“We have managed to keep this great organization, now consisting of some thousand societies, with some millions of capital, up to the principles of the Christian socialists—nominally, at any rate—and I really think the old spirit is, at any rate, alive in a large proportion of the rising leaders, though the mammon devil is, I am bound to own, vigorous among them, and hard to put down.... I still look to this movement as the best hope for England and other lands.”
Mr. Neale has been good enough to write me a fuller account of the connection between co-operation and Christian socialism, which he regards as two distinct movements—in their origin, at least. I will quote what he has to say about them:
“Manchester, December 4, 1882.
...
“I think that the Christian social efforts of Messrs. Maurice, Kingsley, Hughes, etc., and the co-operative movement out of which our present Union has grown up, ought to be distinguished as really separate actions, independent of each other in their origin, though they have subsequently, to a certain extent, coalesced.
“The distributive societies have grown up since 1844, principally from the impulse originating in the Rochdale Pioneers, which was, so far as it can be said to embody any moral principle, Owenite rather than Christian. No doubt it included, from the first, members of the various religious bodies which exist in England, and it never professed to substitute any other religious teaching for that given in the name of Christianity, as R. Owen’s followers had done. Therefore, among the disciples, men soon appeared who said, This co-operation which you advocate is nothing else than the practical application of Christianity to the ordinary business of life. Likewise, when, at a later date, those who had gathered around Mr. Maurice’s endeavors to show systematically the connection of Christian ideas with the Co-operative Union, as is done by Mr. Hughes and myself in the ‘Manual for Co-operation,’ ... this application was accepted by the Congress of the Co-operative Union as a legitimate descent of co-operation, and is more or less assented to at the present time by co-operators who never were in any way connected with Mr. Maurice.
“But this has been, as I have said, a result of relations which have grown up between two movements, distinct in their origin, but similar in their tendencies, and from this similarity, and the aid afforded by each to the other, naturally disposed to coalesce.
“In their origin the stores were antecedent to the teachings of the Christian socialists, which did not begin in any definite shape until 1849 and 1850, when the Rochdale Pioneers had got over the difficulties of their beginnings, and were doing a business of £6611 8s. 9d. in 1844 and £13,179 17s. in 1850; and other stores were beginning to spring up and attain considerable proportions in various towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, under the influence of the success of Rochdale. In London we had scarcely any knowledge of these societies till the end of 1850; and our efforts took principally the direction of attempts to form productive associations of workers by means of advances of capital to them on loan at four per cent. interest, and with no other security than the stock in trade of the societies founded by these endeavors.
“Theoretically, the idea we endeavored to spread was the conception of workers as brethren—of work as coming from a brotherhood of men associated for their common benefit—who therefore rejected any notion of competition with each other as inconsistent with the true form of society, and, without formally preaching communism, sought to found industrial establishments communistic in feeling, of which it should be the aim, while paying ordinary wages and interest at the rate I have mentioned, to apply the profits of the business in ways conducive to the common advantage of the body whose work produced them.