586 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ties to whicli I alluded at the outset, difficulties which must, I think, 

 have been present to the mind of Locke, when he recorded, in the 

 commonplace-book published by Lord King, the remarkable aphorism 

 that " the doctrine proves the miracles, rather than the miracles the 

 doctrine." Contemporary Heview. 



-- 



THE FUNCTIONS OF ASSOCIATION IN ITS EELATION 



TO LABOK. 



By "WILLIAM B. WEEDEN. 



rriHE writer is a member of a copartnership chiefly devoted to the 

 JL business of manufacturing textile fabrics. Within twenty years 

 this firm has divided interests in different mills with eight persons, 

 who acted as superintendents or assistant superintendents of the mills 

 in which they were engaged. These combinations were of the nature 

 of industrial partnerships, and proved uniformly successful. Of these 

 eight persons, two were originally factory accountants, two were fin- 

 ishing overseers, and four were weaving overseers ; all were men who 

 had served long in the factories, and were outgrowths from factory- 

 life. If it be true that in the armies of Napoleon every private car- 

 ried a marshal's hdton in his knapsack, or, as Sydney Smith puts it, 

 if every English curate is a possible bishop, then these industrial 

 combinations must have produced better cloth for the people and a 

 better life in the makers of the cloth, or the laborers who were con- 

 fined in the factories. The firm owned or controlled ample capital 

 for their enterprises, and employed the laborers. It needs no argu- 

 ment to show that the business was more thoroughly done because 

 these industrial partners wei*e taken from among the laborers ; and it 

 is likewise evident that each rank of laborers was elevated and stimu- 

 lated by these promotions. 



Under that modei'n system of organization which unites the labor- 

 ers into one mass, striving to obtain the highest price for their ser- 

 vices, and combines employers in another assembly seeking to obtain 

 labor at the lowest price, oi;r industrial partnerships would have been 

 impossible. If close combinations resulting in certain antagonism, 

 such as has prevailed in England for a generation, had existed here, 

 then no links could have reached across from the chain of laborers on 

 the one side to the chain of employers and capitalists on the other. 

 These combinations are growing in America ; the life they foreshadow 

 must differ from the industrial life described above. It was this 

 thought which led me to consider the matter, and to try to ascertain 

 the true functions of association. The topic is broader than my 

 theme, and enters into all phases of civilized society, but I would con- 



