The co-operative store movement has made greatest progress in its original home, Great Britain. In 1913 about one person in every three was to some degree interested in or a beneficiary of these institutions. The profits of the stores amounted to about $71,302,070, which was about 35 per cent. on the capital. The employés numbered about 145,000, and the sales for the year aggregated $650,000,000. The English Wholesale Society was the largest flour miller and shoe manufacturer in Great Britain, and its total business amounted to $150,000,000. Outside of Great Britain, co-operative distribution has been most successful in Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland. It has had a fair measure of development in Italy, but has failed to assume any importance in France. "There is every sign that within the near future--except in France--the stores will come to include the great majority of the wage earning class, which is a constantly growing percentage of the total population."[155] Within recent years a respectable number of stores have been established on a sound basis in Canada and the United States. Owing, however, to the marked individualism and the better economic conditions of these two countries, the co-operative movement will continue for some time to be relatively slow. As in the case of agricultural co-operation, the money benefits accruing to the members of the co-operative stores consist mainly of profits rather than interest. In the absence of the store societies, these profits would have gone for the most part to middlemen as payments for the risks and labour of conducting privately owned establishments. Forty-seven of the sixty million dollars profits of the British co-operative stores in 1910 were divided among more than two and one-half million members of these institutions, instead of going to a comparatively small number of private merchants. The other thirteen million dollars were interest on the capital stock. Had the members invested an equal amount in other enterprises they could, indeed, have obtained about the same rate and amount of interest, but in the absence of the co-operative stores their inducements and opportunities to save would have been much smaller. For it must be kept in mind that a very large part of the capital stock in the co-operative stores is derived from the members' dividends on their purchases at such stores, and would not have come into existence at all without these establishments. The gains of the co-operative stores, whether classified as profits or as interest, are evidently a not inconsiderable indication of a better distribution of wealth. _Co-operation in Production_