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capable of seating 1,500 persons comfortably. The number of members exceeded 7,000, the business reached 60,000l. a quarter, the profits 40,000l. a year, and the assets of the society 120,000l.

But I am running away from my text. There have been other examples in plenty, as remarkable though not so well known as that of Rochdale; but it is with the movement as a whole, not with individual cases, that we are concerned. It may be said to have begun, then, in 1844. For the next few years it struggled on slowly but surely. The first meeting of representatives of the different stores and associations met at Bury, and afterwards in Manchester, in 1851, to consult and take measures for obtaining legal recognition, and for concerting joint action. There were forty-four societies represented, and the delegates drew up rules for the guidance of the Co-operative movement. To these rules-this first public statement of the objects of the Co-operative Parliament -I must return presently. The inconvenience of having to carry on trade without a legal status was remedied in the next year by the passing of the first Industrial and Provident Societies Act, which gave a corporate existence, and powers of suing and being sued, to all societies of persons carrying on their trade in common who chose to register under it. From the time of its legal recognition the progress of the movement has been as rapid as that flood of riches of which I spoke in my former paper. The Government Returns for 1870-only eighteen years from the passing of the first Act-show that in that year there were upwards of 1,500 registered societies, numbering some half-million of members (each of whom, we must recollect, is the head of a family). These societies distributed amongst their members more than 8,000,000l. of goods, and returned to them 467,1647. in bonuses on their purchases.

But here we are met by the old question. This mere progress in numbers and wealth is nothing to the purpose in itself. It may well have demoralized and divided, instead of strengthening and uniting, and then it had better not have happened at all. How is this? Well, in this case I am glad to be able to answer confidently and hopefully. The wealth has been well earned, is being well spent. From the very first the Co-operators-these poor

men, these weavers, cobblers, laborers— have deliberately and steadily repudiated the current commercial principles and practices. They are societies for fellow work and mutual help. They have fought no battle for high or low prices, and have no such battle to fight. They claim to stand on the principle of combining the interests of producers and consumers; they hold, one and all, as their distinctive doctrine, that inasmuch as the life of nine-tenths of mankind must be spent in labor-in producing and distributing, buying and selling-moral considerations must be made to govern these operations; and anything worth calling success in them must depend, not upon profits but upon justice. For the ideas "cheapness" and "dearness," they have deliberately substituted "fair prices," and their whole life has been a struggle, not, of course, free from backslidings and falls, to reach that ideal.

I mentioned the first Congress of 1851 just now. At that gathering the following resolution was carried unanimously and by acclamation, after a number of others, in not one of which is there any mention of profits. It runs: "That the various Co-operative stores of England should use all their efforts to prevent the sale of adulterated articles, inasmuch as the Co-operative movement is by its very constitution open and honest in its dealings; and that any departure from the strictest honesty in dealing is a gross violation of the principles and intentions of Co-operation." Now, just compare this first public announcement with the prospectus of an ordinary trading company, silent as to everything but profits, and I think you will feel that the atmosphere is different. But it is one thing to pass virtuous resolutions, and another to live up to them. How far have the Co-operators been able to do this? Here again I can answer, consistently, and on the whole successfully. Their system has been, on the whole, faithfully worked by men who have devoted their lives to it, and have remained as poor as they began. They have never lost sight of or lowered their original aims. One striking contrast between the ordinary trade system and theirs will be worth yards of talk. We all know how up-hill, almost desperate, a battle the founder of a new business has to fight in the competitive world. Every neighbor

looks on him as an enemy and an intruder, and tries to break him down as fast, as possible by underselling him, or in any other available way. In the Co-operative system the new comer is welcomed and helped. The great wholesale Co-operative Society at Manchester has been established for this special purpose, one of its most prominent objects being "to consolidate and extend the movement by enabling small societies to purchase their goods on the most advantageous terms-thus securing them from imposition in the days of their infancy and inexperience." In this way the weakest village store gets precisely the same advantages in purchasing its few shillings' worth of goods as Halifax, Oldham, or Rochdale, with their monthly thousands.

But it is impossible to bring before you in the space I have at my disposal anything like proofs of a tithe of the good which this movement has done; how it is steadily strengthening and purifying the daily lives of a great section of our people. I wish I could induce all here to look into the matter carefully for themselves. Meantime I may say that it has in the first place delivered the poor in a number of our great towns from the credit system, which lay so hard on them twenty years ago for the Co-operative system is founded scrupulously on ready-money dealings. Next it has delivered the poor from adulterated goods and short weight and measure. It has developed amongst them honesty, thrift, forethought, and made them feel that they cannot raise themselves without helping their neighbors.

The management of business concerns of this magnitude has developed an extraordinary amount of ability among the leading members, who in committees, and as secretaries and buyers, conduct the affairs of the stores throughout the country. As their funds have accumulated they have been invested in corn mills and cotton mills, most of which have been managed with great ability and honesty, and are returning large profits. There have been failures, of course, as there must be in all movements; but in scarcely any cases have these been owing to the deep-seated dishonesty, the lying, the puffing, and trickery, which have brought down in disgraceful ruin so many of our joint-stock companies. I have been speaking hitherto chiefly of the societies known as Co-ope

rative stores which are concerned with distribution; but associations for production are now multiplying, and at least as great results may be looked for from them. In those few which I have had the opportunity of watching, I can speak with the greatest confidence of the admirable influence they have exercised on the character and habits of the associates. But I prefer to call in here the testimony of one who has had as much experience and done as much work for the Co-operative movement in England as any living man. "If,” writes Mr. Ludlow, "a co-operative workshop has sufficient elements of vitality to outlast the inevitable storms and struggles of its first few years, it begins to develop a most remarkable series of results. Cooperation first expels from the shop drunkenness, and all open disorder, which are found wholly inconsistent with its success; introducing in their stead a number of small adjustments and contrivances of a nature to facilitate work, or promote the comfort of the worker. By degrees it exterminates in turn the small tricks and dishonesties of work which the opposition of interests between the employers and employed too often excuses in the worker's eyes; it is felt to be the interest of each and all that all work should be good—that no time should be lost. Fixity of employment meanwhile, coupled with a common interest, creates new ties between man and man, suggests new forms of fellowship, till there grows up a sort of family feeling, the only danger of which is, its becoming exclusive towards the outside. Let this state of things last a while and there is literally developed a new type of working man, endued not only with that honesty and frankness, that kindness and true courtesy which distinguish the best specimens of the order wherever they may be placed, but with a dignity and self-respect, a sense of conscious freedom, which are peculiar to the co-operator. The writer met with such a type first in the Associations Ouvrières of Paris. He has since had the happiness of seeing it reproduced, with variations as slight as the differences of nationality might render unavoidable, in English co-operative workshops; and he therefore believes that its development may be confidently looked forward to as a normal result of co-operative production."

These two parallel movements-differing fundamentally in their principles and

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objects have had this in common, that rulers, this period has been an industrial they have done more than all other causes one, and that class may well point with put together to raise the condition of the pride to its achievements, and claim that great mass of the working people. By in- the sturdiness and energy which carried creasing manifold their power and weight, England so triumphantly through the great they have at last won for them a place side revolutionary war have not failed her in by side with the other classes of the com- their keeping. The contrast between munity; and have given them a large share Great Britain in 1832 and 1867 is indeed in, if not the ultimate control of, the gov- astounding. In 1832 no railway ran into ernment and the destinies of our country. London, no iron ship had been built, and While they were disorganized they were no steamer had crossed the ocean. The powerless. They have found out the worth power of carrying out great enterprises by of organization, and are perfecting it in associated capital, did not exist except by both directions with an energy which must special privilege. All the necessaries of have very serious results for the whole na- life-air, light, and food-were heavily tion. That much of what they are doing taxed. The press was shackled by stamp in their Trades Unions is causing alarm, duties and paper duties. The Post Office and raising a spirit of hostility to these was a hindrance rather than a help to comorganizations throughout the country, is munication. The Poor Laws were pauplain to the most careless observer. I am perizing and degrading the nation. We not here to defend many of their acts and were even then the workshop of the world, much of their policy. I feel the truth of but a shop in which the workers were many of the accusations which are brought hampered and trammelled by bandages of against them of their carelessness of the all kinds, which look to us now inconceivacommon weal in the pursuit of their own bly mischievous and childish. On their ends; of the tyranny which they some- advent to power the middle class found times exercise over minorities in their own themselves bound hand and foot. They body; of the deterioration in work, the have burst every bond. The period bedawdling and incompetence which in many tween the two Reform Bills set all these trades are not unjustly laid at their door. fiscal confusions and absurdities straight. It has covered the land with railways, and all seas with iron steamers; the earth is belted by the telegraphs of English companies. Every restriction on the association of capital has disappeared. Food and light are untaxed to rich and poor. All imposts enhancing the cost of consumption are gone, or are so reduced as to be no longer burdensome. We have the New Poor Law, an improvement at any rate on the old, and leaving perhaps little to be desired from a middle class point of view. have the penny post and a free press. In the same period the capital of the country has multiplied at the rate Mr. Gladstone has told us. These are the fruits of the admission of the middle classes to their fair share in the government of the countryno mean fruits, surely, and attained in the active life of one generation. There are still men in the House of Commons who sat in it before 1832. The representative man of the best side of this period, Mr. Gladstone, to whom the great financial reforms which followed the repeal of the Corn Laws are due more than to any other, was already then in the full vigor of manhood.

But before we blame them for these things, let us glance back at the history of the country during the last fifty years, the period of the immense development of our material prosperity, and see whether there is not another side to the picture, whether much may not be pleaded on their side in mitigation.

Fifty years ago the intensely national and aristocratic system under which England had lived for centuries, and which had carried her through the great struggle with Napoleon, with so much glory and at such fearful cost, was tottering to its fall. Happily for the nation the cost broke down the system, and in 1832 the first Reform Bill brought the middle class fairly into partnership in the government of the British Empire-indeed, in the last resort (as has been proved so often since), handed over to them the ultimate controlling power. During the next thirty-five years, whenever they have been deeply moved, all opposition has gone down before them. Those years therefore stand out as a distinct period in our history, unlike and apart from anything which went before them. With the trading class as ultimate

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But what did this same period of middle-class ascendency do for the working classes?

The great free-trade struggle was its culminating point, the repeal of the Corn Laws its crowning victory. A middle-class victory, it is true, but carried by the help of the working classes in the great towns, with whom the cry of the cheap loaf did good service. But it was not the appeal to their pockets which carried the working classes into the free-trade camp. Far more powerful than the cheap-loaf cry with them was the grand, if somewhat vague, teaching of the free-trade leaders, of a reign of peace and universal good-will between nations, which the overthrow of aristocratic and commercial monopolies, and the breaking down of restrictions on trade, was to inaugurate. I have no space here to prove the point, but let those who doubt it take one recent instance of the comparative power of self-interest and of high principle with the masses of our people. I refer to their conduct during the American war and the cotton famine, when the chance of averting want from their homes was resolutely put aside lest the cause of the slave in America should be imperilled. Does any man doubt now that, if our operatives had cried out for breaking the blockade, Napoleon's insidious proposals for intervention would have been accepted, and the Southern negroes would have remained enslaved to this day? I own it seems to me -and I say it with some shame for my own class-that, in our great free-trade struggle, the only part of our people which has nothing now to regret for the part they took is the working class. Our territorial aristocracy and their retainers fought for their monopoly. Our trading classes preached justice, freedom, and the vital interests which are common to all nations; but what they fought for was, as the last quarter of a century has shown too clearly, not any commercial millennium in which honest goods and just prices should reign, but the greatest possible facilities for buy-. ing cheap and selling dear. Our working class seized on the noble and human side of the teaching of their natural leaders are still, indeed, proclaiming that "labor is of no country," that "all nations are meant to live in peace and friendship”—but have protested by the two movements we have been considering to-night against the notion that the world is to be saved and set

right by unlimited competition; and they have been hitherto the class which has taken least by the results of the struggle. Laissez faire may have done great things for other classes; for them it has only proved a hard taskmaster, and the new period of our history, which commenced in 1867, when the sceptre passed from the middle class, and the first years of which have been so full of change, will witness the struggle between that central belief of the middle-class period and the belief in, and practice of, organization, which has carried our working classes (who are after all, be it remembered, the great majority of the nation) into partnership with the upper and middle classes. The middle-class period, they will remember, left the labor question almost untouched; and it was not till they had gained a voice in legislation that the Masters and Servants Bill, the Trades Unions Bill, the Hours of Labor Regulation Act, and the Mines Regulations Bill have become law. Bearing these things in mind, and remembering also how new and strange the feeling of power must be to them, I think we shall be prepared to make great allowances, even for the doings of Trades Unions.

The other column of the industrial organizations of the working classes has no need to ask for indulgent criticism, and will bear the keenest without wincing. They have never been aggressive. They have never even negatively encouraged idleness, or class jealousies, or kept back the industrious and skilled worker, or protested against piece-work. They have wrought out the emancipation of their own members by patience, and diligence, and honest dealing; and are giving proofs, sorely needed amongst us, that trade and commerce, production, distribution, consumption, may be made to conform themselves to the ordinary moral laws which have been accepted, in theory at least, by the whole of Christendom for eighteen hundred years. The great reform, like the greatest of all reforms, has come from below; and our upper classes are now beginning to imitate the example of the poor weavers and cobblers, often however in their imitations leaving out the best part of their models, and setting up what are nothing but ready-money shops, founded merely with a view to profits, and calling them co-operative stores.

If I am right as to the leading ideas of

our working classes, it is obvious, then, that one of the chief problems of civilization which must soon come to the front will be the proper functions of Government. They do not share the creed of advanced Liberalism, the intense jealousy of Government except in the capacity of policemen. The taking over of the railways, a more active interference with sanitary matters, with pauperism-with the liberty of the subject, in short-will have no terrors for them. They will not be deterred, I take it, by such phrases as "grandmotherly government," from insisting that society shall be organized precisely to that point where organization will be found to act most beneficially on the habits and life of the great majority of the nation. I venture to think that when they get to understand these matters better, there will be no difficulty in taking legislative means to stop strikes. Legislation of a new kind will be pressed on the Government with increasing persistence. The country will have to consider how far it will go in new directions, and will have no more difficult and delicate questions to consider. I have little fear myself that we shall go too far, for certainly the first two experiments, the Hours of Labor Regulation Act and the Habitual Criminals Act, have not furnished the opponents of " grandmotherly government" with any arguments in favor of their views. I can answer from my own knowledge of the benefits conferred by the former, at the expense, I firmly believe, of no liberty which any citizen had a right to use. Of the working of the second I have the knowledge gained from parliamentary papers.

I do not propose to detain you with the reasons which induced the present Government to break entirely new ground in this matter. Suffice it to say, that on the 11th of August, 1869, an Act introduced by the Home Secretary became law under the title of "The Habitual Criminals Act, 1869."

It has been the fashion to speak of Mr. Bruce as a weak Minister, timid in his political faiths, and easily turned from his purpose by any resolute opposition. I am not one of those who agree with this estimate of him; and certainly the Habitual Criminals Act (and the Prevention of Crime Act, 1871, which has followed it) cannot be cited as timid legislation. So far as the present question is concerned,

the important parts of this new legislation are-first, that it gives the police power to arrest, and the magistrates to imprison, any person holding a license under the Penal Servitude Acts (commonly called a "ticket-of-leave") whom the police have reason to believe is getting a livelihood by dishonest means; and secondly, that in the case of proceedings against receivers of stolen goods, it makes a previous conviction evidence of knowledge on the part of the accused that the goods were stolen, and throws the burden of proving the contrary on the accused. Now these are very startling provisions. We all know that the maxims, "Every man shall be held innocent until proved guilty," "The burden of proof rests on the accuser," lie at the root of English criminal law. I suppose that every Englishman values them as most precious safeguards of liberty, and would be ready to fight for them if necessary. I certainly would myself, and it was with something very like misgiving that I silently assented at last in the House of Commons to the facts and arguments of the Home Secretary, and gave my humble support to the Government. The result has been striking, and well worth the careful consideration of all persons interested in these questions. In the year 1869, in the autumn of which the Habitual Criminals Act was passed, the number of houses of receivers of stolen goods, and of houses of known bad character, reached the highest figure ever attained in England since reliable records of such matters have been kept. Their total number was 15,030. In the following year the number fell to 13,081, and in 1871 to 11,072. In the same period the houses of notoriously bad character, the resort of thieves and their companions, were reduced from 1,740 to 1,139. The reduction of these nests of vice and crime was in the first full year during which the Act was in operation, as compared with the average of the previous three years, equal to 26 per cent., and in the next year (1871) to 36.8 per cent.

The strife between employer and employed, the question of the proper limits of the functions of Government, the inevitable collision between the principle of laissez faire and the faith in organization which the working classes will endeavor to express by legislation as soon as they feel their power, are only superficial indications after all of a far deeper struggle.

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