Co-operation.
Our artisans may believe that the profits of former days were so large that employers can afford to pay the present rates of wages, without raising their charges to the consumers. There is but one means, by which this fallacy can be exposed. The workmen must become to a certain extent their own employers. In a co-operative establishment, created in part by his own hardly-earned savings, the handicraftsman will find himself called upon to apportion equitably the earnings of his business between labour and capital. In this double relation he will learn how great are the difficulties, which beset the employment of capital in productive industry in a country, in which competition is so keen as it is in England. In no other country does capital command so low a rate of interest; and, if large accumulations of capital have been made, and money is therefore cheap, it should not be inferred that the rate of profit has been high by comparison with other countries, but rather that our employers of labour, as a class, have been distinguished by their frugality, their perseverance, and their enterprise. I am grateful, therefore, to Mr. Holyoake, for his vindication of their claims at the recent Co-operative Congress. He justly said that capital was the enemy of nobody, but rather the nursing mother of production.
The co-operative principle, in its application to the business of distribution, has been already most successfully developed. My desire is to encourage working men to create co-operative establishments for the purposes of production. The accumulation of the necessary capital is an obvious difficulty; but as wages were never so high as at present, so this obstacle can be more easily surmounted now than at any former time. Some men may object to recognise the special responsibilities of a fellow-workman holding the office of manager of a large business, by giving a proportionate salary. It is because the recognition of authority is essential, whenever anything practical is to be done, that the International Society has shown such uncompromising hostility to the co-operative principle. The denial of a proportionate reward for superior intelligence or industry is the first article of its catechism. The absurdity of attempting to combine the energies of the men for any definite object, without placing a competent chief at their head, has been humorously exposed by Mr. Carlyle. ‘Ships,’ he said, ‘did not use the ballot-box at all, and they rejected the phantasm species of captains. Phantasm captains with unanimous votings! These are considered to be all the law and prophets at present. If a man shake out of his mind the universal noise of political doctors in this generation, and in the last generation or two, and consider the matter face to face with his own sincere intelligence looking at it, I venture to say he would find this a very extraordinary method of navigating, whether in the Straits of Magellan, or the undiscovered sea of time.’
English workmen are less easily deluded by tall talk and sophistry than the more excitable populations of the Latin race; and I would earnestly invite them to apply their practical sagacity to the difficult yet hopeful experiment of co-operative industry.