The Express.
London, England, 1867-10-01 00:00:00

THE EXPRESS, TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 1, 1867.

rO-OPERATIVI COB PARRICCE AT MANCHESTER.

A conference of the friends of co-operation wan
hel lat the Trevelyan Hotel, lllanclaster, on Friday. Mr.
Timex, HCGBpt, M.P. presided, and them was a good
attendance, which included a number of ladle'. Among
the gentlemen present were also the Venerable Archdeacon
Sandford, the Rev. W. N. Mole,worth, Mr. E. Vonsittart
Neale, Professor W. S. Jevons, Mr. W. Morrison, M.P.,
Mr. G. J. Holysake, the Rev. T. r;. Lee, Mr. Archibald
Briggs, Mr. Henry Pitman, Mr. Alderman Harwood (Bol-
ton) Mr. W. Morris, the Rev..l. I'. Hoy e, 4:c. After
luncheon, Mr. Greening opened the pruceedings by read-
ing extracts from a considerable number of letters received
from gentlemen who were unable to be present. Some
contained practical hints, which were subsequently dis-
cutirdby the conference.

Mr. 111. oir E.', M.P., read a very lengthy and ably written
address, in which he contrasted the great progress made
by the nation in prosperity since the first Reform' Act,
with the moral evils which had been developed at the same
time, and pointed to cooperation and industrial partner.
ships as the true remedies. The following abridgment of
the hon. gentleman's remarks will show the general course
of his argument. it is not enough to show that the nation
collectively is enormously richer in iota than in 11412,
and that every restriction on the production and gathering
in of wealth has been removed—other questions have to be
answered. In trade success for a nation at any rate must
depend upcn character. This or that Englishman or firm
may possibly roll up a huge fortune in a few years by the
help of puffing or trickery, lying advertisements, adulte-
rated goods, and short weight and measure, and get
off unscathed to enjoy the profits of scoundrelism
after their kind ; but there la no such fortune, no
such retreat possible for England. Unless she can retain
her character for hated work and upright dealing her trade
must go sooner or later, and with it her prosperity and the
wealth she has piled up and worshipped. How stands the
I case, then, here ? At the end of the third reign of the
trading class in these islands the British name is, we are
assured by the most trusted organs of that class, at a heavy
discount all over the commercial world, and we have a
financial crisis at home which has lasted nearly two years,
and has brought on a stagnation in the money market,
mush, I suppose, es has hardly been known for generations.
If we can trust the usual channels of information, a fear
of investment has fallen on us through the recklessness and
dishonesty of our trading and investing class, which keeps
untoldmallions idle,while for want of funds our railways,
banks, steampacket companies, nearly all combinations of
capitalists of the upper and middle clamo are trembling
on the verge of insolvency. Day after dayr for eighteen
months our journals have teemed with the reports of
failures of commercial companies and the frauds and sharp
practices of their managers. Again, as to the relations of
the producers between themselves, are not employers and
wurkpeople almost et a dead lock in every great branch of
industry ? The government of the trading class his just
left the great labour question to solve itself, and as the
national consequence what do we see now in our factories,
forges, mime, and workshops ? Is not a cry rising up
from one end of our land to the other, that we English
can in our day get no honest goods and no honest service
for our money, nothing but false weights and measures,
shoddy cloth, quack medicines, alopclothes, adulterated
food, eye-service. What is the meaning of this unprece-
dented material success and this terrible spiritual decline
lying side by side, the prodooo of the same period ? To
me, looking from a co-operative point of view, the one to
which indeed I have been accustomed for the last 20 years,
the answer MOMS plain enough. There has been a fatal
disease at the heart of our system of trade, overlooked or
denied by • nation bent withal! its energy on making money,
the results of which have been felt more and more as our
trade developed, which has now left us as it were sick unto
death. Fifty years ago the name of the English merchant
was honoured over the whole world as the type of
everything that was upright and trustworthy. What
is it that has lowered our standard? Has that
lowering any special connexion with the period of
' the supremacy of the trading class? I cannot but'
think that it has ; and I will tell you, in a few words,
the reason of my belief. The great struggle of this
time, as we all know, has been the struggle for free
trade. Probably every man in this room who is
old enough to remember it sympathised, or took
part with the free-traders in that struggle, and re-
joiced in that victory—it was a battle -fought in the
interest of consumers, or the great majority of the
nation, against producers—the small minority. The
watchwords of the free traders were " competition and
cheapness ;" and their adversaries, with their cries of
" vested interest " and " native industry " (in other words
" monopoly and dearness ") went down upon them. The
reign of free trade commenced 20 years ago, and in its
train has followed swiftly that vast materiel prosperity
to which I hays already alluded. Against free trade co-
operators have no word to say. They recognise it as the
true law of commerce ; they rejoins that their country
has been the first to acknowledge and adopt that law.
But when the means are mistaken for the end,—
' when " competition " and " chattiness," the mere
weapons with which the free trade battle in England was
fought, are set on • pedestal, and we are told to fall down
and worship them ; when we find what are falsely called
free trade maxims—such as " buy in the cheapest and sell
in the dearest market," and "enlightened self interest the
only safe regulator of human affairs," cried up as natural
laws, the truth of which is rs undisputable as that of any
law of science—we have only to protest that the worship
is idolatry and the maxim lies. Cheapness is, at the
best, • two-edged sword, as easily used against the people
as for them. Look at the kinds of labour, disgraceful to
our civilisation and Christianity, which this idolatry of
cheap production imposes on women and children in Eng-
land, at the gangs in the agricultural districts, and the
factories, which have in this very session called forth the
Hours of Labour Regulation Act. Why the faithful endea-
vour before all things, without regard to moral considera-
tions, to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market,
has resulted in that civil war between capital and labour,
employers and their workmen, which has ended legiti-
mately in Sheffield murders, the Trades Union Com-
mission, the bankruptcy, more or lees fraudulent, of half
our commercial companies, and the false weights and
measures, which are a scandal to one retail trade.
Loisseilaire has done geed service in many ways, but we
English have turned it into a superstition, and thwe is one
word which alone can describe its net results, and that is
" anarchy." Why, then, you have a right to ask, have I
spoken of • future full of hope and promise lying before
the England of 1867? I must fix your attention now on
that portion of our fellow-countrymen—the great majority
in numbers, commonly called the working class—to whom
at the end of the short thirty-five years' reign of the
middle class we are, not without grave fears and dismal
forebodings, about to entrust something like their
fair dime in the government of these kingdom&
(After describing the success achieved by the co-operative
principle in various part of England, Mr. Hughes con-
tinued : ) There stands the simple fact for timid statesmen
and journalists to look at, on all aides, and explain away if
they can. Retail trade ham become thoroughly rotten, and
neither parliament nor public opinion, s
nor the law corn*
nor the whole upper and middle classes together could find
the 'medicine for it. The working class took the matter in
hand, and have already restored tone and health to the
retail trade of half the great towns in the country, while
they have worked out a system which will complete the
core, and which the other classes of society are adopting
pure and simple from them without altering • detail
This they have done alone, with scarcely a word of council
or advice, or any active help from outside. For remem-
ber that till within the last year or two you might have
counted on your fingers the men outside their
own ranks who sympathised with the movements or
did not fear to connect themselves in any way with
it. In the face of this fact, I own myself to some impa-
tience when reeding the jeremiad. of the metropolitan
press on the "lap in the dark," to some indignation
when listening in parliament to men in high position,
as orators at any rate endeavouring to frighten society,
already nervous enough from want of knowledge, with
the picture of organisations of English working men
" launching their votes in one compact mass on the insti-
tutions and property of the country." But distribution is
but one-ball of the realm of trade. The most important,
that of production, remain& Granted that the co-opera-
tive movement in England has solved the problem in the
one case, what has it done in the other? Not much
hitherto, but enough, we may answer, to prove that in it
(in some of the forme of association that is to say) is to be
sought the true solution of that tremendous problem
commonly known as " the labour quertion." And
I would first ask of all persons wbo doubt this
in what other direction are we to look for any
help in this matter? Arbitration courts, benevo-
lent marterbcol, I suppose will be the answers.
Alas ! those who have been engaged in the struggle, or
watching it with any care for the last twenty years, can
scarcely now delude themselves into any belief that the
labour question is ever going to be settled in either of
these ways. Arbitration ! why the very name involves
two hostile camps, two armies in battle array—ready
always to grapple in the old style, and try a fall by
strike or lock-out to prove which of the two is the stronger
when the current of decision by arbitrations has been set-
ting against them. No man honours Mr. Kettle and the
other gentlemen who have organised and are working
boards of arbitration, more than I. They have done
much good and will do much more, and I hope that every
co-operator will help them whenever he can, though
he may believe as I do that arbitration is and can
never be anything more than • palliative. Can they dis-
band the two armies and make one camp of employers and
employed? If they can, all honour to them ; the goal
is gained, the problem solved. But in that case they
cut the ground from under their own feet. Arbitration
becomes meaningless. What we are at our wit's end for
is. how to have no more disastrous disputes, not a means
of settling them. Then, spin, for benevolent rnasterbood,
I should be the last to deny its beauty and nobleness.
Thank God, there always has been, there still is, much of
it in England ; but the whole tendency of our time is to
make it more and more obsolete and impracticable. At
best, too, it rests on individual lives. Let a son suc-
ceed to • brunets, or a partner join a firm, who holds the
orthodox doctrine of giving the minimum price for his
labour and getting the maximum of labour for his money,
and strikes and locks-out follow as surely so water runs
down hill when a darn breaks. Besides, how much bene-
volent maaterbood is then going amongst m just now?
Can may man ben name 5, 10, 90' firms lit which all is
well between master and man ? Bet what we want is
not a stream fertilizing • favoured spot here and
there in a dam* land, but a system of irricatiac which