Nevertheless, the statement is true that co-operation is a new development of practical Christianity, which can introduce that essential element of true political economy, sympathy, the hitherto missing guide of human industry.
The few friends who met in a small chamber in 1828 and initiated the Manchester and Salford Co-operative Schools were fired by enthusiasm. The poor weavers of Toad Lane, who saved their hard-earned pence and divided their first chest of tea, were filled with pity for their suffering brethren, and eagerly gave the poor room, the precious time, the exhausting thought—all they had to give—to establish the brotherly principle of mutual help. And the large-hearted leaders of the movement, who changed the name of Christian Socialist to Co-operator—Maurice, Kingsley, Ludlow, Hughes, and many another of the first noble little band—laid down a spiritual basis as the essential foundation of durable material success.
It has been said of the labouring classes ‘that they are unfit for any order of things which would make any considerable demand on either their intellect or their virtue.’ The enlightened co-operator perceives that this is true of all classes of men, rich or poor, in a state of things where industry is ruled by unlimited competition, and trade subjects everything to the domination of money. Where all restrictions are removed, but no sympathy developed, new forms of oppression and revenge arise.
Co-operation, therefore, announces a fundamental law of durable political economy. It adopts mutual aid instead of antagonism in industry, extends a share of the results of labour in equitable proportion to all who produce them, and replaces competition in money-getting by emulation in superiority of production.
Thus sympathy, the first necessary foundation of industry and social union, is being slowly evolved by the trials, the failures, but the ultimately assured success of the Co-operative movement.
This gradual recognition of the necessary basis of progressive political economy—trust, freedom, and sympathy (here slightly hinted at)—is itself founded upon a rock—viz., the immutability of the Creator’s law of Moral Government, the adaptation of the human constitution to its surroundings, the only method by which steady growth can be secured. The waves of selfishness and false theories dash themselves vainly against this rock, and race after race perishes in the foolish attempt to set aside the Moral Law.
The hopeful light thrown upon the future by the revelation of freedom and co-operative sympathy, as fundamental laws of true political economy, can only be fully perceived by those who have measured the evils of slavery and sounded the fearful depths of misery produced by unlimited competition. The revelations of the results of this phase of competition in which we are living are all around us, in every class of society, in every quarter of the globe. The mercantile system, which makes wealth and money synonymous, and reduces every interest to a subject of trade, spares no relation of life, and desecrates every rank of society. We need not go back to the crimes which Warren Hastings committed to fill his treasury. The same methods of crushing the weak for money, of bartering honour and conscience in the lust of gain, are going on at this moment in Asia and Africa, in the islands of the Pacific, in uncontrolled America, and enchained Russia. Its effects are seen in the Legislature and the courts of law, in all professions and trades, in the mansion and the lodging-house. Corruption and cruelty inevitably resulting from a false system of political economy, are barring the progress of the human race.
In the present day we prostitute the superior strength gained by us from the principles of Christianity, to the debasement of human beings. Money being considered identical with wealth, sensuality reigns supreme. Money having under this system become the great means of gratifying material desires, the strife to obtain it becomes ever fiercer. The statesman regards it as a highest duty to open new channels of commerce for national activity, quite regardless of the conditions of mutual freedom and sympathy which make commerce legitimate. Whisky, opium, and gunpowder bring rich returns from the ignorant peoples to whom their use was hitherto unknown, and this wicked abuse of our superior intelligence is in strict accord with the short-sighted teaching of the political economy accepted by trade.[14] This species of trade, carried on without limitation, without the large intelligence of religious insight, must produce a fall of any race equal to the height of its development; for although ‘religion without science is a purblind angel, science without religion is a full-blown devil.’
It is into the last possible phase of limitless competition in buying and selling, that our nineteenth century has entered, by permitting one-half the race to become the merchandise of the other half.
Under a specious hypocrisy, falsely styled freedom of contract, a modern phase of slavery is still exercising its influence in our midst; for the slave-holding principle that the human body may be an article of merchandise is still applied to women, and conscience is still dead to the essential principle of freedom—viz., the sacredness of the human body, through which the soul must grow.