Mr. Vansittart Neale, of Bisham Abbey, who died on Friday
-week, had a remarkable history. A man of good birth, large means, and unusual range of culture—he was educated at Oxford with Mr. Gladstone—he, at the age of thirty-nine, con- vinced himself that the solution of the labour problem was to be found in co-operation, and thence forward, for forty-four years, devoted himself to the promotion of the movement. He founded in succession three societies, one a Central Agency, which was the forerunner of the Wholesale Society, now so successful ; and although they all failed, absorbing in their failure the larger part of his fortune, he never lost confidence in the idea. He forwarded every effort subsequently made to carry out the principle, and, even after his accession to Bisham Abbey, lived in lodgings in Manchester, that he might, by hard work, keep the Central Union straight. For sixteen years he acted as general secretary, giving for nothing aid of a kind which could not have been obtained for money. Every co-operator in the Kingdom now respects his name ; but he was so modest and unpresuming, :so little aware that he had lived a life of self-denial in order to forward a philanthropic object, that the body of English- men were scarcely aware of his existence. Few better lives have ever been lived in this world ; and his career was the more remarkable because his natural instinct was for the life to which he was born, that of a wealthy Squire, and because he possessed the capacity to have made himself a figure in the country. His defect was over-confidence in human nature ; but incessant disappointment neither soured nor daunted him, and he died still believing in co-operation as the industrial instrument of the future.
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