he Anzin Company. He had seen what M. Doumer fantastically
imagines to be the purely French and republican 'idea' of co-operation
carried out in England, the 'beautiful and generous idea,' as even every
French schoolboy ought to know, being of English and not of French
origin.

M. Perier had been particularly struck by the great success of the
Rochdale experiment--an experiment begun and carried out, as Mr.
Holyoake has set forth at length, by weavers, who, being nearly at the
end of their tether, and worn out with distress, had associated
themselves into a company under the name of the 'Equitable Pioneers of
Rochdale.' He looked thoroughly into the history of this experiment, and
having convinced himself that the 'beautiful and generous' idea might
bear as good fruit at Anzin as at Rochdale, he went to work in earnest,
got the society organised, accepted the honorary chairmanship of it, and
set it on its feet on February 21, 1865. M. Cochin took the same matter
up at St.-Gobain, and in 1867 the Imperial law, about which M. Doumer
and his 'true Republicans' have been cackling and dabbling for ten
consecutive years, was enacted, and the co-operative associations became
legally constituted bodies. The statutes which now govern the Anzin
Association were adopted on December 8, 1867, and the Association was
formally launched.

The authorities at first could not be made to understand that a
co-operative association was not a mercantile speculation, and for some
time the Anzin Association was compelled to pay a regular fee for a
licence, or 'patent,' as it is called in France. This exaction, however,
was long ago given up.

Under the original statutes the profits derived from the sale to the
members of the Association, and to them only (a rule never departed
from), of all the goods purchased by the Association, were to be divided
into a hundred parts. Of these, seventy parts were to be distributed at
the end of each year to the members, proportionally to the sales and
deliveries made to each of them. Twenty parts were to be set aside for a
reserve fund; and the remaining ten parts were to be used by the
governing committee chiefly in paying the salaries of the manager and
employees of the Association.

Such was the success from the outset of the Anzin experiment that within
six years, at a general meeting held on April 24, 1872, the Association
adopted a resolution suspending the payment over into the reserve fund
of the