The co-operative retail societies have as their rule either to make no profits or to restore any profit that may accrue to their members in proportion to the amount of their purchases at the stores. In reality there is no profit, but simply a cancelling of insurance against risks which has been shared in by all the members. The process of elimination is strictly in accordance with Owen’s method of putting producer and consumer in direct contact with one another with a view to getting rid of the middleman. But the elimination of profit is accomplished without eliminating money.[524] That close relation which Owen and a number of other socialists believed to exist between money and profit is purely imaginary. We know as a matter of fact that the highest profits are to be got under the truck system, in the African equatorial trade, for example, where guns are exchanged at five times their value for caoutchouc reckoned at a third of its value, representing a profit of 1500 per cent. The employment of money has brought such definiteness into the method of valuation that the rate of profit per unit on a yard of cloth, say, has become almost infinitesimal. Such exactness of calculation would have been impossible under either the truck or the labour note system. The co-operative association, with its system of no profits, will for ever remain as Owen’s most remarkable work, and his fame will for ever be linked with the growth of that movement. But he was hardly conscious of the important part which he was playing in the inauguration of the new movement. It is seldom that we meet with the word “co-operation” in his writings, although that is not a matter of any great consequence, because the term at that time had not the significance which it has to-day, being then simply synonymous with communism. Not only was Owen unwilling to assume any parental responsibility for the co-operative society, his latest offspring, but he expressly refused to consider it as at all representative of his system. Shops of that description seemed to him little better than philanthropic institutions, quite unworthy of his great ideal.[525] Before passing judgment upon him it is only fair to remember that since those early days the character of the co-operative stores has been completely changed. He lived to see the establishment of the Rochdale society, with its twenty-eight pioneers, six of whom were ardent disciples of Owen himself, and two of these, Charles Howarth and William Cooper, were the very soul of that immortal association. But Owen was by this time seventy-three years of age, and he scarcely realised that a child had been born to him. This somewhat late arrival was to perpetuate his name, and more than any of his other schemes was to save it from oblivion.