The other group of co-operators views its members not as consumers but as producers, and by this very fact narrows its range, since every human being is a consumer, but not all of us are, or can be, in the strict sense, producers. There must be clerks, distributors of all kinds, policemen, organisers. The work of such persons is necessary and useful, but it does not produce, like that of the weaver or the engineer, an immediate and apparent increase in the wealth of the world. In theory, the early associations of producers were workers who combined themselves into self governed workshops and divided the profits of their labours. But this ideal is applicable only to industries demanding but a small outlay of capital, and such industries are always growing fewer. “The ideal ... was modified; individual sympathisers outside the workshop were admitted as members ... so too were societies of consumers. Thus, in place of the old self governing workshop, the modern copartnership workshop developed.” Associations of this type have been rapidly growing in the last ten or twelve years, and during the last two or three have spread amazingly in Ireland. All sorts of industries are represented: baking, weaving (of cotton, wool and silk), spinning, building, printing, quarrying, dairying, sick nursing, typewriting, cab-driving and bookbinding among them; there are societies that make wearing apparel of various sorts, pianos, harness, nails, mineral waters, photographs, brushes, watches, cutlery, padlocks and bricks. “Desborough, with its two important productive societies and its flourishing store which owns much of the land and has built most of the houses, is almost a co-operative community.” Of the great English and Scotch Wholesale Societies made up of federations of societies, of the annual conferences, the annual festivals, the Women’s Co-operative Guild—that greatest and most interesting of working women’s associations—it is not my business here to speak in detail. Readers who desire to become acquainted with co-operation as it exists to-day should procure _Industrial Co-operation_.[71] It must be enough to say that in the ocean of commercial competition, co-operation lies like a fertile island inhabited by workers who are putting into their own pockets the profits of their buying and selling, and very often also of their labour.