Pioneer Series No. 7.
ifU
;RJ
>HN T. W. MITCHELL
PIONEER OF CONSUMERS'
CO-OPERATION
PERCY REDFERN
A45
R4
1923
CO-OPERATIVE UNION LTD.
HOLYOAKE HOUSE, MANCHESTER
One Shilling and Sixpence Net
THIS BOOK IS THE PROPERTY OF THE EDUC/H
COMMITTEE, LIVERPOOL CO-OPERATIVE SOCIETI|
BOOKS ARE LOANED FREE OF CHARGE AND SHOUJ
RETURNED BY THE LAST DATE STATED ON THIS
Pioneer Series No. 1
JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
•
BY THE SAME WRITER
THE STORY OF THE C.W.S."
THE CONSUMERS' PLACE IN
SOCIETY."
'CO-OPERATION FOR ALL."
WHOLESALE CO-OPERATION
AT WORK."
These Works are obtainable from the
CO-OPERATIVE UNION LTD.,
MANCHESTER.
J. T. \V. MITCHELL.
JOHN T.W.MITCHELL
PIONEER OF CONSUMERS'
CO-OPERATION
BY
PERCY REDFERN
MANCHESTER: THE CO-OPERATIVE UNION LTD.,
HOLYOAKE HOUSE
First Published in 1923
Second Impression, July, 1923.
PREFACE.
THOUGH neither a founder of the Pioneer
Co-operative Society at Rochdale, nor of the
Wholesale Society that followed, John Mitchell
stands out as originating the conception of an all-
inclusive consumers' movement. He wanted a
democracy sovereign over capital and labour, and em-
ploying both in the direct service of the consuming
community ; and during twenty years he led in this
direction.
His ideas were carried forward by others, in the
co-operative movement notably by the late Thomas
Tweddell ; but they remain to be developed fully.
Arising from a working life, and not from a theoretic
mind, they embody a common-sense to which we must
always return, however far we depart from it.
The pages following set out from this point of view
to present John Mitchell as vividly as may be in view
of the unusual scantiness of the materials. Even
Mitchell's friend, then Mr. William Maxwell, visiting
Rochdale in 1895, could find little to help him in writing
the memoir which appeared in the C.W.S. Annual for
1896. Since then, except incidentally for the Story of
the C.W.S., nothing more has been gathered until now.
There are no letters or MS. writings of any kind to be
traced, and no other records exist to show the develop-
ment of Mitchell's mind. Of what is now garnered
much has had to be gleaned straw by straw.
Organisation from and for the consumer at least
has the merit of giving a place to women as house-
keepers, and to domestic life, that no other mode pro-
vides ; and here we can show that while Mitchell never
married or made a real home, he was to an extraordinary
degree a mother's son. For the elements of this story,
all too slight as it still is, the writer is especially in-
debted to the Maxwell Memoir and to Sir William
Maxwell himself, who has read proofs and readily
responded to every request for assistance.
To the following helpers, also, the writer offers
especial thanks : to Mr. J. Fountain, of Rochdale (who
knew Mitchell on many sides, and who has read the
proofs), for constant, invaluable kindnesses ; to Mr.
J. B. Adamson, Mr. Barnish, Mrs. Golding (who nursed
Mitchell in his last illness), Mr. Robertson and Mr.
Wadsworth, all of Rochdale ; to Mr. and Mrs. Sidney
Webb ; to Professor Hall and Miss Fountain, of the
Co-operative Union (Rochdalians who have also read
the proofs) ; to Mrs. Bamford Tomlinson ; to Mr.
Shotton, Mr. D. Mclnnes, Mr. Greenwood, and Mr.
Mas tin ; and to Sir T. Brodrick (for access to the
Society's records), Mr. Lander, Mr. Goodwin, Mr. Lobb,
Mr. Openshaw, Mr. Justham, Mr. Darch, Mr. E.
Jackson, and Mr. Sheppard, all of the C.W.S. And to
others whose help has contributed in this detail or
that, the same grateful thanks are now extended.
February, 1923. P. R.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I Page.
THE MOTHER'S SON 9
CHAPTER II
THE EOCHDALE WORKER . . 19
CHAPTER III
BUSINESS FOR OTHERS 27
CHAPTER IV
LEADER AND CHAIRMAN 35
CHAPTER V
TRAVELS AND CONTENTIONS 45
CHAPTER VI
THE MAN HIMSELF 54
CHAPTER VII
THE CONSUMERS' ADVOCATE 64
CHAPTER VIII
MITCHELL SPEAKS Our . . 75
CHAPTER IX
JOURNEY'S END 83
CHAPTER X
EPILOGUE 90
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
J. T. W. Mitchell Frontispiece.
Mitchell as a Young Man Facing page 32
Mitchell about 1874 „ 33
Nos. 15 and 13, John Street, Rochdale,
where Mitchell lived and died ,, 48
The Mitchell Hall, Manchester, and Bust
of Mitchell „ 49
The Drawing on the Cover by Russell 8. Reeve is from a
photograph of the Educational Committee of the Rochdale
Equitable Pioneers Society Ltd., taken about 1890.
CHAPTER I
THE MOTHER'S SON
A VISITOR from sunlit cities of the Mediterranean
•**• or the verandahs of the Colonies would find it
difficult at first sight to fall in love with Manchester.
This great place of business might endear itself after
long acquaintance ; but that is another matter. And
leaving Manchester for East Lancashire the aspect
would seem no more enlivening. On the bare, be-
grimed spaces amidst the factories and houses, nature,
even in spring, mopes like a thrush in a cage. East-
ward there are hills ; but they bristle with the shafts
of a monstrous regiment of chimneys. The straight
line of a canal is a relief, for water can never be ugly
while there is a ray of sunshine to glint on it. But,
in general, it is an outlook from which a Morris or a
Galsworthy would fly, either enraged or pitying.
Yet a few miles further on, while little less indus-
trial, the scene rapidly acquires an attractive quality.
A little way beyond Rochdale railway station this
better outlook is found. If fortunately guided, the
stranger emerges on the brow of a short, steep descent.
Right and left the view is open. In place of brick and
mortar spreading without form there is a town, a
civic unit. Just below is a town hall, with a square
and a statue. The tower of an old parish church is
close at hand, backed by the verdure of a park.
Library and art gallery, hospital, schools, co-operative
10 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
central stores, banks and offices all appear, intermixed
with the mass of houses and works. And from an
embanked roadway by a little river, the whole rises
far up, thinning out on the heights into green hill-
side pastures, just under moorlands brown with
heather and whin. Sunlit against the sky, the solitary
moorlands contrast picturesquely with the busy town
below.
The view, no doubt, is not extraordinary. It is no
great city that one looks upon. It is a Lancashire
factory town, still far from the Rochdale planned by
municipal idealists for the twenty-first century. Yet
it is a town so displaying its best aspects upon a
natural site that, like Wordsworth on Westminster
Bridge, one cannot do other than admire.
Go down into the stone-flagged and rain-washed
streets, and you encounter a people racy of the grit-
stone hills. " Rachda' felleys," close-buttoned, sturdy,
and grey-moustached, are such as might have come
straight from that great Chartist meeting of ten
thousand people on a neighbouring moor in 1846. So
far from being dead, the co-operative pioneers of 1844
brush past you ; another deep-browed, firm-lipped
Howarth, another slender, hopeful Cooper, another
Quaker-like sober Smithies. These are still such men
as gathered in mills of their own erecting to hear John
Bright on household suffrage. The pawky humour
of a " Tim Bobbin/' rough and shrewd, lingers here,
and the homely, fireside fun and native poetry of a
Waugh. Whether in clogs and shawls, or twentieth-
century coats and millinery, the women also are no
less vigorous, no less tough-fibred, enduring, and
strong. Perhaps the people do not differ greatly from
the other masses of the Lancashire stock settled in the
THE MOTHER'S SON 11
townships that thicken along the road to Manchester ;
yet they seem more to belong to these rough brown
hills, which rise like walls against the stranger, while
converging sociably toward Rochdale as a centre.
Prominent in the view over the town is the tall,
grey, many-windowed stone building housing the
Pioneers' store in Toad Lane. The streets adjoining
the lane — High Street, Red Cross Street, Mill Street,
and the rest — now struggle to be something better
than slums. While a chapel, a school, and here and
there a housewife's neat curtains announce a brave
stand, many of the old weavers' houses exhibit broken
panes and sorry decay. Though it is but afternoon a
man reels homeward, and a child wearing old boots of
parental size shuffles into a dirty court. And a Salva-
tion Army shelter tells the rest of the story. Yet,
with Toad Lane as an important thoroughfare, this
was once a prosperous quarter. Flannel merchants
lived here in substantial houses with large warehouses
overhead ; and the cottages and gardens of the hand-
loom weavers shared this same sunny slope rising from
behind the old manor house of the Byrons.
Out of the misery of the decay of this quarter the
Rochdale stores (and in consequence the modern
co-operative movement) arose in protest ; and in this
same district, on the 18th of October, 1828 — a Saturday
— John Thomas Whitehead Mitchell was born. The
exact place is unknown ; for we have to deal with the
most obscure and unhopeful circumstances into which
any child may come. Mitchell, as Sir William Maxwell
has noted, was always reticent about his birth, even to
intimate friends, and we can understand and share
the feeling. Until the day of his death, in provincial,
Victorian Rochdale, a gulf lay between children en-
12 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
dowed with the sanctions of Church and State and the
dark origins of those who, like Mitchell, could point to
no legal father. Not only the mother and child, but
(in the case of Mitchell) the grown man's dearest
feelings in after years stood at the mercy of any
cynical or brutal mind "in the know/' A time came
when universal respect sealed even the coarsest lips in
the actual presence of the co-operative leader ; yet, to
the last, there were people who could find in this cir-
cumstance something to take comfort in as being a
blot.
The father is said to have been a man in good
position, but of ungoverned character. Mitchell him-
self, if we are to accept a remembered death-bed state-
ment, felt that he owed small moral benefit to this side
of his parentage. It is evident that the mother and
the father had little or nothing in common after John's
birth, and possibly for some little time before. We
are in a region of surmise ; yet perhaps it may be in-
ferred that the mother set herself to undo a past, and
strove with constant, unwearying effort to efface or
prevent any trace of the father in the son. " His
mother/' writes his old friend, Sir William Maxwell,
in a letter, " would not let him out of her sight." As
a result " he did not make friends with other boys, and
knew nothing of boyish games." Sir William adds that
neither did he get into any boyish troubles " as most
of us did in our early years." In the memoir in the
" C.W.S. Annual " for 1896 the same writer has said
that the mother " lived only for the boy," shielding
him from every possible ill. " Although hard pressed,
she would not allow her child from her side."
By common consent any boy tied to apron strings
grows up a weakling. But Mitchell was attached to
THE MOTHER'S SON 13
his mother not by weakness but by the strength of his
own affections. A common poverty, and a common
struggle against it, also preserved mother and son from
any merely fond and enfeebling association. So the
two lived for each other, and, confined to a narrow
channel, the child's vitality ran deeply. Concentration,
self-sacrifice to duty, and independence of the world,
became natural to boy and man. Late in his life these
same qualities impressed an observer who saw him in
" absolute command " of a C.W.S. quarterly meeting.
The meeting over, Mitchell walked " straight from the
platform, looking neither to left nor right. He seemed
a man entirely alone. If the world went with him, well.
If not, so much the worse for the world/'
Under this home tuition the natural innocence
of the child gained a strength which preserved it
under all the circumstances of a long life both at home
and abroad. Mitchell became such a man as some
modern novelists seem not to have heard of. In the
words of a shrewd observer of character who both knew
him well and knew those who knew him, he was
" sexually incorruptible." But it was a positive and
not a negative quality, an outcome in part of the pro-
found love which in early life he gave abundantly to
his mother in return for her devotion. The undying
love in popular ballads literally was Mitchell's love.
Speaking of the C.W.S. chairman whom he knew so
well in after years, Sir William Maxwell has said (in
the letter already quoted) " I used to think it strange
to hear an elderly man speaking of his mother with
such affection."
While we may suppose that Mitchell derived
vigour of body from his father, we know that the in-
born energy was purified and directed to the best she
14 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
knew by a mother whose unceasing care had to struggle
all the while against the poverty and disqualifications
of her position.
" Mitchell " is a common name in Ireland, and
" The Mount," which is the district from Toad Lane
along High Street, is associated with the Irish in
Rochdale. The Irish immigration began about the
time of Mitchell's birth. " Before 1827," says Mr.
W. Robertson, the Rochdale historian, in a letter on
this point, " there was only one Irishman in Rochdale,
a shoemaker . . . the Hibernians were regarded
with terror." Subsequently a company of Connaught
Rangers stayed in the town, the barracks being near
Toad Lane ; and their stay had the effect of breaking
down the anti-Irish prejudice. Irish workers were then
sought for the cotton mills, which at that time were
new to Rochdale. To house the new-comers, cheap
houses — no doubt obliterating the gardens — were
erected in the neighbourhood of High Street. But
apart from the evidence that Mitchell's mother was
Rochdale born, this development obviously came too
late for the boy's birth in 182S. Moreover, the street
in which we first have definite news of him (Red Cross
Street) is reported by another old Rochdale townsman
as never to have been Irish like the rest of the Mount.
Mitchell himself gave an account of his ancestry when
Mr. Robertson, in 1892, was, with very great difficulty,
extracting a few personal details from the co-operative
leader for the " Handbook " to the Rochdale Co-op-
erative Congress of that year. He told the historian
that his forefathers for generations had been engaged
in the then extinct Rochdale hat trade, and it is clear-
that he referred to his maternal descent. The name
" Mitchell " appears in Rochdale history from the
THE MOTHER'S SON 15
sixteenth century, although a Rochdale directory
of 1841 records few Mitchells amongst the many
Butterworths, Schofields, Kershaws, and Ashworths.
Whiteheads were more common.
The mother's means of livelihood at the time of
her son's birth again can only be guessed. Possibly
she was in domestic service. At a little later date she
kept a beerhouse, and supplemented this by letting
lodgings to the humblest working men. " Home-
brewed beer " is a sign still to be seen in the neighbour-
hood of High Street, and at this date of about 1835 in
all likelihood the beer was made at home. For a
woman trained in domestic service, brewing on a small
scale would form a natural occupation. And the scale
would be very small, for the Mitchells were exceedingly
poor. " Many of us have been brought up from the
cellar/' said the C.W.S. chairman in 1893, speaking at
the Bristol Congress in appreciation of Vansittart
Neale's far different early environment. The beer-
houses of 1835 were very rough places, and the Mitchells
must have had the poorest and roughest of customers.
" I never heard him say anything about his birthplace
or his mother," writes Mr. W. H. Greenwood, who was
intimately in touch with J. T. W. Mitchell for many
years at Littleborough, " except that he was born in a
poor home and had a very hard time of it when a boy."
Yet, according to her means, his mother gave
royally. She kept her little child from going to earn
money in the hungry cotton mills, and off and on she
sent the lad to gain some elements of education at the
Red Cross Street National School. In a rough but
effective fashion she added to this her own moral
teaching. Through her father's experience, that
teaching may have been already associated, however
16 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
crudely, with economic and social ideas. John's
grandfather had joined a co-operative society started
about 1833 or 1834 at 15, Toad Lane. Although un-
registered, trading for credit, and providing for profits
to be appropriated by capital, this society nevertheless
aimed at producing and distributing for the benefit
and social gain of the " industrious classes/' It was a
humble effort, the rent of the whole building in which
it began being no more than £6 a year ; and by 1835
it had failed, leaving the grandfather a loser of no
doubt badly-needed money. In later years Mitchell
never tired of reminding audiences that co-operation
began before the Pioneers and that what the Pioneers
did was not to invent co-operation but to demonstrate
the principles of success.
At about ten or twelve years the boy began work
as a piecer in a cotton mill — the Townhead Mill. " I
have been a servant all my life," Mitchell told the
Royal Commission on Labour in 1892. " I worked
for Is. 6d. a week at the beginning of my days, and
whatever profit might have been handed to me in the
work, I do not see that I could have done more than
I did/' He was replying to a suggestion that men
would work better as profiVsharers ; and therefore he
concluded, " I should not like to feel that the selfish
instinct would give increased energy to the work of
any man."
Love for his mother, and the strong wish to help
her, if only by eighteenpence a week, together with the
spontaneous desire of every vigorous, unsophisticated
boy to put forth his energy and do his best, was a
sufficient motive for the lad Mitchell. Besides work-
ing every day in the mill from six in the morning till
after seven at night, with no more than a few half-
THE MOTHER'S SON 17
holidays in the year, on Sundays he attended classes
in secular subjects, first improving his reading and
writing under a clerk, Mr. Matthew Brearley, at
Baillie Street, and then under a Mr. John Kershaw
getting a glimpse of something less elementary. It was
a life of toil sufficient to tire the strongest ; and still,
poor and ill-fed as John Mitchell must have been at
best, it was perhaps fortunate for him that there were
no temptations to interfere with the concentration of
his energies. He grew up a quiet, reserved, solitary
soul, absorbed in zealous industry.
As soon as the boy began to earn a few more
shillings a week the beerhouse was given up. The
Mitchells removed from Red Cross Street to the
neighbouring Hope Street, tenanting one of the
abandoned workshop-homes of the former small
master-weavers. Here, with the help of her son, the
mother lived entirely by letting lodgings. And here,
in 1846, Mitchell at last found a door opening for him
into a larger life. The congregation of the Providence
Independent Chapel in High Street had become a
vigorous body, whose church and schools provided
both for religious worship and for something in the
nature of social work as well. INew schools having been
built in 1846, it was decided in the interests of the
schools to canvass every house in this poor and
struggling district. The two visitors who called upon
the Mitchells included the teacher of the young men's
class, J. T. Pagan, an important flannel manufacturer
and a leading citizen, who twice became mayor of the
borough. John Mitchell, " a fine, big lad/' was found
reading, and his mother cooking. A short interview
ended in the mother saying, " John, tha's never bin
to Sunday Schoo ; tha might go."
18 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
Mr. Pagan called for the seventeen-year-old youth
the following Sunday and introduced him into his
class. Here, for the first time, Mitchell came into touch
with religious and political opinions intelligently con-
ceived and conscientiously held. He realised that—
apart from the love between his mother and himself
and the help he had given her — he had lived until now
a life little better than that of a beast of burden.
Mixing with the more fortunate and better-educated
of the Providence congregation, he saw that the small
knowledge he had so far gathered served only to reveal
his ignorance. He seemed to himself utterly deficient.
Yet he was not crushed, but inspired with confidence
in his power to learn and to better his state. Still
more important, somehow he absorbed the broadest
Christian faith in human possibilities ; and so came to
merge his ambitions for himself with his hopes and
desires for the ignorant and poverty-burdened masses
in all the dismal Mounts of the wider world.
Radical and puritan, the stripling of eighteen or
nineteen held his new beliefs so strongly as, for the
first time, to go against his mother's wishes by signing
a total abstinence pledge. In 1847 it was an extreme
thing to become a teetotaller. By departing from
alcohol one recklessly defied every ancient tradition
associating health, strength, and manliness with beer.
One risked the unknown. The best of mothers might
have doubts. But it was necessary now for the boy to
go his own way. Ceasing to be a child, and saved from
becoming a drudge, the time had come for him to live
and act for himself.
CHAPTER II
THE ROCHDALE WORKER
JOHN PAGAN did even more for Mitchell than bring
him into a spiritual environment at Providence.
He gave aspiration a material opportunity. It was
not an extraordinary one ; yet it led to a position in
which Mitchell was able to qualify for the great work
of his life. Attracted by the serious character and
manifest truthfulness and honesty of the threadbare
recruit from Hope Street, Mr. Pagan offered John
Mitchell a place in the warehouse of his flannel milL
The young man's wages were only 16s. a week ; on the
other hand, 16s. was a valued wage in 1848. So
Mitchell turned from cotton to wool.
In the new position, under the firm of Pagan and
Stewart, he was happy in his work. Although the
heads of the house changed again and again, he re-
mained with it until 1867, rising to the managership of
the warehouse. In these years he acquired a thorough
knowledge of flannels, a still more important insight
into the business of selling as distinct from producing,
and, chief of all, an ability to manage men. In control
he gained the character of supporting energy and
ability, discouraging idleness, and acting generally
with a fair and equal mind.
But this is carrying us far from the period of 1848r
to which we must return. Promoted to Pagan and
Stewart's, Mitchell began to count for more at home.
20 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
He gained the sole use of a small room at the top of the
house in Hope Street. To this little room he was able
to invite meetings of sub-committees of the Rochdale
Temperance Society. He had joined this society and
had become an active worker on its committee. Fre-
quently he spoke in public for the temperance cause
which, in those days, had need to be militant. What-
ever our modern faults, it would be difficult to believe
that we have not gained from the teetotal attack upon
the hard drinking of the past. As late as 1868 certain
notorious methods of Eatanswill prevailed here, and at
every election drunken mobs made the lives of the
police dangerous and democracy ridiculous. Alcohol
provided an easy way of keeping electors on the other
side from the poll.
Saturate him well with liquor.
So to do the work the quicker ;
Take him then and lock him up,
Still supply the potent cup,
And when polling day is o'er,
Giving him the clothes he wore,
Let him seek his home once more,
With an aching head and sore.
This Rochdale rhyme, quoted by Mr. Robertson,
illustrates the " bottling " of electors, and suggests
the worse things that could happen with drinking
habits so powerful, things against which Mitchell
strove. Until his death he remained an office-holder
in the local division of the Sons of Temperance. It was
a delegate from the Sons of Temperance who, in after
years, changed his mind at a conference and put the
blame on " Mitchell." " Why/' the delegate urged,
" he'd wheedle a duck off watter ! "
Mitchell appears to have been vigorous also in
" wheedling " people on to " watter " or tea, which he
drank copiously. With his boyhood's experience
THE ROCHDALE WORKER 21
behind him, he knew how to use the stock epigrams,
for example, that the reason why men could not make
both ends meet was because one of them was drink.
In later life he worked for local option, though with
little hope of its adoption " until women have the
vote/' But he stopped short of fanaticism. At a
co-operative dinner a plum pudding was served with
brandy sauce. " Mr. Mitchell won't have any of this,"
said the chairman. " Oh, sha'n't I ? " replied Mitchell.
"I sha'n't throw the cob away for the sake of the
slack."
Returning again to the earlier days, Mitchell while
at Hope Street was to some extent a reading man. It
has been said that in his little room he gathered " the
nucleus of a library " and found delight in Shakespeare.
It is likely that he read fairly fully within the narrow
limits of the Providence School library ; and a few
books that were old possessions he retained in after
life. " Hudibras" was one, with its wit and sense of
character, and amongst the others were three volumes
of the homely realistic poet, Crabbe. Milton he knew
something of, as befitted an Independent ; but the
poetry of Shakespeare, it is pretty certain, he had no
more than looked at. Carlyle and Ruskin, as well as
the orthodox economists, were, in Sir William Max-
well's words (in a private letter), " outside his range."
Fiction he ignored. " The Bible was his book," says
Sir William, " and he knew it well." The Bible,
however, is poetry and prophecy, story and drama, as
well as a library of religious and moral teaching ; and,
like thousands of men and women before him, Mitchell
could pasture there his imaginative, emotional, and
ethical natures alike. And the Bible sufficed him
throughout his life. When he turned elsewhere it was
22 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
to the serious daily newspapers of his time, or to the
" Economist/' or the publications of the Cobden Club.
To this list of his later days the co-operative publica-
tions naturally must be added. At that time, with the
ideals of the prophets in his soul and a close grip upon
what was to him a perfect material means to their
realisation, he could surpass Shakespeare's exiled
duke and find poetry in balance sheets.
About 1850, Mitchell was affected by a movement
of the new generation at Providence. An issue arose
there over the appointment of a new minister. It
ended in a secession, led from the Sunday School, and
the founding of the present Milton Church. The spirit
of the new movement was shown in what the " Roch-
dale Sentinel " described as "a splendid effort of
architecture/' With its ecclesiastical spire, rose
windows, and flying buttresses, the Gothic building
certainly marked a break-away from Puritan and
Evangelical severity. Of the minister, too, the Rev.
W. H. Parkinson, it is still remembered that he wore
a gown. Yet at the opening in 1854 his text from the
humanist words to David of the wise woman of Tekoa,
showed his liberal quality. And, indeed, the new
minister was a living force, taking part in politics,
writing leaders for the local press, developing popular
services, and ready in his preaching to find illustra-
tions either in literature or in common objects like
a pawnbroker's sign.
Secession never was a process that appealed to
Mitchell, and though as a young man he went over
with the new movement, he went reluctantly. At
Milton Church, however, he found, spiritually, a
permanent home. In a material sense, moreover, the
Church and school were to become for him more of a
THE ROCHDALE WORKER 23
home than the house he slept in. Meanwhile, little as
the ecclesiastical note of the buildings accorded with
his simple beliefs, it is probable that he gained much
in mind and spirit from this vigorous religious develop-
ment. From 1854 he taught in the Milton Sunday
School, where afterwards he was superintendent until
his death in 1895. At one time, despite the " chaff "
which never ruffled his good humour, this Benedick
who found no Beatrice to alter bis mind, boldly taught
a class of young women.
John Mitchell had now passed into manhood, pre-
senting at this time a tall and energetic figure, large-
limbed, with a fine head scantily covered with fair hair,
full blue eyes, a fresh complexion, and equable, good-
humoured, mobile lips. Already he was clean-shaven,
presenting an appearance comparatively rare amongst
the bearded Victorian working men. He was twenty-
four when on the 7th of February, 1853, he joined the
Rochdale Equitable Pioneers' Society. Co-operation,
as we have seen, was not a new thing to him. But
when the new co-operative movement began he was
only sixteen and, moreover, completely immersed in
the individual struggle with ignorance and poverty.
Now he was to unite his efforts with those of others.
Already the young men at Providence frequently had
discussed the new society which was making such a
stir in the town. Mitchell knew many of the first
Pioneers and, there is little doubt, understood and felt
with them. At the store, too, a newsroom and library
had grown up ; and in Toad Lane this room was not
so many yards from Hope Street. Again, Mitchell had
found a friend, a young married man, Abraham
Howard. Already co-workers in other movements, in
joining the society Mitchell became a fellow co-operator
24 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
with his friend. All these things brought him into the
co-operative movement.
Yet for two or three years the young Mitchell took
no active part. He lived the life we have seen at Hope
Street until, in 1855, it was ended by a heavy blow.
In the summer of that year, on the llth of June,
his mother died, and with her death he lost one who
had been mother and father and friend. A generation
earlier she had set herself to save her boy from the evil
she had found in the world and in mankind. She had
worked, stinted, watched, struggled all for him. And
she had lived to see, amidst weaknesses, misfortune
and frustrate hopes in neighbours around her, some-
thing almost miraculous. Her branded child of the
slums out of that mud had grown tall and erect like a
tree. He had become an active, earnest, kind soul, a
young man already prospering and honoured in the
world. He had not been spoiled by his dawning success.
Still true to her teaching, he sought less his own than
the common good of many.
Except that John Mitchell's mother thus laboured
to bring good out of evil we know scarcely anything of
her. Three generations have arisen since she died.
The people who " saw her plain/' and " stopped and
spoke," have all vanished, and there are no records.
But we can surmise that she died content.
John Mitchell remained. He was always a man
who felt deeply. Twenty years later he praised his
fellow co-operator and adversary within the movement,
Tom Hughes, because of the latter's strength of feeling.
Mitchell did not care, as he said, for men who could not
feel strongly ; for abundant feelings went with good
hearts and sound minds. But a capacity for emotion
means suffering as well as joy. " Where there is most
1HE ROCHDALE WORKER 25
power of feeling/' said Leonardo da Vinci, " there of
martyrs is the greatest martyr." And how deep those
feelings were in the mother's son may be guessed from
an incident of later days. Perhaps thirty years after
her death the co-operator attended a meeting of the
Rochdale Pioneers Educational Committee which had
to caution certain boys for writing obscene words on
papers in a newsroom.
" What would your mother have said to you if
you'd done that ? " was the sudden, sly question of
the chairman to Mitchell.
The words touched a spring ; and an observing
friend across the table saw his colleague almost over-
come. Then Mitchell's face twitched, and his throat
cleared, as he mastered himself ; but he said nothing.
Yet in his sorrow Mitchell found companionship.
His friend, Abraham Howard, at about the same time,
lost his young wife. Two griefs do not make a joy ;
but sorrows shared become lighter. Doubly drawn
towards his friend, Mitchell transferred to Howard
much of his affectionateness. " He looked upon him
as an elder brother, whom he trusted," writes Sir
William Maxwell, " and I saw that feeling in word and
deed when I was with them." After a couple of years
his friend re-married, and John Mitchell then went to
lodge with the Howards, and in doing so found a
second home.
To its credit the Rochdale Society, about 1856,
found employment for Hungarian exiles, followers of
Kossuth, and Mitchell's name is to be seen in the
Rochdale press of the day as speaking with Greenwood
and Cooper at a co-operative meeting in their honour.
Thus he appears at this time associated with leaders of
the Pioneers as a foremost member. It was naturally
26 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
felt that such a man ought to be secured for the
Pioneers' committee, and early in January, 1857, he
was elected to office. The paid (but badly paid) full-
time post then held in the society by William Cooper
was that of cashier. Mitchell became the still less-
rewarded spare-time secretary to the committee. He
took this lion's share of the work for two years. It was
a time when the membership was doubling and trebling
every few years and when new branches and depart-
ments were opening. Moreover, on the same January
evening he was appointed to the Library Committee,
and there was plenty of work in that direction, too.
In 1853, the occasional grants to education had given
place to a regular grant of 2J per cent of profits. The
library grew with this money; the newsroom was
opened daily ; and even on Sundays there were adult
classes in this room for teaching writing and English,
arithmetic and mathematics, to old and young men.
It is clear that John Mitchell's zeal to employ all his
great energies for the good of others had full scope
before 1860.
CHAPTER III
BUSINESS FOR OTHERS
THAT J. T. W. MITCHELL was the father of the
idea of consumers' co-operation, is a view
supported by the authority of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney
Webb. " As far as we know/' they have told the
writer, " Mitchell is to be credited with the idea ; he is
the earliest to whom the consumers' idea can be
traced." Knowing, as we do, by what contrary and
devious roads great ideas are reached, it is not so sur-
prising that Mitchell's most prominent early co-opera-
tive activities were in another direction. In 1854 he
was working with the Pioneers' leaders to promote the
Rochdale Co-operative Manufacturing Society. The
story of that society, and of the cotton mill these co-
operators built on the plot of land westward of the
town called " Mitchell Hey/' is instructive. In their
store the Pioneers, in essence, had taken the whole
world into partnership. But when they followed the
productive ideal, and began to use in their own Lan-
cashire cotton trade the capital that the store had
accumulated, they found themselves part of the
capitalist system, and not joined in one organisation
with their customers. And if they were to go on, and
enter that promised land of production, they had to
accept the position. So they formed a society, not to
buy or produce for their own use but to sell in com-
petition with others in the open markets.
28 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
Thus in the strict sense they ceased to be co-opera-
tive. But that they had so ceased did not occur to
them ; for under rules revised by E. V. Neale they
intended to share profits with labour.
From 1856 to 1860, with a rugged steadfastness not
less praiseworthy because exerted by them as small
capitalists, they worked toward success, and they
divided profits with the workers. At first (after meet-
ing interest and depreciation) the division was half and
half. Then this simple reckoning was altered to one
of paying out the surplus in an equal ratio of pence for
every sovereign of capital invested or wages paid.
The reasons given for this payment were somewhat
contradictory. It was passionately defended as due to
the worker in his own right, in discharge of the co-
operative obligation to regard him as a partner and not
a hireling. At the same time it was urged as a shrewd
means of obtaining more profitable workers.
Between these two contrary views (both cham-
pioned by Holyoake) of the bonus being a gift yet not
a gift, perplexity and dissatisfaction arose. The shares
were widely held. There was a total of about 1,400
shareholders and only 300 workers. Few of these
workers were shareholders, the share list having been
closed ; and in any case the workers received the bonus
whether members or not. To the shareholders, them-
selves nearly all poorly-paid wage-earners, it seemed
that they were giving something for nothing. And
after a first attempt to alter the rule in 1860, the bonus
was finally revised out of existence by a three-to-one
majority in March, 1862.
Besides having been one of the founders of the
society, Mitchell was a member of the committee, both
in 1860 and 1862. And in Holyoake's " History of
BUSINESS FOR OTHERS 29
the Rochdale Pioneers/' Mitchell is reproached in this
connection for " unfaithfulness " to profit-sharing prin-
ciples. The mill's own records (it is still successfully
carried on under the old co-operative name, though
now registered under the Companies' Act) go back
only to 1867 ; but from " The Co-operator " of 1862 it
seems possible that the leader from Milton Church may
have been one of the " religious persons " who advo-
cated the abolition. One speaker is reported in " The
Co-operator " as having been determined to give the
practice a trial and having become convinced in
practice that it was a source of dissension and disunity
which should be abolished. This sounds rather like
the voice of Mitchell, especially as from another source
it is stated that Mitchell was against the bonus, his
opinion being that with fair wages workpeople in-
terested in the mill could acquire shares and so par-
ticipate in any profits.
Though it abolished " Participation/' the manufac-
turing society proved its working-class sympathies
during the cotton famine by providing employment
when other mills were closed, and incurring losses in so
doing. This was a benefit worth many times the pay-
ment of about 33s. 4d. a year which William Cooper,
in defending the bonus, took as typical of its bounty.
Either during this period of the famine, or a little later,
Mitchell became chairman of the committee ; and from
that time onward his bold, flowing signature appeared
below the minutes regularly until July 30th, 1870.
Then he seems to have failed to secure re-election to
the committee. By that time, however, he was
beginning to find, outside Rochdale, a larger — and a
more co-operative — field.
Meanwhile, the scene of our story must remain in
30 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
Rochdale. In 1867 the chairman of Mitchell Hey had
left the wool warehouse, where he was manager, to enter
into business for himself. Man of affairs though he was,
his motive in launching his own venture was not the
usual one. Work for other people was demanding
more and more of his time, and he wanted to be free to
give it. To gain this freedom he set up for himself. In
this business he sold cotton cloth woven at the Mitchell
Hey mills. Thus committee work and daily work were
brought together, and, in the same way, when Mitchell
travelled to sell his goods and establish connections, he
travelled also, without payment or charge, for religious,
co-operative, temperance, and political causes. Often
it must have been a huge relief for puzzled committees
and officials, in those days of slender funds, to hear
Mitchell remark that business would take him to a
distant town, and that while there he could, at no cost,
represent the common cause.
Similarly, Mitchell combined his place of business
with his home. Only four years after his happy estab-
lishment with the Howards he had suffered a lodger's
fate. Abraham Howard was appointed to a post in
Liverpool and, perforce, removed to Merseyside.
Mitchell had to seek another habitation. His friends
looked to the rising leader to make a " proper " home,
amidst the solid domestic comfort that Rochdale
appreciated. Mitchell was at least half-engaged to an
Elizabeth Wynn, whom, it is said, his mother had
wished him to marry. But, as we shall hear again later,
he did not marry. As Thoreau whimsically wished to
do, the co-operator had disappointed his friends by
taking a house adjoining the wool warehouse — this
was in 1861 — and installing a pair of caretakers, man
and wife.
BUSINESS FOR OTHERS 31
When he commenced his own business he had
removed from this house to John Street, a short street
of mills and better-class cottages tilted up and down
hill from the main Yorkshire Street to the valley,
near Milton Church. Radical though he was in ideas,
in his personal life Mitchell rarely sought any change.
It was the incorporation of his former home with the
wool warehouse beside it that drove him to John
Street. Arrived in John Street, with the same care-
takers in charge, he used this house — number 15 — as
his own warehouse, according to the custom of the
merchants of old days, who had lived and nourished
on " The Mount." Then his male caretaker died, and,
some time later, the widow married again. She went
away, and Mitchell was left alone. " From this time,"
wrote Maxwell, in his Memoir of 1896, "he lived
absolutely by himself, and many who have been
stirred by his eloquence and warmed by his bright
presence will now think sadly of him returning to such
a home — no one to welcome him after his long and
thankless journey for the good of others. And yet in
that dark and sullen abode lived one of the brightest
and happiest men on earth."
Separated from his oldest friend, Mitchell had a
spare bedroom fitted up at John Street in which
Abraham Howard could spend a night whenever in
Rochdale. But, says Maxwell, " a visit to his house
showed distinctly that if he provided liberally for his
friend he had no thought for himself. His own bed-
room was furnished with some of the old furniture his
mother had when he was a boy, humble in the ex-
treme." The five-roomed house in John Street was
less a home than a sleeping place, a study and a cell
where the busy man could read his Bible in peace.
32 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
" There was scarcely a chair to sit on for books and
papers/' says one who visited him there. " The table
was full o' papers and you mustn't touch nothing," is
the recollection of Mr. Butterworth's former house-
keeper. " One room was just letters." Number 13,
next door, is a three-roomed cottage, and this little
house Mitchell also tenanted, having a door through
from the one to the other.
After his last caretaker married, though alone in the
house, Mitchell found in a neighbour a devoted servant.
The story of the attachment is such as might have
come from Les Miser ables. This neighbour was one
Thomas Butterworth. About 1872 Butterworth was
caretaker at one of the newsrooms of the Pioneers'
Society. The newsroom was separated from the branch
storeroom only by a matchboard partition, and this
storeroom, in turn, communicated with the shop. By
unscrewing certain boards the caretaker of the news-
room found a way through. Money began to be missed.
The branch manager reported the losses, and a watch
was set. Butterworth was caught, prosecuted, and
sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment.
The ex-caretaker was released to find every face
turned against one who, through robbing the store, had
robbed his fellow- workers. But Mitchell saw only a
man broken by suffering and despair. Generously he
held out his hand. Perhaps he understood what it
meant to be under a stigma ; perhaps it was that
fidelity of his to anyone whom he had liked ; or perhaps
it was just human goodwill and faith in goodwill. At
any rate, heedless of any remark upon a co-operative
leader seeming to be the friend of a convicted thief,
Mitchell stretched out a helping hand that was eagerly
grasped. To the trust of a man respected as Mitchell
J. T. \V. MITCHELL AS A YOUNG MAN.
From a Photo<irupli lent l»j Sir W. Mn.nrcll.
T. W. MITCH KM. AT ABOUT Till) \c. i; <)l |<>.
BUSINESS FOR OTHERS 33
was — a man standing high at Toad Lane and Milton
Church — Butterworth's whole nature responded. He
became the co-operator's devoted servant. Later on
the ex-employee inherited property and developed into
Mitchell's landlord, himself living a few doors lower
down John Street, but the new status made little
difference. Butterworth's servant was Mitchell's
servant at need, and Butterworth himself was as ready
as any valet. The attachment grew into a personal
friendship that increased with the years, Mitchell con-
fiding in Butterworth absolutely. Neighbours said
that if Mitchell died Butterworth would soon follow
him ; and this prophecy was remarkably fulfilled.
Another of Mitchell's connections with the Pioneers'
Society was through the science, art, and technical
classes instituted by the co-operators in 1872. " The
smallest society in the country/' he said (Plymouth,
1886), " could afford the small sum of money necessary
for such classes." In Rochdale the good work grew
until taken over by the Rochdale Corporation and in-
corporated in the present Municipal Technical School.
Mitchell was secretary. Though he retired in 1873,
he accepted the office again in 1881 and kept it until
his death. He was no secretary born, disliking secre-
tarial details. But he patiently did the work, helped
occasionally by Mr. Barnish, then the society's librarian.
Another witness still living, Mr. Fountain, was in-
timately associated with Mitchell in the later days
of these classes. Mr. Fountain remembers how
on one occasion a chairman of the committee in charge
of the classes insisted upon appropriating an extra fee,
due to those who sat amongst the students at examina-
tions to ensure fair working. " It's mine by right,"
said the chairman in question, when appealed to
34 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
in the interests of a poorer man, " and I'm going
to have it."
" Mitchell screwed up his shoulders but said noth-
ing/' Already he had declined the paid appointment.
But during the examination he dropped into the room.
The sitting lasted four hours, and the overlooking was
rather tedious. To one and another Mitchell said,
" If you like to go and stretch your legs a bit, 111 look
on."'
At other times also the secretary of the classes did
the same. A member of the committee who had thus
been relieved for a couple of hours demanded that
Mitchell should share the half-guinea fee. " I never
shall," replied Mitchell ; and at no time did he take
any fee, though his interest in the classes and the
students was of the keenest.
Through the secretaryship, Mitchell came into
touch with many of the teachers. Occasionally,
assuming that the organiser would have tickets to give,
a teacher would ask for a seat at some one or other of
the society's teas and entertainments. The request
was rarely or never refused ; but payment to the
society for the ticket was made out of Mitchell's own
private pocket.
He gave readily at his own expense but he would
not replenish at the cost of others. When he was sent
as delegate to Manchester or elsewhere it was often
open to him to draw expenses on two or three different
accounts ; but if one journey had been made to serve
three purposes only one journey was charged for. It
was in this spirit that all J. T. W. Mitchell's co-opera-
tive and other public work in Rochdale was done.
CHAPTER IV
LEADER AND CHAIRMAN
UNTIL he was 40 years of age Mitchell belonged
almost entirely to Rochdale, despite his occasional
journeys ; and in Rochdale one must seek for the
few public evidences of his existence. But the year
1869 marked a new period. On the Whit-Monday of
that year (May 31st) the first of the present series of
Co-operative Congresses was convened in the theatre
of the Society of Arts in London ; and " John J. W.
Mitchell " (as his name appeared) was officially listed
as delegate from the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers'
Society.
The Co-operative Wholesale Society of those days
held its meetings in its back-street warehouse, the
delegates finding rough seats on boards laid across
barrels. But the first co-operative congress, assembling
in the West End, was almost a society function. An
Earl of Litchfield was there ; a Comte de Paris looked
in ; Sir Louis Mallet and Henry Fawcett, M.P.,
attended; Florence Nightingale and John Stuart
Mill sent benedictions. Organically, nevertheless,
this was the more primitive gathering. It included
private employers calling their firms " industrial
partnerships/' and trade unionists present in the
interest of trade unionism ; and odds and ends like
the " Radical Newspaper Company " of Birmingham.
Amongst the miscellany of 57 delegates a minority of
36 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
about 26 represented the co-operative store move-
ment.
The debates extended over four days, and Mitchell
took a modest part in all. When Capital and Labour
discussed production, Mitchell, alone amongst a score
of speakers, reminded the Congress of the consumer.
The success of the store, he pointed out, was due to both
custom and capital being at hand. In commencing
with production it was different. " Even if they
managed to get the capital they had the customer to
seek/' Yet the practical-minded delegate from Roch-
dale was also idealistic. He saw no insuperable
difficulty in establishing model co-operative villages
" provided we begin low enough and proceed by
natural growth/' And he was confident that with due
caution co-operative banking could also be managed.
Six months later, on the 20th of November, 1869,
the C.W.S. recorded that the nominee of the Rochdale
Equitable Pioneers Society, J. T. W. Mitchell, third
with 78 votes on a list of six elected candidates, had
been placed on the C.W.S. directorate "for the ensuing
year/' A fortnight later the new member was
appointed to the finance committee. Through the
C.W.S. and the Co-operative Union the Rochdale
representative thus had come fully into the national
co-operative movement.
Though not recorded as present at the next Co-
operative Congress, Mitchell attended again at Bir-
mingham in 1871, and suggested — and in this way
originated — the present district conferences of the
Co-operative Union. District and county conferences,
he declared, would lead to an increase of mutual con-
fidence. He had now to speak for the C.W.S. board
also, defending that body against a charge of neglecting
LEADER AND CHAIRMAN 37
to open boot and drapery departments ; and he won
the respect of the delegates, as reported at the time by
Holyoake, for his good sense in resisting temptation
and declining to pursue an irrelevant local issue. At
the same Congress, too, he spoke in favour of a co-
operative newspaper, possibly to be called " The
Citizen " — " a delightful name/' he said, " for we
are all citizens of a great and free country which we
hope by co-operative enterprise to make brighter and
better than it has ever been in times past."
As we shall see, Mitchell continued to attend the
Congresses, being present at every one until his death.
But in these critical years from 1870 onwards the
weight of a moral demand was upon him to translate
ideals into practice in the C.W.S. Boardroom at
Balloon Street, Manchester. The C.W.S. in 1870 was
no more than six years old. Developments were upon
it which worried and frightened some of the leaders.
Branches were wanted far away from the co-operative
homeland round Manchester. Risky businesses like that
of selling draperies had to be faced. Manufacturing
was talked of, and banking. All these things meant
launching into seas as unknown as the Caribbean to
Columbus. Committee-men wanting security and a
quiet life drew back. Mitchell, by the evidence of
C.W.S. minutes and by common consent, led on. He
it was who proposed that the C.W.S. should manu-
facture boots and shoes ; his was the experience drawn
upon for starting the drapery business ; he was at
London with Hughes (M.P.) , Morrison, Holyoake,
Ludlow, and Hodgson Pratt to discuss with them
a C.W.S. London branch ; he watched, defended,
and developed every C.W.S. opportunity toward
banking.
38 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
In one way his spirit of energy and confidence was
helped by the times. A cycle of good trade, beginning
about 1869, became a " boom " under the influence of
the Franco-German War. As wages and prices rose,
both the courage and the dissatisfaction of working
people increased. They wanted a bigger share in the
benefits and control of industry, and these they felt
they had the power to win. But if this ambitious
spirit helped men like Mitchell it also harassed them.
Profiteers were taking advantage of the times to get
rich quickly, and even co-operators were carried away.
Looking only at the diffusion of shares under co-
operation, and seeing diffusion under the small
capitalism of working-class joint^stock companies,
they reasoned from one to the other and slid into
company promotion.
Amidst this confusion of thought, a number of
these speculative companies were admitted into mem-
bership of the C.W.S. In 1872 the C.W.S. had begun a
Deposit and Loan department — in reality, banking
under another name ; for the law as it stood was read
as forbidding banking to a society like the C.W.S.,
and, as Mitchell said in 1893, " ever since co-operation
began we have done things illegally (i.e., illegal things)
and made them legal afterwards/' It was the fate of
this new-born department at once to encounter the
dubious customers. The companies lodged their deeds
with the C.W.S. in return for money, and came for
more and more money as " slump " followed " boom/'
Large advances were made even when, in one case, a
modest co-operative request had to be declined. The
then chairman of the Wholesale Society was himself
manager of a company not only selling to the C.W.S.
but also asking for a loan of £30,000 — in this instance
not granted.
LEADER AND CHAIRMAN 39
It must be admitted that to the extent of being a
junior member of the committee Mitchell was party
to these dealings, which, in a few years' time, were to
bring losses of tens of thousands of pounds upon the
young and still comparatively poor C.W.S. With his
tolerant nature and willingness to learn from events,
it is likely that Mitchell waited to be sure of his ground.
But at the G.W.S. Quarterly Meeting of November
15th, 1873, it came out that in committee the position
of the occupant of the chair had been challenged. No
names were given ; but " it was considered by a
certain gentleman that he (the co-operative chairman
and private manager) occupied a very false position as
a member of the board/' That the " certain gentle-
man " was Mitchell is at least probable ; for, as the
minutes show, the coming chairman was now the
active spirit on the committee. It was he who was
moving that voting on the committee be " open and
not secret/' and pressing for right methods in other
matters, like that of separating the banking from trade
accounts. Forty years later on it was remembered,
by one present at a vexed meeting of the C.W.S., how
Mitchell " rose like a lion/' and how leadership seemed
to belong to him afterwards. This vividly-remembered
detail is in accord with the statements of others who
knew those days — that it was Mitchell's work and
leadership at this period which established the Whole-
sale Society for what it became.
The chairman of 1873 secured a vote of confidence,
and though he retired a few months later it was to the
accompaniment of an illuminated address and assur-
ances that his name would go down to history, and
that co-operators would have " some difficulty in
finding an equally competent person to fill his place."
40 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
Yet it is not on record that the task of discovering a
successor caused any hesitation or anxiety. At their
next general meeting, on May 22nd, 1874, only six
days after the vacancy, the C.W.S. Committee re-
solved " that Mr. J. T. W. Mitchell (already in the
chair pro tern.) be president."
There was no room for doubt. It was urgent for
the C.W.S. to have a captain on the bridge compact of
honesty, courage, and will, who both knew the prin-
ciples of co-operative navigation and how to apply
them. Mitchell had all these qualifications. In
addition he had the physical gifts of a commanding
presence and sonorous voice — gifts without which few
leaders can do much with democracy, which likes to be
dominated as well as guided. That is to say, it likes,
and naturally likes, to follow a leader who is trans-
parently dominating for the common good ; and there
Mitchell took hold. " He was a born chairman,"
writes Mr. T. Goodwin, the present manager of the
C.W.S. Bank, " gifted with eloquence, a fine presence,
and a native tact."
" I have known him " (continues Mr. Goodwin)
" by some happy remark or witticism or good-natured
satire, followed by a practical suggestion, straighten
out a meeting which seemed to be getting hopelessly
tangled and irritated. He could instinctively feel the
moment when to take a vote. Summing up a dis-
cussion in a few words, he would obtain a decision —
of course, the decision desired by the chair — before the
delegates fully realised what had happened. . . .
The meeting would find itself laughing at how it had
done exactly what the chairman wanted. In fact, the
delegates seemed to enjoy the process, even when they
did not altogether agree with the result. M. Coue's
LEADER AND CHAIRMAN 41
auto-suggestion only mildly suggests the irresistible
manner in which Mitchell at his best could pick up
and carry a meeting with him. He never really lost
this power, though there were times in his later years
when he halted a little and was not so swift and sure
in his judgment/'
" At his best he was beyond reproach/' wrote Mr.
Ben Jones, in 1895, of Mitchell as a chairman ; and
in the same appreciation the then manager of the
C.W.S. London Branch dwelt upon Mitchell's " good-
humoured sallies, never without point," his " bon-
homie," and his " extraordinary tact and delicacy of
judgment."
There was steel under the velvet. " Sit down !
Sit down ! " the chairman would cry to delegates
seeking to prolong a closed discussion ; and they sat
down. The meetings, an old observer has said, were
more amenable a generation or so ago. ' ' They wouldn't
take it from him now." That may be so ; yet there is
a wide difference between autocratic rule and genuine
leadership ; and it was as a leader that the chairman
prevailed.
Sometimes Mitchell failed to carry a meeting with
him. On the question of employees' pensions, for
example, he was too broad-minded or too far-seeing
for the delegates. But usually he succeeded, aided
most of all by the common knowledge that here was a
man actually whole-hearted for the common good, and
not secretly seeking any sectional, personal, or other
undeclared object. And in the final years of the
eighteen-seventies, when lame ducks were fluttering
home, a strong leadership was sorely needed. Paper
companies, land companies, collieries, had to be
salvaged by the C.W.S. as mortgagees, just when the
42 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
Ouseburn and Industrial Bank failures were absorbing
money and destroying confidence. The C.W.S. own
new productive works demanded close attention, too ;
while the drapery departments were losing money.
"' The Wholesale Society," Mitchell confessed in 1881,
" was in very great straits."
On the other hand, at every congress, conference,
and C.W.S. quarterly meeting, the chairman had to
contend with a misjudging idealism. The situation
was almost tragic. Nearly all the disinterested,
educated, high-minded ability of the co-operative
movement, embodied in men like Hughes, Neale,
Morrison, Holyoake, Sedley Taylor and others, was
set upon courses which, for practical value, were
dreams from beyond the ivory gate. They wanted
to separate the C.W.S. Bank from the C.W.S., or at
least so to alter things as to make the federation and
its treasury virtually separate. They sought to
divide production from distribution and bring the
O.W.S. workshops more or less under the group con-
trol of the particular workers in each factory. And
except for the unfailing sagacity of Dr. John Watts,
the great educationalist who possibly influenced
Mitchell's views, there seemed little on the other side
except a dull, uninspiring common-sense, which by
the idealists was dubbed " materialism " and damned.
Absorbed in practical work, it was Mitchell's fate
to be ranked with the " materialists." But though he
may have failed to get his idealism " over the foot-
lights," in the real sense of taking every present step
for the sake of a far-off goal, he was as idealistic as any
of them. Thus, as he told different congresses, he
wanted the C.W.S. Bank to become the co-operative
bank for the whole country, utilising trade union and
LEADER AND CHAIRMAN 43
all other capital. Trade unions he especially invited
to bank with the C.W.S., saying that " as long as there
are two classes in the community, capitalists and
labourers, trade unions would be necessary/' He
wanted C.W.S. depots in America with the long view
of " uniting the purchasing power of American,
Canadian, and British co-operators/' At Leicester, in
1877, he looked forward to co-operative representation
in the House of Commons, commenting on there being
no such representation at the time, although co-
operators were "taxed to pay for the government of
the country/' When the Congress of 1875 was tender
toward joint^stock companies, Mitchell, while careful
not to condemn companies of a public utility or
philanthropic kind, and ready to admit that com-
mercial companies, "though not altogether right/' still
" divided the profits of trade amongst a greater number
of people than before," nevertheless " understood
co-operation to mean that the profits of trade should
go to all the people."
" The best means," he added at this Congress,
" originally devised for carrying this principle out, was
the distribution of profits upon purchases." For, as
he told a public meeting during the 1879 Congress,
the co-operative object was " to change the world,"
" to create a new state of things " wherein " none will
have too much and none will have too little." Thus
(Glasgow, 1876) they would " enable all to enjoy more
fully this world of beauty and plenty." " Let them
persevere (he told Leicester co-operators in 1877), and
the time must come when all the trading and distri-
bution in the country would be done in the interests
of the whole people. Let them have confidence in
themselves and each other, let them promote that
44 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
education which would drive away superstition and
extinguish suspicion and jealousy, and they would
have that condition of united interests no power
could break." And this commonwealth was to be world-
wide ; for as Mitchell continually spoke of no more
war, and of treaties made in future by the peoples,
so he now declared that the highest form of co-opera-
tion was that which bound nations together by mutual
interest and sympathy.
In 1874 Mitchell was elected to the Central Board
of the Co-operative Union, and in 1871 to the Board of
the Co-operative Newspaper Society — being an
original member of the directorate — and when the
Congress of 1879 had suffered a surfeit of presidential
addresses, and wanted a president for the day who
would get to work without talking, they put Mitchell
in the chair.
CHAPTER V
TRAVELS AND CONTENTIONS
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW has recalled a con-
ference at which great captains of industry rose
one after the other to declare solemnly that each
owed his business success to following the golden rule.
Simple at heart though he was, Mitchell was not simple
in any comic sense. He found himself obliged to
choose. Either he could work for others or for him-
self. After the London agent of his private business
failed, some time during the eighteen-seventies, more
and more he chose the former course. As Sir William
Maxwell has recorded, " he allowed his business quietly
to slip away from him." His secular time and energy
went to the co-operative movement, in which the
Wholesale Society came first. The latter was " the
principal object of his existence/' said the " Co-opera-
tive News/' in recounting his life ; and the same
authority remarked that, where other people might
ask " how will this affect me ? " the question that
Mitchell put to himself was, "how will this affect the
Wholesale ? "
Yet his chairmanship provided him with nothing
beyond a livelihood. He received no more than other
members of the committee, and even after 1885, when
the directors were promoted to 7s. 6d. a meeting and
second-class railway fares, the chairman's income
from the society, including travelling allowances,
46 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
could not have exceeded £150 a year. The members
of the C.W.S. ruled that chairmen should not receive
more than the ordinary committee payment ; and
considering that on one occasion a member of the com-
mittee in a week with few meetings went home with
no more than 16s. for his full-time work, the chair-
man's rewards of office may have averaged less. But
careful to the last farthing with others' money,
Mitchell was indifferent about his own. The cashier
would reckon the fees and fares due to him, and
Mitchell would accept the sum always without check
or question. On one occasion, when the cashier over-
paid him, and Mitchell innocently endorsed the error,
this indifference seemed a fault.
In 1884, with Sir William — then Mr. — Maxwell,
Mr. Shotton, and other members of a joint English and
Scottish deputation of six, the C.W.S. chairman visited
America for the Society, sailing on April 3rd, in
the " Britannic." The faithful Thomas Butterworth
saw him off at Liverpool ; and for a little while all
went well, Mitchell rapidly making friends with
passengers of both sexes. But it was to be a stormy
passage ; and it has been rather unkindly recorded
that, after this too sanguine beginning, not until April
8th did Mitchell make his first appearance at table.
Even then a new gale, increasing to a "perfect tem-
pest/' kept everybody below until the llth. But,
arrived in the United States, the chairman permitted
himself no compensation for his sufferings. '" We
tried to get him out once or twice in New York to see
the sights," writes Mr. Shotton in a letter, " but, no !
that was not his business."
The deputation was there to visit meat packers
chiefly ; and besides making contracts they inquired
TRAVELS AND CONTENTIONS 47
closely into wages and working conditions. The
Chicago Exchange shocked them : they saw buyers
more like madmen than merchants . . . scream-
ing and yelling, a den of bulls and bears/' Mitchell had
provided himself with a bag specially made to hold
copies of C.W.S. balance sheets, and it gave him great
satisfaction to present one to the President of the
United States. In Canada a most enthusiastic
welcome awaited the party at Toronto. Co-operators
there met them with carriages, gave them dinner, kept
them busy addressing an enormous public meeting
until midnight, talked to them until 3 a.m., and then
finally let them go to bed and snatch a few hours before
leaving Toronto at eight in the morning. Through-
out the busy trip the chairman's Bible was still more
dear to him than the bag of balance sheets, and every
journey was planned to leave him an undisturbed
Sunday for visiting churches and Sunday schools.
For the federation of which he was president this
period of the eighteen-eighties was one of strength
renewed after the trials of the 'seventies. In the early
autumn of 1884 the society celebrated its " coming-
of-age." It was extending to Bristol, expanding in
London, launching steamships on the East Coast,
buying fruit in Greece, entering into fresh manufac-
tures at home. In the midst of these activities
Mitchell spoke at the opening, in 1887 (November 2nd),
of the Leman Street offices and warehouses in London.
His duties and engagements, he said, left him little
time for preparing any formal address ; and his
characteristically vigorous speech was apparently dis-
cursive, yet it was held together by a main idea.
" Power," he said, "followed the possession of capital."
Through co-operative trade the people could acquire
48 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
capital, property, and power. They could influence
relationships with other countries, and require diplo-
mats to pursue policies of peace. Looking out at
London, whose workers were agitated by the move-
ments shortly to culminate in the prohibited Trafalgar
meeting of " Bloody Sunday/' he advised his hearers
to get water, gas, and other public services into public
hands, to work for equalised rates between rich dis-
tricts and poor, and to defeat vested interests. " Co-
operators should fight for the general good and insist
on improved government for London/'
In this speech Mitchell said he " would not trench
on politics, for co-operators belonged to no party or
sect/' but here, as at many other times, the C.W.S.
chairman looked over the boundary hedge, and talked
of work to be done beyond the hedge, as if only waiting
for the day when the movement would break through.
While London strove toward a new era under the
London County Council, commercial Manchester was
fighting for the Manchester Ship Canal, and this large
project equally appealed to Mitchell's enthusiasm. As
a " stalwart champion " of the canal he figures in the
official history by Sir Bosdin Leech of the promotion
and construction. In 1885 he gave evidence before a
House of Lords committee. His opening statement
(together with " his quaint appearance, loud voice,
and bluff manners ") caused the chairman of the com-
mittee to ask in amazement, " what are the objects of
your society ? " For reply, we are told, Mitchell
dived into a black bag, produced a large book, stalked
across the room, and astonished the chairman by
placing the volume in his hands. In stentorian tones
he counselled the chairman to read ; he would then
know a great deal about the society. " The com-
NO. 15, JOHN STREET, ROCHDALE, WHERE J. T. W. MITCHELL
LIVED FOR MANY YEARS AND WHERE HE DIED.
THE NEXT HOUSE WITH THE SINGLE WINDOW IN JOHN STBEET IS NO. 13, WHICH
MITCHELL USED AT FIRST AS A WAREHOUSE AND AFTERWARDS AS A STUDY.
J'huto: C.W.S.
THE MITCHELL MEMORIAL HALL, AT THE C'.W.S. H KADQUARTERS,
MANCHESTER,
THK BUST OF J. T. W. MITCHELL IN THK MK.MOK1AL HALL.
TRAVELS AND CONTENTIONS 49
mittee," says the historian, " enjoyed the episode,
concluding that Mitchell was a typical Lancashire man,
who had little fear of dignitaries " ; furthermore, they
now gave him " marked attention/'
Supported by his fellow-directors and their con-
stituents, Mitchell pledged the Wholesale Society to
the project, and the C.W.S. lent £20,000, while writing
off the investment as one not likely to bear interest.
Mitchell lived both to see ocean-going vessels at Man-
chester and to be the first man to land merchandise
at the new port. The C.W.S. ss. " Pioneer " held the
post of honour amongst all merchant vessels at the
opening ; and it was Mitchell who wheeled off the
first case from her cargo of sugar.
As if the many-sided activities of the national co-
operative trading federation were not enough to occupy
him, Mitchell during all these years had a special task
of his own. It replaced his private business, with the
important difference of being — in the words of a
biographer in the " Co-operative News " — " an anxious
work for which he did not receive a penny/' Amongst
the ventures which came to wreck in 1878 was the
Lancashire and Yorkshire Productive Society, which
had flannel mills at Littleborough, near Rochdale. Of
this society, in November, 1878, Mitchell was appointed
liquidator. The shares were then worth nothing, for
the money on loan, which had preference, did not seem
to be worth more than 10s. in the £. It looked like a
case of winding-up ; but the old Rochdale flannel
warehouseman felt himself in his element, and he
decided to hold on. And from 1878 until his death in
1895 he stuck to this unconventional liquidating until
every loan was paid off with interest, and the previously
worthless scrip of the society shareholders was con-
50 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
verted into sound assets. He began by obtaining an
overdraft from the C.W.S. Bank, and for this apparent
recklessness he had to answer to critics made properly
careful by the previous losses. Had this " liquidation "
failed, it would have been very awkward for him ; but
he did not mean it to fail. And this anxiety and risk
he not only accepted without pay but without receiving
anything for expenses, until at length a sum of £20
was specially voted to him for the purpose. But even
this money he promptly reinvested in the business,
from which eventually it was paid over, with interest,
to the executors of his will.
" Mitchell was a good judge of wool/' says Mr.
Fountain, of Rochdale, who did business with him in
those days, " and he took a pride in making flannel
that would do somebody some good/' About half-past
seven of a morning he would leave John Street to go
by steam car to Littleborough, and any agent with
wool to sell had to be early at the mill and get his
samples out while Mitchell opened his letters, for
G.W.S. business at Manchester wanted attention and
there was no time to waste. By half-past nine the
" liquidator " was off again. The chief clerk at the
mill, who also remembers these details, also recalls how
at Christmas time a person continually brought into
touch with Mitchell by his duties in Littleborough
begged a small present of flannel. The " liquidator "
had eight yards cut for the gift ; but Mitchell added to
the clerk, " tell me what it is and I'll pay you, and you
can make me a receipt/' And pay he did, out of his
own pocket, as was his practice, for " he would not
take a yard out without paying for it." And this was
the man but for whom, writes Mr. Greenwood, of
Birkenhead, who was manager under J. T. W. Mitchell,
TRAVELS AND CONTENTIONS 51
there would not have been any C.W.S. flannel and
blanket works to-day — the mills having been bought
by the federation as a prospering business after
Mitchell's death.
Disinclined to controversy, preferring always to
affirm and act in a world large enough for all, Mitchell
still was compelled to labour amidst opposition. As
we have seen, the "intellectuals" of the co-operative
movement welcomed and aided C.W.S. warehousing
and selling while opposing vehemently C.W.S. bank-
ing and manufacturing. " The Wholesale Society,"
said Holyoake (Glasgow Congress, 1890), had " neither
mission nor capacity " for production. Hughes,
Holyoake, Neale, and others all demanded that the
Wholesale Society should be simply an agency for self-
governing workshops, whose independence would be
only "qualified" (in Neale's words) "by federal union
with consumers." Even while confessing that con-
sumers' societies were " inexhaustible sources of the
profit that is the mother of capital/' E. V. Neale, in
the last appeal that prefaced the Congress report of
1891, still pleaded for courses " by which this capital
may be converted into the patrimony of the workers."
Characteristically, Mitchell made no objection to
these opinions for argument's sake. He was at first
fully content that the C.W.S. should exercise its
liberty to develop, and prove by results whether or
not it had the capacity to employ its members' capital
in making things for its members' use. Active dissent
was only wrung from him after the strike of 1886 at the
C.W.S. Leicester boot factory. The strike itself was a
small matter. It arose over the sending of work from
an over-crowded factory into the country at town
rates less cartage, and it ended three days after the
52 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
Wholesale committee met the workers. But in 1886
a strike of co-operative employees was almost — though
not quite — unprecedented. In 1887 the famous old
Rugbeian, Tom Hughes, opened the Congress Exhi-
bition at Carlisle by speaking of the strike as " deeply
humiliating/' and denouncing C.W.S. production as
" contrary to the most vital of pur principles/' and
having the " sole end of dividend-hunting/' In the
evening of the same day Professor Sedley Taylor
followed by declaring that the C.W.S. system was that
of " ordinary private enterprise " and " could not be
called co-operative/' And during the subsequent
Congress debate Holyoake, " bowing his head in shame
and humiliation " as he surveyed the connection of
Mitchell (" one of the most remarkable men in this
movement ") with so desperate a state of affairs,
lamented " the disastrous day " when the Wholesale
Society went to Leicester.
Mitchell permitted himself one reply. This was on
the Saturday evening, when Taylor following Hughes
had proved a last straw. He reaffirmed his belief in a
co-operation that was for all, and not for any less
number ; that blessed all alike, for " God made all
men alike/' Then, with a cry from the heart, as one
deeply wounded, he said, " The Wholesale had that
evening been slandered." " There was no higher form
of co-operation," he added ; and then he said, " what
we want to accomplish by co-operation in our co-
operative works is absolute equality in the distribution
of wealth, though that seems hardly possible."
In other words, Mitchell evidently looked forward
to co-operators, through the federal or C.W.S. system,
employing everybody (" possessing all railways and
canals," besides finding employment for themselves)
TRAVELS AND CONTENTIONS 53
at approximately equal pay, and distributing industrial
surpluses to all, through their consumption, for " profit
was made by the consumption of the people " (i.e.,
through their payments for goods to be consumed),
" and the consumers ought to have the profit."
Probably it was the bitterness of this controversy
which produced that " more bellicose " spirit in these
disputes noted by his friend Maxwell as replacing in
later years the C.W.S. chairman's earlier sunny toler-
ance. Mitchell was no gay contender. If he took hard
words he felt them, and they affected him. Hence at
later congresses we find him retaliating. He protested
against " the new system of competition " arising from
the congress recognition of independent productive
societies each in search of a market. He objected to a
grant from " common funds " to enable productive
societies which included " private interests " (i.e.,
worker or private shareholder) to exhibit. And he
asked whether he had come to a co-operative congress
or not when Holyoake advocated production by large
retail societies more or less in opposition to their
general federation for supply. But in the main his
good humour remained unimpaired. At Edinburgh
in 1883 he spoke humorously of a Rochdale shopkeeper
who, though "interested in the teetotal movement/'
had refused to shake hands with him (Mitchell) because
he belonged to that " renegade lot," the co-operators.
And with equal enjoyment, during the Dewsbury
Congress of 1888, he told a Huddersfield audience how
it was said that " co-operators were a selfish lot, who,
if they went to chapel, sat in the free seats, and came
out before the collection."
CHAPTER VI
THE MAN HIMSELF
DURING one of those congress battles through
which Mitchell so unwillingly was compelled to
join issue with fellow-co-operators, the chairman of
the Wholesale Society complained of the unfair
assumption that the system he advocated did not
" make men/' " He had felt somewhat keenly/' he
said in this connection, " though he had said little/'
For the Rochdale leader it was a sufficient answer
to say that the Wholesale Society was the backbone
of co-operative store organisation, and that this body
was all the time lifting men out of poverty and train-
ing them to work together on an ever-increasing scale.
But in addition the chairman was contributing the
force of personality, and so helping to make the C.W.S.
not altogether ineffective in his opponents' sense of
encouraging personal initiative and responsibility and
rewarding personal achievement.
A present official of the society commenced work
as a boy in the C.W.S. Bristol office, occupying, in his
own words, " the humblest position the C.W.S. had
to offer/' The chairman came to Bristol, and the
shy lad was brought to his notice. The latter now
remembers how " the words of encouragement that
Mr. Mitchell gave me at that time have always been a
source of inspiration. The introduction was followed
up by his kindly greetings on every occasion he visited
THE MAN HIMSELF 55
the depot. With his usual cheery manner he would
greet one after this manner, * Well, my lad, how are
you getting on now ? Be sure that the co-operative
movement offers the best opportunities for bright young
lads. Do your duty, and a future is before you/ '
Another official recollects the chairman's personal
fairness : how the latter once went out of his way to
admit his own information on a point of business
mistaken and the official's opinion right. Another
remembers a piece of work being done, and a colleague
of Mitchell's on the directorate wanting to know every
detail of its progress since Mitchell had last made an
inspection. At the next committee meeting the chair-
man would certainly enquire, and would only be
satisfied by a real answer. Another recalls " a feeling
in the air " under Mitchell's presidency, a feeling that
the capable man would be helped, and the erring man
as frankly criticised whatever his rank.
In the boardroom or out of it Mitchell was the
same. Absolute punctuality, no smoking, no coarse-
ness (diamonds were sometimes rough in those days),
and complete attention to business he insisted on to
the full limit of his power as the elected chairman of a
democracy.
" This institution has a great future in front of it,"
he would tell his colleagues. " What you have to
think of is what is best for the C.W.S. The C.W.S.
must come first."
To each colleague he conceded a full opportunity.
A new-comer to the boardroom put a searching question
in committee.
" Tha' wants to know more than we know as have
been here twenty year," scornfully interjected a senior
member.
56 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
But the chairman intervened. " All right, Mr.
Lander/' he said. " Go on. Make your enquiries/'
For the good manager Mitchell's rule was a free
hand, with help and backing in any trouble ; but with
no weakness in grasping a nettle in any case of trust
betrayed. Behind everybody was the encouragement
of his own absolute devotion and absolute faith. When
the C.W.S. sales were less than ten millions he
prophesied twenty, and wished he could live to see it.
Always he was confident for the future of the society
as a manufacturer, and the actual development since
his day has followed very much as he foresaw. Yet,
with all his optimism, he was prudent. The ambition
to develop and produce before the co-operative market
has been organised and tested — an old seductive
ambition — did not ensnare his judgment. The Irish
developments of his time failed through political
causes ; and, apart from that, no step of Mitchell's
time has had to be retraced. On the other hand, his
policy of building up reserves (only superficially in
contradiction to his enthusiasm for distributing
wealth) has proved invaluable long after his death.
To a newly-appointed official of a large retail society
he said: "You are young for such an important
position. Remember — depreciation and reserves, and
what I said in my speech this afternoon, and try
your best to carry it out." The words were both
remembered and followed, to the benefit of the
thousands in that society.
When he erred it was through excess and warmth
of feeling, and through a narrowness of training that
sometimes was too much even for a mind and spirit
naturally large and tolerant. When Lord Monteagle
went to the Lincoln Congress of 1891 to gain friends
THE MAN HIMSELF 57
for the new co-operative movement of Irish peasant
farmers, the Rochdale radical, in the face of the
co-operative peer, protested against subscribing funds
" to enable the Irish landlord to get a higher price for
his land " ; and this blunt attitude again showed itself
a little later when Sir Horace Plunkett was dismissed
from the C.W.S. boardroom.
These, as we can see, were unfortunate errors.
And, apart from prejudices, Mitchell conceived strong
personal likes and dislikes. An observer has noted
how " at the mere sight of certain persons his whole
face would cloud visibly/' On the other hand, there
was at least one colleague whose self-indulgent manners
were far from being Mitchell's, yet who appealed to
the chairman in some way that saved him from rebuke.
If John Mitchell felt a dislike he felt it, and through
feeling unwittingly did injustice. The same tenacity
made him unwilling to turn against a man he had
liked, and it is said that unworthy men thus found
protection. Nevertheless, it would have been difficult
for any mere ingratiating schemer to take advantage
of the weakness. The native shrewdness that very
well can go with simplicity of heart, remained as a
barrier against wilful deception. And whenever he
realised that feeling had led him too far, there was a
willingness to admit and be just. He strove to control
the tides of feeling. " At public meetings," says Mr.
Wadsworth, of Rochdale, " I've seen him bite his lips
to master himself ; but he did master himself."
And whatever his dislike of an individual, charity
was ever a greater motive. He was appealed to in
Rochdale by Mr. John Fountain on behalf of one in
need.
" No," he said ; "I never cared for that man."
58 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
" Ah," came the reply, " but he's in a bad way ! "
" Is he ? " exclaimed Mitchell, instantly touched.
And five shillings were at once handed over.
" Mr. Mitchell has wisely said " — so Holyoake
quoted him at Carlisle in 1887 — " that men may not
do what you instruct them but will do what you
request/' Although Mitchell could make himself
feared, and sometimes seemed austere, his manners
with employees as with colleagues usually were easy,
homely, democratic. One has even met with a refer-
ence to a " professional smile." That ready smile,
open and winning as a child's, was more the outcome
of a real inner grace. Of E. V. Neale, his fellow-
worker and occasional antagonist, Mitchell said that
" he never knew a person who, when he had lost his
own point, tried more to put the points of other people
in the best possible form." Mitchell's appreciation of
this fine unselfishness reflected a like quality in him-
self. In his day he was the man in the Wholesale
Society ; yet (each in his place) he wanted and did
his best to make every other man the man too. " Co-
operation," he said (Gateshead, 1880) " made the
humblest occupation of as great importance and value
as the highest."
The case against captains of industry who encourage
individuals is that they neglect the mass. The mass
pay for the individuals as under trade union and
collective rule individuals may be sacrificed to the
mass. So far as man could Mitchell tried to compass
both ends, his care for the thousands of C.W.S. em-
ployees collectively being well shown by his leadership
in putting before the C.W.S. quarterly meetings of
March, 1887, the committee's scheme for the superan-
nuation of old servants. Boldly he emphasized the
THE MAN HIMSELF 59
non-contributory character of the scheme, adding that
the proposal " was not only benevolent but prudent/'
The subsequent discussion — or denunciation — showed
how far ahead of his time he then was. Unsupported
by any one of the dozen speakers, he had to bow to his
constituents. But in so doing he reaffirmed his belief
that the proposals remained worthy of " further con-
sideration " and " ultimate adoption."
Devoted to Balloon Street as he was, one magnet
unfailingly came into operation every week to draw
him home to Rochdale. This was the Milton Church
Sunday School. Whatever happened during the week,
if it was physically possible the superintendent was
there every Sunday to preside over the hundreds of
scholars — there were six hundred due to attend.
Sometimes a train from the south or west would turn
him out into the Manchester streets at an early hour
on Sunday morning. With the help of his good friend
the C.W.S. watchman he would then make himself
comfortable in the boardroom, until roused for the
first train onward in the civilised part of the day. One
way or another he would reach Rochdale in time for
morning school.
Upon his characteristics in school every old teacher
and pupil is agreed. As with adults, his powerful
presence and voice commanded instant attention.
" The discipline was perfect " — although when in the
schoolroom he gave word to his flock to pass into the
church, and the boys doing so before his eyes rather
pardonably contrived to escape by going out through
a church exit beyond his observation, the victory was
to human nature. Yet he did not rule by fear. Though
he was stern, " there was no need to be afraid/'
Tears were noticed upon his face when, on one occa-
60 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
sion, he had been driven to shake a particularly
troublesome boy. He had " a wonderful patience/'
said Mr. Wadsworth. And besides great patience
with the scholars he showed impartiality. " He was
not like most fathers," remembered an old scholar ;
" he had no favourites. Boys and girls — they were all
his children." Another former scholar declared he
favoured the boys, at which his wife, who also had
been a scholar, replied " no, he leaned to the girls."
Almost secretly out of his own pocket he had children
shod in winter or tattered girls clothed in white Whit-
Sunday frocks, for " he spent money freely " ; and
" what he did to help no one knew." Yet he exerted
himself even more in trying to find employment for
the boys, and in giving them a start in working life.
In this connection young and old came to him for
testimonials ; but he wouldn't testify to a character
" unless he'd bottomed it."
While a professional man of independent position
like E. V. Neale found his inspiration to help the pro-
ducer in the thought of the comparatively hard lot
and dull life of " hands " in the factories, it is not un-
likely that Mitchell, the ex-factory hand, renewed his
zeal for the consumer in thinking of the little ones
whose mothers said they could not attend school
because they had no boots.
The superintendent's address was always of a
brevity welcome in a Sunday school ; and his religious
teaching, though less remembered than his personality
and influence, has been described as " broad and
original." He was not lukewarm. On the contrary,
when his friend Maxwell's life was despaired of by the
doctors (in 1892) he went out of his way to visit
him and pray beside him " as only a true Christian
THE MAN HIMSELF 61
can pray." "His presence/' says Sir William, "did
me good, and I recovered." But in church " he let
others teach." School play he enjoyed with the same
zest as the work. It is still remembered, for example,
how he gave up a co-operative excursion and travelled
all night from Plymouth after a Whitsuntide Congress
to be present at the annual Whit-Friday festival
of the school. " He was one of ourselves," says
Mr. Wadsworth ; " ready to do anything wanted."
" There's been no one to fill his place," added another
old teacher after thirty years, "nobody like him."
During many years the engagement of the superin-
tendent to Miss Elizabeth Wynn was a matter of
natural interest to the teachers and older scholars at
Milton School. The engagement, it is said, was
entered into by Mitchell in earlier life partly under his
mother's influence. Miss Wynn is reported to have
been " a fine woman, something like Mr. Mitchell
himself in appearance." She had the character, how-
ever, of being eccentric — " very odd." Mitchell was
" very kind to her " ; but somehow the engagement
dragged on. When it passed into the " teens of years "
it became a subject for sly jokes at the school, jests
which the superintendent received in perfect good
humour. He was too busy, it was said, to look after a
matter like that. Others assumed that the delay came
from the other side, and were sorry to see Mitchell
kept waiting so long. But one evening Mitchell
declared that the question was to be decided one way
or another. He called upon Miss Wynn, and, whatever
happened at the interview, afterwards " he bothered
no more."
No one seems to have regretted the ending of this
unhopeful engagement ; but many well-meant
62 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
thoughts and remarks were directed against the
superintendent's continued solitariness. It was inex-
plicable that a follower of the thrice-married Milton
should choose so lonely a life. The church held to a
home-like faith intertwined with domestic happiness.
Its temperance workers probably would never have
cared what or how much men drank had the latter
been no better than bachelors ; while the consumers'
co-operative movement aimed first of all at turning
the raw material of wages into the real final product,
food, clothing, and comfort of body and mind in the
home. Yet Mitchell, faithful leader in each sphere,
had neither wife nor fireside guardian.
It would, of course, be foolish not to admit that he
missed much which goes to the making of a full life.
Nevertheless he kept his warmth of nature, and in
spirit grew neither old nor crusty. When William
Maxwell announced to his old friend his approaching
second marriage, the latter confessed himself jealous of
the lady ; " f or I shall see less of you and shall miss our
friendly discussions, but," he continued, " I am glad
and happy for your sake/' And at the wedding at
Formby on the 26th of February, 1894, only a year
before his death, he took part both as best man and as
the one to bestow the bride, "coming to Formby at
some inconvenience." " At the wedding breakfast,"
writes Sir William Maxwell, " he was the life of the
party, extolling the happiness of married life, until he
was reminded that he knew nothing about the subject."
There was no case of sour grapes, or a fox without
a tail. On the contrary, cheerfully content with the
fullness of his activities, Mitchell probably envied none
and could rejoice with all. And it may be that,
going home to his quiet retreat, in plain Roch-
THE MAN HIMSELF 63
dale fashion, Mitchell rediscovered for himself the
secret of St. Anthony and the generations of his
followers — the mystic happiness, ever springing up
afresh within, which may be felt by the man of devoted
life who in uninterrupted seclusion every day renews
his purpose and faith. Perhaps that was why Mitchell
always came forth so cheerfully from the cloisters of
John Street.
Be that as it may, certainly he kept one mark of
the single-minded devotee, which is pure innocence and
simplicity. It is remembered how in London a woman
of the streets once was paid to accost the chairman by
name, and how his simple yet courteous friendliness
on hearing himself greeted quite defeated the mis-
chievous intent. How, in Manchester, he was once
riding outside an open tramcar with a social student,
a lady who pulled out her cigarette case, and how
he begged leave to retire inside the car, since he was
" so well known " in Manchester and " had to be
careful." And how, in the drapery warehouse of the
Scottish Wholesale, at Glasgow, he chose a sprig of
milliner's flowers to wear as a button-hole. " You
could know his character in two minutes," an old
fellow-worshipper of his has said.
Man of the world and president of a huge business,
and masterful in character as became a leader, yet
still a child at heart, thus he came and went. And
the teachers and scholars who on Sunday evenings at
Rochdale met his tall figure hastening back to the
railway station, with bag and travelling rug, bade
good-night to one going out to his world of labour as
religiously as any missionary monk of old.
CHAPTER VII
THE CONSUMERS' ADVOCATE
ABOUT the year 1890 the old co-operators came
into touch with the new generation of socialists ;
and congress records began to be sprinkled here and
there with names made familiar since then through
the labour movement. One such contact, both in-
teresting and fruitful, was that between Miss Beatrice
Potter, afterwards Mrs. Sidney Webb, and J. W. T.
Mitchell. The investigation begun in London by
Charles Booth had enlisted her in the social movement
and then sent her out to discover what co-operation
was doing to help the masses as consumers. She
reached Manchester and established friendly relations
with the leaders of the Co-operative Union, and still
more with Mitchell and through him with the com-
mittee and officials of the Wholesale Society.
To the lively young student — a woman
educated and widely travelled — the northern co-
operators no doubt seemed a curious company. The
first impression was of people rough cut. They ate
heavy food and drank quantities of tea ; and they in-
dulged in platitudes and tea-party perorations. Their
leader was one of themselves. His northern speech,
adapted to ruling large meetings, seemed slow and
pompous, and apparently he was obsessed by his
belief in the C.W.S. as solving all social problems. But
it was clear that this man with the full good-tempered
THE CONSUMERS' ADVOCATE 65
mouth and the strong chin, this real democrat whose
solemnity would melt into laughing bonhomie, was
not self-seeking, and the organisation he championed
most certainly represented a real method of social
reconstruction.
Mitchell kept no diary. What he first thought of
the young lady from London we do not know. But he
welcomed enquiry, especially enquiry on the consumer's
side. And finding a serious student, he took pains to
exhibit the C.W.S. from within. To see the bachelor
chairman entertaining a lady at Balloon Street was
sufficient to excite badinage from the homely humorists
about him ; but the former teacher of a Rochdale
young women's class was well used to this harmless-
ness. He attended to the serious business of the visit.
Later on " The Co-operative Movement in Great
Britain " appeared, and the value of his hospitality
became apparent. In modern terms and with unusual
insight, the book set forth a conception of co-operation
similar to that which Mitchell constantly was labouring
to convey.
Throughout these years this labour also was freely
given through unstudied addresses delivered in every
corner of the country, and illustrated with figures, from
C.W.S. official sources of money gains through co-
operation to the society represented by his hearers.
Sometimes the labour was paid ; sometimes not.
Occasionally the speaker received neither fees nor fare,
and went away the poorer in pocket. But to Mitchell
that mattered nothing. He spoke because he was
invited to speak ; and if a poor society fifty miles from
his nearest point of call gave the invitation because at
a pinch the visit need cost nothing, probably Mitchell
never suspected the flaw in the welcome.
66 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
In the year 1892, however, the movement brought
its chief platform to his door, and invited him to
honour it. He was offered the presidency of the
Co-operative Congress, which met in that year at
Rochdale. The great gathering still kept to the odd
method of changing its president daily, to ensure that
each had his day and ceased to be, but to the C.W.S.
leader was given the special honour of the inaugural
day. In his native town he found himself in a new
place. The Town Hall being occupied by the Congress
Exhibition, the Congress had been glad to find
accommodation in the large Baillie Street Chapel, and
Mitchell had to mount the pulpit. He proved a
vigorous preacher.
Like many other speakers to the people, whether
lay preachers, political orators, or social advocates,
Mitchell had the habit of throwing off bunches of
remarks without any particular order or design. The
faith and purpose of the speech gave it cohesion, and
neither speaker nor audience troubled to look for
anything more. The Rochdale Congress address was
rather of this kind ; yet the practical perceptions ex-
pressed or implied in it possessed a unity of their own ;
while it was original as all fresh observation of life is
original. On the previous day, the Whit-Sunday,
without meaning to disparage the store, the minister
at Milton Church (Rev. Hirst Hollowell) incautiously
had urged co-operators to "do more than keep grocery
stores/' He had asked them to " apply the principle "
in the workshops, and on the land, and in housing and
education. Now Mitchell, with his actual experience,
had not found co-operation a thing to be " applied "
here and there. He had seen it as something organic
— an instrument of different parts for attaining one
THE CONSUMERS' ADVOCATE 67
end. He felt the sermon as a challenge. Next day he
said that some of his statements would not have been
made " but for the sermon I heard last night," from
one who was " a capital adviser on spiritual mattera
but not altogether reliable on co-operation."
So he told his hearers that co-operation began
many years before 1844. For centuries the industrial
classes had struggled against selfishness in control of
" the legislative and other forces of the nation," this
control using the masses " to sustain and strengthen
that selfishness." As a ready illustration of this con-
tention he touched on the site values created by the
communities of Rochdale and Manchester, values
belonging to all yet taken by " a section of the com-
munity." To end sectional aggrandisement a method
of business was wanted based on unity of interest, and
aiming at " the common good of all." A common
interest was sought by the Rochdale co-operators of
1832, and unity of interest was aimed at by the
Pioneers of 1844. They " did not start with capital
or labour but with consumption." They started with
the store, and, said Mitchell, " I say to all never
despise the store."
The Congress President went on to defend con-
sumption or use as the region in which the desired
common interest was to be found. Use was the basis
of all values. All charges (i.e., material and wage
costs, profits, rates, taxes, interest, as Mitchell made
clear elsewhere) came back to be borne by the con-
sumer, " and the humblest contribute most largely,
in proportion to their means, to the luxury of the
rich." This process (of every private and sectional
interest taxing the public, on public consumption)
should be reversed. " My desire is that the profits of
68 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
all trade, all industry, all commerce, all importation,
all banking and money dealing, should fall back again
into the hands of the whole people." (Or, as he
said elsewhere, " Let those who pay the profits get
them back/')
Ahead of his time in perceiving (though, perhaps,
crudely expressing) a danger which the " boom " of
the great war made clearer, Mitchell continued :
" The plan of some capitalists is to get Labour united
in order to crush the poor consumer. I want as much
as anyone to see the elevation of Labour. I think
Labour ought to be elevated. But how ? . . .
simply by making the interests of our common
humanity equal all round/'
If the last sentence was obscure we can tell from
other declarations what Mitchell was driving at.
Elsewhere in this address the president warned
co-operators against selfishness corrupting the move-
ment from within, that is to say, against individual
interests coming in to divert the aim from that of the
good of " the entire body politic " — a favourite phrase
in his latter years. And with a naturally characteristic
but undiplomatic directness he attacked men in the
movement who received bribes and presents from
private firms, saying bluntly, " There is a gentleman
in this room who for several years has received a
cheque, and has passed it through his cash account/'
A member for so many years of the committee of
the Co-operative Newspaper Society — now the
National Co-operative Publishing Society — Mitchell
pointed to the power of the press " in this and every
country," a power neglectful of co-operation. Co-
operators and trade unionists were alike in having
few papers and very little press influence. To be of
THE CONSUMERS' ADVOCATE 69
" greater influence in the nation and the world/' co-
operators would " have to control the press more
largely, and it must be of our own colour/' That the
reference to the world was designed was proved by his
reply to the vote of thanks later, when he spoke of a
society in Rangoon trading with the C.W.S., and on
this Burmese peg hung some remarks friendly to India.
Later in the same year (1892) the president's social
creed came under examination by the Royal Com-
mission on Labour, a government mouse that had come
out to appease a mountain in travail. Mitchell was
the first of four witnesses before the commission, the
second being his old friend William Maxwell. All
were appointed by the Co-operative Union. The
evidence put in had been very carefully prepared, and
included a fairly full history of co-operation right
back to the dim years before Rochdale. This docu-
ment was duly printed and circulated by the govern-
ment with the report, no doubt to the great annoyance
of the private traders, represented by Mr. Walker.
This same gentleman attended later, to rebut the
co-operators' statements, and innocently to remark
that if the government could take steps to refuse
co-operative societies permission " to declare a divi-
dend," " that of itself would be a solution of the
question ! "
Mitchell attended on October 25th, 1892, handing
in, according to the official statement, " the Annual
Report for 1892 issued by the English Co-operative
Wholesale Society." Alas, for Scotland's participa-
tion in that joint volume !
The eighth Duke of Devonshire, as chairman,
naturally sought relief from the documents,
" especially the historical parts," and the witness
70 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
complied, reciting the facts in outline only. Along
the way he had to mention the big new C.W.S. flour
mill at Dunston-on-Tyne, which had just caused a loss
of nearly £20,000. Mitchell's frankness is noteworthy.
" We are sorry for our loss/' he said, " but we cannot
help it. No doubt if we had bought at the right time
we should not have made that loss ; but we did not,
and we cannot help it."
The co-operative leader passed on to labour's
advantages in working for the organised co-operative
market ; steadier work and steadier wages ; greater
continuity of work ; a full and friendly recognition of
trade unionism ; a minimum of trade disputes. " No
business can exist," he said, " except what is pro-
duced is sold." In other words, the workers' con-
ditions must always depend ultimately upon the
value-in-use of his products, or alternatively upon the
goodwill of consumer-workers in buying what worker-
consumers produce. Hence Mitchell declared that,
" We want the consumer to own the capital " and
" get the limited interest on capital," and labour to
work for " generous remuneration," and " the extra
share " to " come to them (the workers) through . . .
the trade which (as consumers) they give."
The statesmen and capitalists on the Commission
at once became anxious for the worker as worker.
They pressed Mitchell in the direction of profit-sharing,
asking what his society was doing to give the worker a
fair share of the wealth he helped to produce. Mitchell
replied that if there was no possibility of a wider dis-
tribution he would support the giving of a bonus to
labour ; but the wider distribution was better. Any-
thing less would not accomplish the end desired ; for
sectional distribution would lead again to accumula-
THE CONSUMERS' ADVOCATE 71
tions in a few hands, to " a new order of capitalists."
And when some one fatuously asked whether it would
not mean better workers " if you carried out your
principle fully and completely/' Mitchell turned on his
questioner with something like indignation. " If you
will allow me to put it in this way," he said, " it means
this : that a man will not give his best energies for an
honest wage, but he wants some other inspiring
motive in order to lead him to put forth his best efforts
— f or which he is engaged — to serve his fellow-workmen
in different parts of the country."
A pertinent question put was whether in the co-
operative store movement employees could be elected
to management committees ; and, speaking in 1892,
Mitchell replied, " Not for the direction of the insti-
tutions where they are servants."
" But if co-operation were universal ? " asked his
questioner.
" You would create a new state of things in that
case," was the reply. " Interest would then be
common, and when the interest is common there can
be no special interest."
" I have found this," he continued, " that where
interest changes the methods of action change. There
must be commonality of interest and purpose where
you want uniformity of action."
Ironically a commissioner commented on Mitchell
wanting to make of every man " a member of a society
for universal distribution," and the witness quickly
took up the point. " Yes," he said, " and I want to
see that all co-operative societies shall be so conducted
that it will be an impetus and a part of the inspiration
of every man to become a member of a co-operative
society."
72 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
But this did not interest the commissioners. From
all sides they continued their questioning for the man
at work, the Duke intervening at one piquant point
to explain Mitchell to the perplexed trade unionist in
Mr. Abraham — "Mabon." "I want to see the work-
man most generously rewarded," asserted Mitchell.
" He deserves it. No one deserves it more." But
again he asserted the dependence of the worker on the
consumers, and then pointed out how co-operation was
training consumers not to buy shoddy boots, but " to
appreciate an article by giving a better price for it."
Attacked again on the charge that consumers' co-
operation would give most benefit to the rich, Mitchell
replied by a direct negative. " Personal consumption
is comparatively a small matter with anyone." The
greater benefit would be to the largest families and the
poor ; while the system would also " alter the flow of
wealth," and would mean " a control of trade as
regards production more in the interests of the
poor."
Asked whether his universal co-operation would not
beggar poor traders, the witness replied that it would
be " better to subscribe and keep them than main-
tain a bad system." And he added that small traders
already suffered more from then- large rivals than from
co-operation.
Mitchell had said that he was not in favour " of a
distribution of wealth by law," preferring " the
ordinary forces of commerce, industry, and perse-
verance " ; and Mr. Tom Mann took up the questioning
on this side. Every legal supersession of private
ownership, he said, presupposed " a just and righteous
manner." Would the witness be opposed to that ?
And Mitchell replied " not at all." Tom Mann then
THE CONSUMERS' ADVOCATE 73
pointed out that democratic control of railways might
come in this way, at which Mitchell remarked that
co-operators had " already begun to buy up railways."
At present he preferred the co-operative method ; but
if another method were before him he would consider
it, and " endorse all for the good of the people." In
the same way he was in favour of municipal socialism.
The municipalities could supply gas and water better
than co-operative societies ; they were the proper
bodies to do that and undertake " any other work
they can do equally satisfactorily." But he was " not
sure " that he would be willing to transfer the C.W.S.
Leicester boot works to the Leicester Corporation.
Hesitation was on practical grounds, the business
being more national than local. A federation of
municipal corporations would be another matter ; for
its operations would be national and "like our own."
Declaring himself " not bound down to C.W.S.
methods," the C.W.S. chairman added, " any-
thing that comes nearest to that which we have
I accept."
In 1893, at the instance of the King of Greece,
Mitchell was made a member of the Order of the Golden
Cross. The ceremony was performed at Balloon
Street by the Greek Consul. The recognition, it must
be confessed, was not personal. The chairman re-
ceived the Order simply because the C.W.S. was a
great and an appreciated customer for Greek fruit.
Indeed, as that year's purchases did not turn out too
well (owing to events in France causing currants to be
thrown on the market), the honour (shared with
another) was even derided as " the Knighthood of the
Innocents." Happily the chairman's personal modesty
saved him. He accepted the Order as in duty bound,
74 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
with some friendly words showing appreciation of
ancient Greece ; and then like Ivan in Tolstoy's
parable, put away the decoration and evidently
thought no more about it.
CHAPTER VIII
MITCHELL SPEAKS OUT
TO the Co-operative Congress at Lincoln, in 1891,
Mitchell declared it " absolutely necessary for
co-operators as such to be represented in Parliament,"
the representatives to be sent " apart from politics and
religion/' And at the same gathering he urged that
" co-operators should strive to get the government of
the towns they represented more under their own
control/'
In 1891 the time for co-operative candidates had
not come, nor is it likely that Mitchell would have
accepted nomination had there been a Co-operative
Party. But after many previous requests he did allow
himself, in 1893, to be put forward at a by-election
for the council of his native town, where he had just
become a J.P. He had been a member of a pre-
franchise Non-electors' Association, and then of a
Radical Reform Association, and now he came out as a
Liberal. But, as he had " admitted " at Ipswich that
" in the past Conservatives had done more good than
Liberals/' it is clear that he was not an orthodox party
man.
At Rochdale, in the Castleton West Ward, he
entered on his campaign confessing this to be his first
candidature, but asserting that " good government was
one of the most valuable concerns of human life/' He
stood for the direct employment of labour by the cor-
76 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
poration. " When the corporation wanted work doing
they should employ their own workmen to carry the
work out themselves. That would be best for the
corporation and best for the workmen they employed/'
There should be " a living wage for all/' Economy
should be exercised " to get the best results for ex-
penditure " and not merely to secure the lowest price.
He did not see how politics could be left out of muni-
cipal affairs, and then declared that the aldermanic
bench, like the House of Lords, should be abolished.
Every man should come before the electors periodically.
It has been said that Mitchell did not make a good
candidate ; and an unverified story hap! it that because
of Sunday School work he could not even spare an
evening to meet the canvassers. It is evident that he
was shy of having his virtues proclaimed either at the
hustings or from door to door. None the less, the
fight was extraordinarily keen, the " interloper " being
beaten on a record poll by only 16 votes. The figures
gave 656 to Mitchell and 672 to his Conservative
opponent. At the Conservative Club there was great
rejoicing. " Baron Wholesale " had been defeated,
and a teetotaller kept out of a council on which there
were " too many teetotallers " already. The Con-
servative gathering, indeed, resolved itself into an
anti-teetotal meeting. In Mitchell's camp, with a note
less fortissimo there was more enthusiasm. Fighting
against a strong opponent, and a lavish expenditure,
his party had come very near to winning. Unani-
mously the candidate was asked to stand again.
Agreeing to do so, Mitchell remarked on a statement
that he could not attend the council meetings if
elected. If he could not, said Mitchell, " it would not
be because he was on a bowling green or anything of
MITCHELL SPEAKS OUT 77
that kind." He revealed that in two different con-
stituencies he had been asked to stand for Parliament.
He " hoped the time was not far distant when members
of Parliament would be paid " — under that head his
programme was to pay members £500 and insist upon
them attending to business.
The next contest came at the November elections
of 1894. At that election a cry was " Vote for Mitchell
and the standard rate of wages/' But the candidate
in this case was not worldly wise. Just before the
election, on October 27th — a Saturday — he spoke at
the annual tea party of the Littleborough Co-operative
Society. There he read from a trade paper an account
of one quality of tea being sold by private shopkeepers
at three different prices. Then he touched on the
existence of private fortunes which under co-operation
" would have gone for the good of mankind." And,
he asked, " Why did they want to have an advantage
greater than their neighbour's ? " — ^adding his own
answer, that " none were entitled to that advantage.
Those who had talents should use them for the good of
the community, and not simply for themselves."
This was Mitchell himself and his very faith ; but
it was too much for the tradesmen who abounded in
the Castleton West Ward. Mitchell was attacked on
the ground of having made " specious promises of a
policy of plunder." Possibly there was some faint-
heartedness amongst Mitchell's supporters ; for the
Liberal newspaper was accused of suppressing the
report until the election was over. At anyrate, the
scale was turned against the co-operator. When the
result appeared it was found that the Conservative
vote had increased to 709 while Mitchell's had fallen
to 628.
78 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
Mitchell's speech after the poll was reported as
" extraordinary." He felt the defeat ; he felt, too,
that he had been a victim of unfair tactics. At Little-
borough he had been " talking to his own friends in
his own way/' He had never obtruded co-operative
opinions on any other platform, but in his municipal
candidature his co-operative views had been used
against him. He should have been opposed solely
" on his policy as a candidate." As it was, there were
now " those in this ward who would not vote for me
on any account." " Have a better candidate," he
said, " and you will succeed." And with characteristic
openness, and generosity in forgetting his own com-
plaint of unfairness, he concluded, " with a tremor in
his voice," " I have been defeated twice, and you will
find you cannot win with me at all, because the oppor-
tunity has been given fairly and fully, and the electors
are not in my favour. . . . My labour will still
continue for the ^good of the town, but perhaps in a
humbler sphere."
Whatever we may think of the persons who, having
heard Mitchell within a co-operative meeting, went off
to quote his words with prejudice in another place, or
of politicians who purposely misused those words, we
cannot altogether escape the difficulties of the position.
However sincerely a man may be simply a co-operator
in one sphere, a Liberal and nothing more in another,
and purely a Congregationalist in a third, he is still
one man in mind and faith. Of this latter fact Mitchell
himself was a living proof. Any person entirely hostile
to any one of his fundamental beliefs ultimately would
have found himself in disagreement over the others.
No doubt there is wisdom in stopping short of ultimates
and keeping particular issues separate in actual affairs,
MITCHELL SPEAKS OUT 79
so as to secure all sorts of immediate practical unions
and agreements. But the unity of life remains ; and
unless store, town, country, and church affairs in each
case are very carefully delimited and fenced about,
that unity will inconveniently assert itself. People
in movements can move cautiously inside thin
walls, or express themselves completely ; but there is
no other alternative.
Political and temperance associates deserted
Mitchell when he uttered his full self ; but in the
co-operative world he could speak his mind and open
his heart, and then he was happiest. One of the most
congenial of his co-operative tasks had been that of
opening the C.W.S. Dunston-on-Tyne flour mill in 1891.
This development had roots going back to the early
eighties, while as the first of the great C.W.S. flour
mills it had pioneer importance for the coming century.
To Mitchell the tall building by the Tyne, with its
quay for ships, and its floor upon floor of new
machinery, was an embodiment of his pride. This
was the outcome of a mass of consumers' purchases
at the stores — this great instrument, employed for no
individuals or sections but for the " entire body
politic." Those who grew rich, he said, always would
snap their fingers at those who were poor. Then let
them make none rich.
This was in the speech made at Tynemouth follow-
ing the opening. The C.W.S., he said in this speech,
employed 2,000 persons hi production and the " total
profits " on production had reached £70,000. It was
better to distribute these to 70,000 persons than to
2,000.
At this E. V. Neale, still faithful against what at
Carlisle he had called " the system of taking the
80 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
earnings of those who do the work to give them to
those who do not do it," interposed a brave "No/*
Mitchell replied, " I say ' yes/ and it is more to
the interest of mankind/'
And then the C.W.S. chairman took his stand on
the unshakeable ground which the originally domestic
operation of flour milling now afforded for the col-
lectivist. In one C.W.S. industry, the chairman said,
using figures still valuable for comparison, a capital
of £50 was sufficient to employ one man. In another
it was £87, in another £312. But in flour milling it
was £1,500. In two flour mills employing 200 workers
a profit of £40,000 had been made. Were the 200 to
take the £40,000 ? If so, that was not co-operation.
It was diametrically opposed to the spirit and genius
of co-operation. " They might produce/' he said,
" but if they did not consume what would be the good
of this production ? " Let the people see to it that
the profit on their consumption came back to them-
selves.
Mitchell's battle for regarding all profits on cost as
belonging to the whole community of consumers con-
cerned, and not to any group of capitalists or workers,
was won. He had lived to see himself victorious
there ; as Neale — not less a happy warrior — had met
defeat. But Mitchell still had other battles to fight.
One was over printing. This industry is the opposite
of flour milling in lending itself to small productive
effort. " I do not object to independent productive
societies if they are the better method/' Mitchell told
the Labour Commission. " I like our own method
better than theirs ; that is all." Yet, under Mitchell's
own chairmanship, the Manchester meeting voted
against allowing the C.W.S. to commence its own
MITCHELL SPEAKS OUT 81
printing ; and that it did become a great printer
was due to a major vote from the rest of the con-
stituencies. Again, too, Mitchell was overcome on the
question voted upon in 1895 of direct purchases from
the O.W.S. by individual employees.
In large matters Mitchell was all for equality ; but
though he sought to cast down mountains and exalt
valleys, he had no taste for steam-rolling small, loose
stones. While the employees had been described as
forming in this respect " a privileged aristocracy,"
Mitchell made fun of " this very awful state of things/'
" a matter of £10,000 in £10,000,000 — a few coppers a
week all round/' But although the common law
eventually stepped in to prove Mitchell's sagacity, on
the immediate issue he and his committee had to
suffer defeat. It was his last quarterly meeting, and
the largest over which he had ever presided ; and
perhaps it was fitting that he, of whom Holyoake
said "energy was his element/' should battle to the
last.
Yet these defeats did not mean that the chairman
was losing his personal hold. On the contrary, at this
same C.W.S. meeting of March, 1895, the delegates
were intent upon doing him honour. About £100,000
of co-operative money had been invested in the Man-
chester Ship Canal, and it had been assumed that
Mitchell would accept a unanimous invitation of the
directors to join the Canal Board. The " Co-opera-
tive News " described this prospect as giving " un-
bounded satisfaction." But it meant transferring to
Mitchell's name a qualifying holding of £2,000 ; more-
over, Mitchell, the unwearied, the man who never took
a holiday, was now beginning to doubt his own physical
powers. Reluctant all along, finally he told the
82 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
delegates he could " only fill one place at a time " ;
that he could not stand the extra strain.
Still determined to honour the chairman, a delegate
called attention to the approaching completion of his
twenty-first year of office. " That is not on the pro-
gramme/' Mitchell ruled, and he rang his bell to end
discussion, amidst laughter and cries to the delegate
of "Go on ! " Already, however, the event had been
anticipated by the committee, auditors, and employees,
and a portrait of Mitchell painted for due presentation.
The picture had been finished ; but it was never pre-
sented. For the big, hale man, with the deep chest,
strong voice, and ruddy face, who had attended
punctually at meetings of every co-operative kind
during the period of a whole generation, was soon to
pass out of sight, leaving in his place only a memory,
a thing to fade and perish.
CHAPTER IX
JOURNEY'S END
THE winter of 1895 was bitter almost beyond
precedent. A relentless frost hammered the
country throughout two long months ; on quiet parts
of the coast the sea itself was frozen. In Rochdale
the 13th of January brought " a fearful Sunday
morning," with doorways " completely blocked by
snow." Mitchell, nevertheless, was at his place in the
Milton School, prompt as ever. The weather was
little better on the next Sunday ; yet, again, Mitchell
was present. But it was noticed that he was tired,
that he walked slowly and painfully. Three years
earlier he had slipped and fallen on the Rochdale
railway station steps. He hurt his ankle, and any
considerable amount of walking after that became
difficult. And during this winter a more serious handi-
cap imposed itself more heavily. The damp, cloudy,
smoky atmosphere of East Lancashire is unkind to
bronchial tubes, and Mitchell was a sufferer.
One of his engagements during this winter was to
speak at the opening of a branch store in the Derby-
shire coalfield. " As nearly as I can remember,"
writes Mr. Duncan Mclnnes, who was then secretary
to the Midland Section of the Co-operative Union,
" this was the last great meeting Mr. Mitchell attended
in the Midlands. The audience was so large that two
halls were occupied. . . . Both halls were crowded.
I remember Mitchell pointing out to me the condensa-
84 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
tion running down the walls of each of the crowded
rooms, and his remark that the conditions were very
trying for him, as he had a long-standing bronchial
trouble. We went down to the railway station in a
closed conveyance together ; he repeated what he had
said, asked me how far I had to go before I got home ;
bade me good-night, and I never saw him again.
" He was a martyr to duty/' adds Mr. Mclnnes,
confirming the testimony of many, " and never spared
himself."
During his last illness the " Rochdale Observer "
commented upon his position as a bachelor with " no
one to restrain him/' and said the co-operators ought
not to work a willing horse too hard. " But kindness/'
added the journal, " seldom takes the form of with-
drawing invitations." On the other hand, in the
Maxwell memoir it is said that " his friends . . .
beseeched him to take some rest ; but no, his rest was
not here." He laboured through the hard weather,
and saw the end of the frost and the hope of spring.
On the 9th of March he kept his place at the head of
a record attendance of over 700 delegates at his last
quarterly meeting at Balloon Street, and none sus-
pected more than a rest would cure. But he was
exhausted. On March llth and 12th the important
annual joint meeting of the English and Scottish
committees was due in London. This over, the way
to a holiday would be clear. After the big meetings it
was his intention (as a colleague told the Co-operative
News readers) to lay up for a while. His old friends the
Howards had begged him to stay with them at Liver-
pool, and the invitation in all likelihood would have
been accepted ; but first of all he was due in the chair
at the London meeting.
JOURNEY'S END 85
" I thought of going with him to Manchester," said
his landlord, friend, and attendant, Butterworth, on
Sunday the 10th; "he's not a bit well." In London,
on the Monday morning after his journey, he was
unable to rise ; and the evening still found him very
ill. But the next morning he insisted on getting up.
Though obviously ill and enfeebled, he so controlled
himself as to appear at the meeting in his old kindly
character, commenting pleasantly on the flower in a
colleague's button-hole. He gave his mind to the
business, too. The salaries of the higher employees
formed a question on the agenda, and Mitchell, it is
said, stood out for a certain course, protesting to those
who differed from him, " Gentlemen, you are not con-
sidering the employees." But to quote the Maxwell
memoir, " death was written largely on every line of
that genial face/; His comrades " beheld the rare
sight of a man dying at his post. The vote of thanks
that day to the chairman was full of pathos. . . .
We felt a void . . . that could not be filled in our
time. His last co-operative meeting was over."
After the meeting Mitchell managed to take a little
food ; at Euston, however, on the way home, he had to
be wheeled across the platform in a bath chair. The
vice-chairman and his eventual successor, John
Shillito, accompanied him. At Stockport there was a
change of trains, and Mitchell reached Rochdale
completely exhausted. " I feel," he said, " that my
work is done."
His doctor summoned a specialist, and orders soon
had to be given for the patient to see no one. That
was in accord with his own feelings. " I don't want
bothering, Kate," he said to Butterworth's house-
keeper, who was his nurse, and people knocking at
86 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
No. 15, John Street, were left to go on to No. 27.
" Look after Thomas," he bade her also ; for, as if to
fulfil the prophecy, the faithful Butterworth too had
fallen ill, and had to be nursed in an adjoining room ;
indeed the landlord survived his tenant and close
friend by less than three days.
A trained nurse was suggested ; but Mitchell did
not like the idea. " Who can look after us better
than those we're used to," he said. So while addi-
tional help was engaged no one unf amiliar helped in the
sickroom.
As the chairman lay dying his thoughts were on
the Wholesale Society and the school, but perhaps the
school most of all. Had he done his full duty to the
school, to the children, and to the church ? " They're
few and far between who'd have done as you have
done," was one reply. But in these hours of quietude,
with the deathly cough becoming easier as the body
grew weaker, the meditations of one who had never
obtruded personal thoughts on the world were his own.
Bye-and-bye the failing life lapsed into unconscious-
ness. The 16th of March was a Saturday, a very mild
day at last, a day of Spring. The weather had been
fine and sunny, though misty later on. Yet at five of
the afternoon it was still early for the shadows of night.
It was still early .... but, anticipating the sunset
and the dark, the co-operative leader slipped away.
Breathing, which had been so difficult, became gentler,
and less and less perceptible, and then ceased.
To the scholars he had sent a message. " Tell them
to give their young hearts to God " ; but there was
human grief amongst the children next day for the lost
father of the school. The feeling throughout Rochdale
and England expressed itself at the funeral, on the
JOURNEY'S END 87
Wednesday following. Edward Vansittart Neale, his
one equal in unselfishness, had preceded him ; hardly
more than a year earlier Mitchell, in St. Paul's Cathedral,
had unveiled the memorial tablet to that heroically
generous man, and had spoken with a warm affection
for Neale that no differences of mind could diminish.
But other leaders of the Co-operative Union were
there, with co-operative society representatives from
Edinburgh to London, with C.W.S. workers of all
degrees, with Women's Guild and Employees' Union
representatives, with Ship Canal directors, with all
who loved him for his many deeds.
In the complete absence of relatives all duties to-
ward the dead chairman were discharged by the Whole-
sale Society, in union with the Milton Church. The
coffin at the church was almost hidden by the masses of
flowers from co-operators, school children, and church
members. Every seat was occupied except one, draped
in black, Mitchell's own seat in the gallery, over the
clock. " No man could have had a more inauspicious
start," said the Rev. Hirst Hollowell in his address ;
and as the preacher proceeded his words became a
thanksgiving for a man of transparent character,
childlike, generous, cordial, charming, a life given to
upbuilding, " the most successful of all embodiments
of the socialistic spirit." " Plain living, hard work,
love for children, purity of motive, love to God, and
kindness to his fellowmen," said the minister, " marked
and ennobled his whole life." And then was sung one
of the simple and hearty hymns Mitchell most loved,
" Joyfully, joyfully, onward we move."
An enormous concourse went to the grave or lined
the streets to watch the long procession. Not since
the death of John Bright had Rochdale borne such
88 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
witness. " The suddenness of his death," said the
" Rochdale Observer," "the pathetic loneliness of his
life . . . together with the fine simplicity and in-
tegrity of his character, had profoundly impressed the
popular mind. Honoured in life, when he died he
was buried like a king."
The event was long remembered by Rochdale
people. " Eh ! that was a funeral," were words on the
lips of matrons for a score of years. Co-operators in
their days of effort may fail to arouse any deep and
wide public attention ; but at least one did so in his
death. Yet a last signal proof of Mitchell's devotion
remained to be given.
During his lifetime it was freely said by the cynical
that, after all, Mitchell was doing pretty well out of
his good work. Once he had given a subscription
of two guineas. The next man approached gave
£10. Seeing the previous entry in the book, the donor
said, " That's a poor subscription for John Mitchell."
" I think it's a good one," replied Mr. John
Fountain, who was collecting the money.
" He's worth £30,000," retorted the first speaker.
" He's not worth 30,000 pence," was the warm
reply. " John Mitchell's the wrong chap to accumu-
late money."
" What, with his splendid opportunities for back-
handed work ! " exclaimed the other.
" He wouldn't do anything of that sort," answered
the collector. " And I'll make this assertion, that if
we're alive then I'll come to you when his will is proved
and you'll find me right."
The body was not buried before similar rumours of
wealth went round Rochdale. In Manchester a rail-
way official remarked, " Well, he's gone, and he's left
JOURNEY'S END 89
£50,000. How could he have got that honestly ? "
But the will was published, and the total estate re-
turned at £350. 17s. 8d. Even that sum, Sir William
Maxwell has said, was the residue of money saved
when he was hi business for himself. The Conservative
" Times " equally with the Liberal " Observer " had
proved its respect, and, commenting on " the surprise
to everyone " to hear that Mitchell had died " a
comparatively poor man/' the " Times " said : " This
alone proves he must have been singularly disinterested
and unselfish." And in the " Annals of Rochdale,"
amongst the notable wills of past Rochdale citizens
this figure of Mitchell's stands to-day, set in quiet
contrast with the five-figure and six-figure sums
around it.
All the property was willed to Thomas Butter-
worth, who, as if to follow his friend and let money go,
had died on the day before the great funeral. And so
it> happened that while the money went to Thomas
Butterworth's heirs, all the keys and trophies given
to Mitchell during his lifetime came into the keeping
of the C.W.S.
The Rochdale cemetery lies westward of the town,
on a slope commanding all that is best in the view
around Rochdale. Here the C.W.S. erected a granite
monument, on which is engraved the besl^known
passage from Mitchell's Rochdale Congress address :
" The three great forces for the improvement of man-
kind are religion, temperance, and co-operation ;
and as a commercial force, supported and sustained
by the other two, co-operation is the grandest, noblest,
and most likely to be successful in the redemption of
the industrial classes."
CHAPTER X
EPILOGUE
Nearly thirty years after 1895 a student, making
an enquiry from a stranger in a Rochdale street,
mentioned the name of Mitchell. " Mitchell," ex-
claimed the Rochdalian. " Ah ! he was an honest
man."
Few of us, perhaps, are so conspicuously honest
that we can hope to be remembered for it a generation
after we have left the world ; yet we can recognise
and practise plain honesty as the first essential in all
co-operative effort. Where men are corrupt social
institutions cannot be erected ; and where honest men
have built corruption will bring to the ground. But
Mitchell's was more than the average which is necessary
and serviceable ; it was a dominating honesty ; and
this was one of the qualities that made him a master
builder. Another was energy. " Energy," said
Holyoake, " was his element, and he gave it." In a
consumers' business, where supply follows demand,
there is a tendency to sit down and wait for demand
instead of leading it, and only a moral self-driving
force like Mitchell's will overcome this inertia. Yet
energy by itself is not enough, and may be very harm-
ful. Has not the devil always enjoyed a reputation for
activity ? In the earlier years of Mitchell's presidency
of the C.W.S., after the follies of the " boom," he had
to hold back as well as advance. He could do both, in
EPILOGUE 91
fidelity to principle, because of a third quality of
absolute unselfishness of aim. In the fine words
uttered in homage to his memory by his old opponent,
George Jacob Holyoake, " he sought nothing for
himself."
Material benefits to the consumer came naturally
and properly within his principles. Because of this he
was misunderstood until after his death, as he would
again be misapprehended to-day. He was reckoned
a " divi-hunter " and selfish. Even the famous author
of Tom Brown's Schooldays took the self-taught C.W.S.
chairman for another variation of the type of Lanca-
shire self-making man. Had Mitchell talked in terms of
the prevailing ideal it might have been different ; as it
was he paid a price for adhering to his unfashionable
conception of the co-operative aim, and, like his
doctrine, he was judged " unspiritual." Well, it has
been admitted that he was not what is called an intel-
lectual. He made no claim to the spirituality of fine,
subtle imaginative minds. He was the plain, blunt
man. He may never have understood that criticism
of collectivism which is implicit in the nobly-expressed
co-operative teaching of Neale and Hughes — the
criticism which champions individuality against the
mass and personality against the machine, and is valid
enough as criticism. But was it necessary for him to
understand ? He had to concentrate upon truths
more elementary. Romantic, fantastic attempts at
castles in the air, all idea and no substance, every actual
reformer has to witness. Mitchell did not ask for less
theorising but for conceptions more plainly based on
common human needs.
Less imaginative but more realistic than his critics,
or their successors in the world of labour to-day, he
92 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
perceived a primal truth. If we are to avoid mere
towers of Babel there must be agreement upon a uni-
fying principle. And for all who would reconstruct
society, in or out of the co-operative movement,
Mitchell's challenge still stands. This principle is only
to be found in the corner-stone used by the Rochdale
Pioneers almost accidentally — the principle that in-
dustry and commerce must be organised primarily for
the welfare of consumers, with freedom and generous
conditions for producers as they serve human needs
which consumers represent. In other words, service
may be free, self-directed service, as millennial as may
be ; but proved service must come first, all the
apparent exceptions arising from foolish or wrong
demands of particular consumers not destroying the
general principle.
The English C.W.S., which is senior to the other
co-operative wholesale societies throughout the world,
was, as Mitchell left it, his monument. Yet this large
practical work was done almost by the way. It was
Mitchell's lot to labour so much in the basements of
the new social order that people did not realise what
he was after. His high aim was not primarily a
C.W.S. turning over so many million pounds ; it was
to express and demonstrate his social beliefs. " Public
service, the welfare of the ' body politic ' ... as
the condition of individual progress/' said the Daily
Chronicle in 1895, " was Mr. Mitchell's civic gospel
and co-operative faith." Instead of writing books
about it, he helped to build co-operative stores and
factories, local and national. But all the while, as
the Rochdale Observer of the same period said, co-
operation was to him more than trading, more than
material gain ; it was " voluntary socialism."
EPILOGUE 93
This work was fundamental but not final. It was
the sincere, hearty effort of a man always ready to
welcome the contributions of others, because of his
intrinsic modesty, tolerance and " freedom from
personal vanity/' In the midst of his controversies,
before a hard-headed audience ready to follow a lead
in scorning ideas, he showed no sign of being tempted.
On the contrary, he took occasion to rejoice in
theories, for " theories are the basis of universal
practice " ; and to hope for " a permanent and bene-
ficial association between the thinker and the actor as
long as the co-operative movement shall stand/' At
Plymouth, in 1886, he suggested a place even for com-
petition if deprived of its selfish aim, and made ser-
viceable to what on this occasion he called the greatest
good of the greatest number. Mitchell was a pioneer,
improving on the work of 1844 by elaborating into a
basis for conscious action the principle which the
earlier pioneers (intent on helping their fellows as
producers) had used only casually and empirically ;
but doing that as pioneer work. We may be sure that
he wanted others to follow, and build into his structure
everything consistent with its base. It is quite likely
that the friar of John Street did not "figure out" the
full breadth of scope necessary if the consumers'
movement is to be equal to the richness of life, and is
not to shut out from employment initiative and
personality. But we may be certain that he desired
it. Given a right basis, the larger and richer the final
structure the better. We may believe that the genius
of Balloon Street, commercially inclined as he might
seem, wanted (in this respect) not a warehouse, but a
cathedral.
In all Mitchell's building the ultimate foundation,
94 JOHN T. W. MITCHELL
too, was moral-spiritual. Though he used phrases
ready to hand, like that of the utilitarians, his impulse
ran more deeply. He was moved by a steady, quiet
passion for universal good. Common benefit, not
sectional benefit, was his constant demand ; and he
expanded his conception of the constituency to benefit
until all aims became sectional that were not open to be
shared by all mankind. It is this characteristic which
gives present-day point to his idea and invests it with
its full meaning. We live amidst a welter of sectional
interests, in which that of labour is merely less sectional
than any capitalist interest it opposes. Already it is
plain that in a world run for what interests and nations
of interests are going to get out of it, common humanity
is going to get less and less out of it. We shall not get
peace for all abroad, nor, let us say, houses for all at
home. Another, and a greater, aim is necessary, an
aim of common human benefit, an aim which can be so
established in our minds that by constantly looking on
affairs from this point of view, in obedience to custom
and public opinion, either spontaneously or as in duty
bound, we shall work it out.
Bringing men within one economic organisation in
itself may not do very much for us. The old Adam can
so soon make himself at home in new quarters. But
to imbue mankind at large with an ideal of common
human good, and to direct men to a new and practical
means of expression in terms of consumers' benefit,—
that is another matter. That way opens to a wide
vista. In the past, and not only in the distant past,
ordinary humanity, when moved by a mass impulse,
has revealed almost too great a capacity for personal
self-sacrifice. Given a true social aim, knit up at last
with the everyday ideas of the mass, it will not fail for
want of mass energy and courage.
EPILOGUE 95
To-day Mitchell's chief significance arises from
the contribution he sought to make to such a common
ideal. Beyond board rooms, offices, and workshops,
he saw a world of consumers, men, women, and
children, ill-fed, ill-clothed, ignorant, disunited, mani-
pulated for profit where they should be served ; and
he wanted to unite all in striving for a new world in
which all gain would be for all. Experience of human
selfishness, as he told the Royal Commission, modified
his hopes. But not by any means did it destroy them.
He continued to work as steadily as if sure of his
millennium dawning in his own day. For that ever-
upwelling impulse of his did not derive from success.
It was the motive that in itself is success, that in itself
is the beginning and the end ; in a word, the motive of
love. The love of God and man that has kindled
prophets, saints, and heroes, moved him, too. The
most normal, yet most profound of spiritual forces,
uplifted him, as it will uplift any other plain man as
constantly living and working in the same faith.
While well aware of the world, and not led by illusion,
the Rochdale man of business came to share in his
plain way the mystic's faculty of anticipating the
happiness of triumph. He lived for his faith, and took
the wages of living ; but it is not merely dust that is
left of John Mitchell.
BOOKS ON CO-OPERATION
Acland, A.H.D.
and Jones, B. Working Men Co-operators : An account of the
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Bubnoff, J. V. ... The Co-operative Movement in Russia: Its
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Flanagan,J. A... Wholesale Co-operation in Scotland 1868-1918.
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Haktead, Robert The Producer's Place in Society ..................... l/-
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Co-operation in Scotland. (Illus.) 2/6
The Story Retold. (Illus.) 2/6
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