52S 



TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



English mind, and points to the organization of | 

 society. English cooperation gives nothing to a 

 man because he wants it, but because he earns 

 it. His capacity, if he has any, is seen in his 

 performance, and there needs no other investiga- 

 tion into it. There may be heard in Parliament, 

 from politicians who hope to be regarded as 

 statesmen, and who should use precision of 

 speech, and make inferences from ascertained 

 facts only, talk of the wildest kind about men 

 who aim at an equality which is to level every- 

 thing. English people never aimed at leveling 

 anything. Their sensible and moderate object 

 has always been to raise the low to the height of 

 self-help, intelligence, and competence; and if 

 there be equality in this, it is equality which has 

 no terror in it, and which will take care of it- 

 self. 



There is an unpleasant ring of infallible as- 

 sumption in speaking of true and false coopera- 

 tion. Cooperation is a definite thing, and it can 

 always be spoken of as such. Cooperation is 

 now capable of simple definition. Its principle 

 and all its parts can be brought into view at once. 

 Distributive cooperation is a union for saving 

 money by economy in buying and selling, and 

 dividing the gain among all concerned in making 

 it. Productive cooperation means union for cre- 

 ating profits and sharing them with labor and 

 trade. Where the interest of the purchaser is 

 not recognized in distribution, where the partner- 

 ship of the workman is not recognized in produc- 

 tion, there is no cooperation, and the assumption 

 of the name is a mistake or an imposture, and in 

 either case misleading ; and whether the mistake 

 be conscious or not, it comes under the head of 

 " trading under a false name." Distributive co- 

 operation, which takes in the purchaser and leaves 

 out the servants of the store, is partial coopera- 

 tion. Productive cooperation, which recognizes 

 the laborer and does not divide profits with di- 

 rectors, managers, and customers, is incomplete 

 cooperation. That comprehensive form of indus- 

 trial action which includes in the participation of 

 profit all who are concerned in any way in the 

 production of it, is complete cooperation, as un- 

 derstood in the constructive period. Coopera- 

 tion, therefore, is a simple, distinct, definite, de- 

 finable thing. It is equity in business. A trad- 

 ing society is cooperative, or it is not. There is 

 no such thing as false cooperation. Cooperation 

 is complete or partial. There is nothing else 

 worth considering. 



Where capital divides profit with shareholders 

 only and as such, that is a mere money-making 



affair. It is mere joint-stockism. It is not a 

 scheme that concerns laborers much. It does 

 not care for them, except to use them. It does 

 not recognize them nor appeal to them, nor com- 

 mand their sympathies, nor enlist their zeal, or 

 character, or skill, or good-will, as voluntary influ- 

 ences and forces of higher industry. And, to do 

 the joint-stock system justice, it does not ask for 

 them. It bargains for what it can get. It trusts 

 to compelling as mwch service as answers its pur- 

 pose. Even if by accident or arrangement all the 

 workmen are shareholders in a joint-stock com- 

 pany, this does not alter the principle. They are 

 only recognized as shareholders — they are merely 

 regarded as contributors of capital. As work- 

 men, and because of their work, they get nothing 

 save their stipulated wages. They are still, as 

 workmen, mere instruments of capital. As share- 

 holders in the business in which they are engaged, 

 they are more likely to promote the welfare of 

 their company than otherwise ; but they do it 

 from interest, not from honor, as a matter of 

 profit rather than as a matter of principle. They 

 are merely money-lenders — they are not recog- 

 nized as men having manhood. Joint-stock em- 

 ployers may have, and often do have, great re- 

 gard for their men, and no doubt do more in 

 many cases for their men than their workmen 

 would have the sense to do for themselves. But 

 all this comes in the form of a largess, a gift, a 

 charity, not as a right of labor — not as an equi- 

 table proportion of earnings of profit made by 

 the men ; and the men, therefore, have not the 

 dignity, the recognition, the distinction of self- 

 provision, which labor should possess. 



If most workmen had a fund of capital, and 

 could hold sufficient shares in all enterprises in 

 which they were engaged in labor (quite a Utopian 

 condition of society not yet to be seen even dim- 

 ly), they would be merely a capitalist class, re- 

 garding work not as a dignity or duty, or hardly 

 so much an interest as a necessity. Their study 

 would soon be how to get most by the employ- 

 ment of others, how early to desert work them- 

 selves, and subsist upon the needs of those less 

 fortunate than themselves, to whom labor was 

 still an ignominious obligation. What coopera- 

 tion proposes is tliat workmen should combine to 

 manufacture, and arrange to distribute profits 

 among themselves and among all of their own 

 order whom they employ. By establishing the 

 claim of labor, as labor, to be counted as capi- 

 tal, by dividing profits on labor, they would 

 give dignity to labor, make it honorable ; they 

 would appeal to the skill, good-will, to the utmost 



