Mr. Balfour very properly dwelt upon the difficulty of getting
co-operative societies engaged in production to pay big enough salaries, and doubted whether democratic bodies could organise industries successfully. Co-operative produc- tion was the endeavour to substitute an industrial republic for an industrial monarchy. But he pointed out that there might be many half-way houses between complete co-operative production and working for an employer,—notably profit- sharing. The whole tone of Mr. Balfonr's speech in this respect reminds us of the remark which Burke somewhere quotes from Bolingbroke. A Monarchy was to be preferred to a Republic because it was easier to engraft the advantages of a Republic upon a Monarchy, than the advantages of a Monarchy upon a Republic. We think that for the same reason an employer, sometimes an individual, sometimes a joint-stock company, sometimes a distributing co-operative society, will always prove more successful in industrial work than a society for co-operative production, the reason being that while pro- duction by an employer and production by co-operation both have advantages of their own, it is easier to engraft the advantages of the co-operative system on the business of the individual employer, than the advantages of the individual employer upon co-operative production.
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