,876.
In October, 1915, its employees totaled 27,593.
The C. W. S., as the Cooperative Wholesale Society is known, has
purchasing depots, salesrooms, wholesale warehouses, banking agencies,
 factories, and other cooperative plants at over 50 points in England
 and Wales.® It has four purchasing depots, three creameries
(with six auxiliaries), and one factory in Ireland. It maintains forsign
 and colonial buying or other depots at New York, Montreal,
Rouen, one in Spain, five in Denmark, one in Sweden, three in West
Africa (one of them a joint depot with the Scottish Cooperative
Wholesale Society), and a joint depot in Colombo, Ceylon.* In conjunction
 also with the Scottish Society, it operates tea estates in
Ceylon, covering 3,386 acres ? as well as other tea estates in southern
[ndia,® and raises its own cocoanuts in Africa.
The society owns and operates a steamship service between Manchester,
 Swansea, and Rouen.?
To Americans this society is important chiefly as a buying combination.
 Their New York office annually buys from $8,000,000 to

\ The Cooperative Wholesale Societies (Ltd.) Annual, 1916, p. 337.
1Ibid., p. 210.
sIbid.. p. 193.
1Tbid., p. XVI and p. 207,
+ Thid.. frontispiece (map)

8 Ibid., pp. 195 and 202,
7Ibid., p. 189.
#Ibid., p. 202.
Ibid. p. 173.