Further evidence of the correctness of this assumption is found in the vital statistics of the period. In 1864 the deaths of children under five years of age were 46·93 per cent. of the total deaths; in 1862 they had been 48·85 per cent. of the total. In those years the children were dying at the rate of one in every nine of the population, a deathrate nearly equal to that of the British Army during the four years of war. The effects of poverty and bad housing on the health of the population were further evidenced by the number of deaths of children under five from tubercular diseases. In 1863 these were 381; in 1864, 378; while the total deaths from tuberculosis were 1562 and 1763 respectively for the same years. In his report to the Corporation for the year 1864, Mr Watson, Town Chamberlain, points out that there was ample scope in the statistics he had compiled for showing the need for benevolence “in alleviating the character of the dwellings of the very poor,” and he urged the need which existed to provide other and better houses. At the same time he notes that employment generally was good in this year. In 1868, 786 children under five died from consumption, and in 1869 the total infantile deathrate (children under one year) was 48·20 per 1,000. In the Clyde area it was 56·81 per 1,000. It was in a city in which the conditions of the people were such as the figures quoted above reveal that, on the last Monday in January 1869, what was destined in the course of fifty years to become the largest business of its kind in the world opened its doors for trade. For six years the idea of the federation of Co-operative societies for trading purposes had been occupying the minds of the Co-operators of Scotland, keenly interested as they were in the progress of the North of England Co-operative Wholesale Society. Only a little over two years before, also, those of them in the West who took an interest in the affairs of their Co-operative neighbours had seen the Co-operative societies of Ayrshire join together to form a baking association for the purpose of supplying themselves with bread; and in September 1868 the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society had been safely launched, after several years of anxious consultation and consideration. No sooner had the S.C.W.S. been sent on its way than the stalwarts of the West turned their attention to yet another venture. Since the collapse of the second Glasgow Society there had been no Co-operatively-produced bread in the city. The price which was being charged for bread by the private bakers was considered too high, and yet not one of the societies thought itself strong enough to finance a bakery of its own.