COOPERATION IN ENGLAND. 749 



tion necessary to the maintenance of a " connection." The good will 

 of a business year by year declines in value in the market. In some 

 measure needless competition arises from the improved modern facili- 

 ties of locomotion by virtue of a curious illusion : merchants and manu- 

 facturers seem to think that the mere aggregation of the small districts 

 in which business was done in the past increases the area of the total 

 market, as if taking down fences affected the aggregate acreage of 

 contiguous farms. If the factories and warehouses engaged in the 

 supply of the home market were distributed throughout Great Britain 

 in sections of equal population, their over-supply would be plain. 



For all the baffling difficulties which the enlargement of the area 

 of trade has introduced into business, and all the parasitical expenses 

 which have fastened themselves upon it, cooperation offers a remedy 

 a remedy, however, only to be applied as intelligence and trustworthi- 

 ness advance. The costly war and waste of isolated competition are 

 signs and tokens that men can not trust each other, and have not mu- 

 tual forbearance enough to combine for common ends in securing for 

 themselves competence and content. 



The leaders of English cooperation, while busily engaged in for- 

 warding their plans of distribution, are constantly striving to apply 

 their principles to the more important field of production. If the iden- 

 tification of the interests of buyer and seller is fraught with advantage, 

 still greater advantage awaits the successful fusion of the interests of 

 capital and laboi\ Up to the present time, however, the experiments 

 in this direction have not been promising, and the case of production 

 now seems to stand where the case of distribution did forty or fifty 

 years ago. Workmen are not educated up to it yet ; neither, it would 

 seem, are the men of capital. The Messrs. Briggs, at their White wood 

 collieries, divided for several years a percentage of their profits among 

 their employees, leaving for their own share a sum larger than they 

 believed would have come to them under the usual system of hiring. 

 A plan similar to that of the Messrs. Briggs has been followed by 

 Messrs. Fox, Head & Co., at Middleborough. Another method adopted 

 extensively in Yorkshire and Lancashire is for workmen to invest their 

 savings in shares of joint-stock manufacturing companies. The vast 

 business now conducted by cooperative stores has in some measure 

 opened up a path for cooperative manufacturing, but to an extent very 

 limited in proportion to the business transacted, and in a manner very 

 remote from perfect cooperation. At the Leicester shoe-factory and 

 elsewhere the workmen are hired for wages, just as ordinary capitalists 

 hire, and have no share in profits. The difficulties of managing a store 

 are not few, but they are far less troublesome than conducting pro- 

 duction on purely cooperative principles. When every workman in a 

 concern has a voice and vote, in the present state of morals and intelli- 

 gence, the disputes are interminable as to their respective rates of pay- 

 ment, the proportions of profit which shall be divided between capital, 



