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TEE POPULAR SCLEXCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



have — that cooperation is an old and familiar 

 word, used now in an entirely new sense. Co- 

 operation as the name of a modern industrial 

 scheme, which the public so often hear of, is a 

 very different thing from cooperation as denned 

 in dictionaries. The term cooperation in litera- 

 ture merely means united action for the increase 

 of mechanical power — as when several men join 

 in moving a log or a bowlder, because one alone 

 could not stir it. In this way a bundle of sticks 

 bound together presents a force of resistance 

 which separately none could pretend to ; and in 

 this sense the sticks are as much cooperators 

 as the men. But industrial cooperation, in the 

 sense in which the word is used now, means not 

 a union for increasing mechanical force, but for 

 the purpose of obtaining the profit of the trans- 

 action and having it equitably distributed among 

 those who do the work. It is not noting this 

 difference, or not knowing it well, which causes 

 much confusing chatter, in the highest quarters 

 in literature, about " cooperation being as old as 

 the world," and " which has been practised by 

 every people." 



Mr. Gibbon Wakefield says, " Cooperation 

 takes place when several persons help each other 

 in the same employment, as when two greyhounds 

 running together will kill more hares than four 

 greyhounds running separately." l This is the 

 nature of the cooperation chiefly known to politi- 

 cal economists. But industrial cooperation unites 

 not merely to kill hares, but to eat them. The 

 greyhounds of Wakefield run down the hares for 

 their masters ; the new cooperative greyhounds, 

 of whom I write, run down the hares for them- 

 selves. Industrial cooperation is not only union 

 for creating but for dividing profits among all 

 who have helped to make them. Politeness, as 

 explained by that robust master of definition, Dr. 

 Johnson, consists in giving a preference to others 

 rather than to ourselves. In this sense coopera- 

 tion may be defined as the politeness of industry ; 

 for it consists in giving, if not a preferential share, 

 at least a proportionate share of its produce, to 

 all who contribute to create it. Definition is 

 as the geography of a system ; it is the map of 

 the roads taken by the projectors of it. The 

 ways are many which at different times are pur- 

 sued by the leaders of movements. These ways 

 are different definitions of the end to be aimed 

 at. Therefore to enumerate the leading defini- 

 tions of the subject, is to explain the different 

 and progressive conceptions of it entertained 



1 C. G. Wakefield, note to Smith's "Wealth of Na- 

 tions," 1840. 



from time to time. Gradual and tardy were the 

 steps taken in arriving at practical statements of 

 it. Definitions are always vague at first, because 

 in practical life very few people know what they 

 mean; some are late in knowing it; and many 

 never do know it, but, if they know somebody 

 who does know, they follow him. Still, a good 

 many people want to know where they are going 

 to, and therefore those who invite the public to 

 take a new path find it necessary to define the 

 objects they propose. 



Though cooperation as a social scheme be- 

 gan with Mr. Owen, he gave no definition of it. 

 Though he founded at New Lanark the first store 

 which devoted profits to educational purposes, 

 cooperation was in his mind a paternal arrange- 

 ment of industry, which could be made more prof- 

 itable than the plan in which the employer con- 

 sidered only himself. The self-managing scheme 

 under which working -people create profits and 

 retain them among themselves, Mr. Owen had not 

 foreseen. His idea was to organize the world ; 

 cooperation attempts the humble work of organ- 

 izing the provision-store and the workshop. This 

 is the distinction between communism and coop- 

 eration, which public men, of no mean discern- 

 ment, continually confound together. Yon Sybel 

 defines communists — 1. As those who desire to 

 transfer every kind of property to the state ; 2. 

 Those of similar pretensions, who, while they rec- 

 ognize the rights of private property, wish to give 

 the state the actual disposal of it by indirect 

 means. 1 These are the Continental crazes of 

 socialism, and have nothing to do with anything 

 English. There never was but one conspiracy 

 for the transfer of property to the state even in 

 France — that of Baboeuf — so the reader may dis- 

 miss the political hallucination from his mind. 

 There was M. de Metz, who founded a criminal 

 community. M. de Metz was fortunate. He was 

 a gentleman. He had fortune, and therefore he 

 was not reviled. Had he been a working-man, 

 he had been regarded as a Utopian, or as a hired 

 agitator. He was as mad as any other social 

 philanthropist. He believed in the radical good- 

 ness of little scoundrels, and that honesty could 

 be cultivated as successfully as vice. A writer 

 who has a cultivated contempt for social crazes, 

 but who sees through things and is always fair 

 (Mr. W. R. Greg), remarks : 



"We have had republican societies like Pinto's, 

 Fourier's, and Babceuf's ; hierarchical and aristo- 

 cratic, like St. Simon's ; theocratic, like the Es- 



> Von Sybel, " History of the French Kevolntion," 

 vol. i., book ii., p. 249. 



