BOOKS.
HISTORY OF CO-OPERATION.* MOST people hope, sooner orlater, in some form or other, to find the land of " Prester John," and perhaps the world owes most of the good that is in it to that inextinguishable hope. Progress is real, though Utopia may seem to sober eyes no nearer, and the volume before us, though it deals so largely with failure, is really a history of material advancement. It Is the record of a movement in which we have blundered, been awkward, often ridiculous, but in which the purpose and the goal were clear. Those really engaged in it did not swerve from the one, and have left behind them the possibility that their successors may reach the other. The idea of co-operation has a very limited meaning to most minds. It is associated with limited-liability companies, with "Civil-Service stores," and in other ways is given a local habitation ; but the principle itself is one of far wider application, and it is well to carry the mind back for a moment to the time when for most practical purposes it was an unknown quantity in the national life. In theory of course the idea is old enough. It is simply a com- bination of worker, capitalist, and consumer, by which, as Mr. Holyoake with slightly sarcastic force expresses it, "honesty shall be rendered productive." Mr. John Macdonell is quoted as counting Jacob tending Laban's flocks as one of the earliest instances of a co-operative worker,—an unfortunate illustration surely, if the interests of the masters are to be taken into consideration; but without going into the records of that ancient world, there are half-forgotten instances in our own history, of the co-operative use of land in England, and arrangements for some trades, in which the principle which Mr. Holyoake says "turns toil into industry" is fully recognised,—as in some of the most ancient "Guilds," which certainly were in. tended, as Toulmin Smith says, to be "institutions of local self- help, joining all classes together in a care for the needy and for objects of common welfare." Yet at the beginning of the present century the mass of the English population would have regarded any idea of" concert for the diffusion of wealth," or of working for the common benefit, with a prospect of sharing in the profits of labour, as utopian to the last degree ; while the governing classes would certainly have voted the principle itself to be revo- ]utionary, which in a sense it unquestionably is. It was a ques- tion for the philanthropist, the statesman, the capitalist, and the workman, but to its discussion flocked every lunatic at large who had a theory to ventilate, every speculator who had something to gain. It was small wonder the better men were often worsted in the fight. But perhaps, before passing to a brief glance at the failures, blunders, and very small successes noted in the little volume before us, it might be well to let our author state in a few 'words his definition of what co-operation is practically aiming at. It is wisest in the end to judge both schemes and men from their best side, since it is generally their truest. Mr. Holyoake says :— "The distinction of co-operators is that they set the example of work purposeful, cheerful, hopeful, successful, for the workers. What mostly existed before their time was simply labour disliked—people doing reluctantly what they were obliged to do. Co-operation turned toil into industry, which is labour animated. Induatry means men working willingly, busily, knowing the reason why—no apathy, no idling, no bungling, no evasion of duty ; because the profit of each is in pro- portion to his work, and is secured to him. Co-operation proposes that, in all new combinations of labour-lender and capital-lender, the produce of profits shall be distributed, in agreed proportion, over all engaged in creating the profit. Co-operation means concert for the diffusion of wealth. It leaves nobody out who helps to produce it. Those who do not know this do not understand Co-operation ; those who do know it and do not mean it are traitors to the principle. Those who • The History of Co-Operation in England: its Literature and its Advocates. By George Jacob Holyoake. Vol.!. The Pioneer Period, 1812 to 1844. London : Triihner and Co. 1875. mean it and do not take steps to secure it, or are silent when others evade it, or do not advocate it and insist upon it always, and insist upon it openly as the impassable principle of industrial justice, are- unseeing, or silly, or weak, or cowardly. It is thus that Co-operation supplements political economy by organising the distribution of wealth in the near future. It touches no man's fortune ; it seeks no plunder ; it causes no disturbance in society ; it gives no trouble to statesmen ; it enters into no secret associations ; it needs no trades union to protect its interests ; it contemplates no violence ; it subverts no order; it envies no dignity ; it accepts no gift, nor asks any favour ; it keeps no terms with the idle, and it will break no faith with the industrious. It is neither mendicant, servile, nor offensive ; it has its hand in no man's pocket, and does not mean that any hands shall remain long or com- fortably in its own ; it means self-help, self-dependence, and such share of the common competence as labour shall earn or thought can win. And this it intends to have, but by means which shall leave every other, person an equal chance of the same good."
If any one doubts the want of heartiness shown in toil where the labourer has no interest in the profits, let him consult any master builder whose men are so employed and ask why the expensive arrangement of overseers to keep the men at their work is neces- sary. "There's scarcely a man in my employ," said an extensive contractor known to the present writer, "who will do a fair day's work unless he is looked after." Let that same set of men have the minutest interest in the profits their labour is helping to. secure, and another tone would speedily appear, as happily many masters are beginning to find out. But at this moment, in this volume on the pioneer period of the co-operative movement, we are engaged rather with its blunders and apparent failures than with its possible success, and will proceed at once to a few facts,. not going further back than 1825, in which year Francis Jeffrey, at a dinner given in Edinburgh to Joseph Hume, M.P., made a speech in favour of the combination of workmen. It was a bold thing to do, in a day when workmen were scarcely recognised as having rights at all. It is difficult for those who are wont to. speak of the good old times, when the poor made no outcry, to recognise that it was despair which made them dumb. And when hope broke in, a ray of light in the darkness, it is small wonder that it was not in elegant verse or terms polite that their grievances- first found vent. The Bradford weaver laid his hand on the sore, if he didn't do it gently, when he sang:— " Odds bobs, lads, pray what's the matter? Come, tell the cause of all this clatter, And let me know what 'tis about; Have you with master fallen out? 'Yes, sir, we have, and well we might, For sure we are our cause is right ; For let us work bard as we will, We're ne'er the better for it still.'"
The "old world "had done its work so badly that men talked vaguely about making a new one. Social projectors were all "world- makers," content with nothing short of reconstruction. They could not see, as Mr. Holyoake very sensibly puts it, that most human devices have truth in them, and need reconsidering and improving rather than reforming. But he adds a truth never to be forgotten, that "impatience and daring have done much for mankind. Their grand schemes have opened the eyes of the world, which, though a perilous operation to attempt, is serviceable, for men are never the same any more after they have once seen a new thing."
The new thing, unfortunately, these Utopians generally saw was the equalisation of property. This has ever been the dream of the world-maker, and our author quotes Plato, Aristotle,- Lycurgus, the Essenes, and our own Sir Thomas More, amongst the old worthies to whom that doctrine was not unknown. After all, one's reach should be beyond one's grasp, or whaths. heaven for ? But it is not surprising that schemes for the equalisation of wealth, very badly stated, should have alarmed the conservative members of society, in fact all who had any- thing to preserve. And since discontent might lead to struggle, it was dubbed "sedition," and "free thought known by the hideous name of sin." In 1696, a complete plan of an industrial com- munity in England was proposed by one John Bellers. Our author gives a very full sketch of the scheme he proposed to carry out, and believes, if it had only been adopted, "pauperism would by this time be a tradition in England." We are not prepared to say how that might have been, but the scheme was a sound one. He proposed to found a College of Industry, at the cost of about £18,000 of the money of that time ; adopted for his motto the words "Industry brings plenty," reminded the rich they were stewards of their wealth, and had the audacity to suggest that it was possible to prevent any more people from. becoming poor. The profits of his College were to be divided , among the shareholders, but the workers were to be guaranteed security in and for all things necessary in health or sickness; and, if parents died early, their children were to be educated and.
preserved from misery. This was in 1696! Mr. Holy- oake believes that this is the only State scheme of co-opera- tion which has ever been proposed in England. But the modern idea of co-operation, the idea which, in spite of all, is gradually and steadily maturing itself among us, undoubtedly took form and shape in the hands of Robert Owen, the Lanarkshire cotton- spinner. We are not going to endorse all the schemes that fertile brain planned, nor can we ever cease to regret the errors of judgment and of taste into which he fell. But unpalatable as the truth may be, especially to men of wider culture, it is neverthe- less a fact that the world owes much to men -of one idea. It is easy for men of much learning and much leisure to judge Owen from the ridiculous side, to point to extinct periodicals with high- sounding titles, and extinct communities too, both signal failures in their way, which claimed Robert Owen as their founder and head. But he recognised the truth, till then ignored in England, that the workman would be all the better for becom- ing as intelligent as his master ; would work all the harder, if he had any interest in the success of his labours. He raised the condition of the large population under his direction, made tem- perance, not total abstinence, the rule among his people, estab- lished Infant Schools—a fact which ought alone to rescue his name from oblivion—suggested the self-supporting pauper colonies of Holland, "originated the short-time agitation on behalf of children in factories, assisted Fulton with money to try his inventions in steam navigation, purchased the first bale of American Sea-Island cotton imported into England," and saw what possibilities were open for the world, if only the thought of the great teacher, whom unfortunately he tried to ignore, were carried out, and men who fancied they loved God were pre- pared to love their brothers also. His dream was a splendid one, even though it included Orbiston, Queenwood, and New Har- mony. Its novelty, as Mr. Elolyoake remarks, is over. "Science has taught men that the improvement of mankind is the affair of a million influences and unknown time." But the ideas he sought to inculcate, filtered through a generation, have left a residuum for which we to-day are better.
Between 1830 and 1841 the principle of co-operation ran mad, and introduced itself under the name of "socialism,"—a brief madness, and not an ignoble one, but one that did much mis- chief, in retarding healthy progress and alienating sober and healthy minds. Mr. llolyoake's chapter on the subject does not please us. It would, we think, have been possible to have applied the lash with sterner and, at the same time, less unkindly hand. So flippant is his ridicule of the socialistic literature which embodied the aspirations of the new "world- makers," that it is difficult to imagine it is not a foe rather than a friend that is writing ; and a friend of the principle which underlay the errors heaped upon it, we presume no one really doubts our author to be. However, it must be trying to a man of ordinary common-sense to wade through a tithe of the utterly irrelevant matter with which the theorists thought to put a new world together. At the Social Congress of 1832, a resolution was adopted and put into circulation which might well cause the originators of it to be regarded as hydra- headed monsters, to be silenced at any cost (that of truth or otherwise) by respectable landowners. It ran thus :—" 1. Let it be universally understood, that the grand ultimate object of all co-operative societies, whether engaged in trading, manufac- turing, or agricultural pursuits, is community in land." Few stayed to inquire the means by which such an alarming proposition was to be carried. In vain clear-headed men explained the idea was to level up, and not down. Nothing short of revolution in a nut- shell was, to the alarmed mind of the English squire, embodied in such words, and perhaps we can hardly blame him. We have not got much further yet. And the whole thing seemed of one piece with the invention of one Charles Toplis, who had conceived a sort of infernal engine, which was to throw a thousand balls in the time one man could fire, and was on that account to be named the "Pacificator," — making war impossible by multiplying the powers of destruction ! But side by side with all this, a little leaven was leavening the lump. Social science, which, as Mr. Holyoake observes, was in those days looked upon as a wild and visionary thing, has come to be a very practical thing indeed. And the strength lent by co-operation is proving itself every day. The history of "lost communities," in which socialistic principles were tried and failed, is full of interest, and not without its lesson. That lesson is, that all association, to be successful, must involve "the sacrifice of minor things for the attainment of greater," a principle fatally lost sight of in "New Harmony" and elsewhere, as it will be apt to be in commu- nities where self-interest is radically the uniting principle ; but if the history of these "lost communities" is interesting,-that of the early advocates of social progress is yet more so. The Iearly and often-forgotten workers have passed away. This volume ' brings us only to 1844, at which period co-operation was known mainly by its mistakes ; by the "lunatics at large," who thought no theory too wild to embody under the head of "Socialism ;" by , the cry of underpaid and underfed men and women, living lives I of hopeless toil, which made itself inconveniently audible ; by the way in which honest but deluded men were victimised by the schemes of the dishonest and unscrupulous ; a time of social chaos and discontent, to be put down, and if possible put out of mind, by all sane persons who had interests, sac, stake in "society." But much-deformed principles with a vital spark in them have a trick of living on, and "these which have turned the world upside down have come hither also ;" and in a future volume, we shall see—perhaps some of us be surprised by—what they have accomplished.
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