The organization of a local co-operative business was very simple--its methods also. A society was formed, goods bought for the co-operative store, and the members paid cash for them. At each buying they were given metal tokens representing the amount of their purchases--it was a coinage which obviated the necessity for the intricate labors of bookkeeping. At the end of three months the committee took stock of the store, compared the value of the goods with the standing at the last quarter day, counted the cash in hand, figured up the expenses, and were ready to declare a dividend. The shareholder brought his tokens--his chips, if you like--to the counter, and on the dividendial basis was given cash, or credit for more goods. With ten children, eight of whom lived to maturity, the voluntary treasurership of a village co-operative store, with the quarterly dividends added to the weekly wages at the Crum works, didn’t furnish many luxuries to the Hanna family, beyond the unsearchable riches that came to us from the Sabbath journeys to Pollokshaws. As the next to the youngest, I did not know personally of the harder struggle which beset the heads of artisan families when all their children were small. But, even in the sixties, life was a constant experiment in frugality. At the Thornliebank school we were all average scholars, I think, and in my thirteenth year my father obtained for me the job of office boy at the headquarters of the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society, in Madeira Court, Glasgow. Call it the coincidence of the commonplace, the accident of association, if you like; but several years ago, while certain negotiations were proceeding for the purchase of land and the erection of grain elevators in the West by the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society, one could not help contrasting the change in that commercial enterprise, since his first acquaintance with it; and noticing also the difference there was between running messages from Madeira Court, and looking after the interests of a railway that connected tidewater on the St. Lawrence with tidewater on the Pacific, and had fifty thousand shareholders in the British Isles. In those far-off days finance was a simple art, though it involved some fine adjustments. The pay in Madeira Court was four shillings a week. Out of that, return railway fare over four miles, and a midday meal, had to be provided. Transportation took about a third of the income--a trifle more, when one remembers that there was a mile walk to and from the Kennishead station, Thornliebank not being on any railway. Shanks’s pony cost something for shoes. At midday there was resort to Jenkins’s Cooking Depot, on Jamaica Street--a place where a bowl of soup, a slice of bread and a halfpenny cup of coffee offered some justification for the unchallenged boasting about free trade and cheap living which was a part of British electioneering for nearly sixty years.