The Express.
London, England, 1861-10-22 00:00:00

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Ts a:s;;;;. 31C 47.7.:::-Arrsii«.—. 3h. shim.
Mh hithessaa. 41‘.

LOSDON, TUESDAY, (T. 22.

TO OUR ItZADIRIL

s voIITING LVIIILLIOViCF-

A !ate ~liti..o of the Liras is published every
mooing .11aria$4 the racing se sow containing the
results el the day's Meg.

LAXT Friday we drew attention to the largeness
of the autos whiilt the working classes are able to
throw away iti strikes, the readiness with which I
for a cherished purpose they can make immense
sacrifices of labour and money. Two-and-twenty
thousand pounds were spent on the Builders'
Strike of 18:i9-60. And the workmen of the Lon-
don trades have just resolved to pay &pound a week
to each of two hundred and fifty masons who refuse
to work melee the "hour system." Few persons
can have reflected on these facts without a feeling
of sorrow, awl almost of humiliation at so much
voluntary wade of power. of the large expendi-
ture two years ago nothing remains but the
vouchers. No workman was a farthing the better
for it. It will be the same with the money now
being subscribed for the masons voluntarily unoccu-
pied. That handful of men will absorb large sums
of hard-earned money for a time, and then, when
either their comrades are tired of subscribing, or
they themselves are ashamed of leading an idle
life, they will go to work.
Many who are not anxious to be judges in the
dispute between the masters and the men are
asking why should this waste, and what is worse,
this morel degradation, go on? The workmen are
discontented with the existing relations between
labour and capital : they say that in the distribu-
tion of the products they do not get their fair share.
It is this feeling that underlies their ever-recurring
strikes. They are undoubtedly wrong in looking
at the connexion of master and workman as a
partnership, instead of as one which is determined
simply by exchange—but let that pies. Let us
take the men in the attitude and with the
disposition in which we find them. And
we are at once struck with the fact that while
quarrelling with capital they have the source of
capital in their hands. That source is not labour,
as some delusively tell them, but abstinence. They
are now abstaining from the enjoyment of the
fruits of industry to keep two hundred and fifty
good workmen from doing work that is wanted.
But in the very act of depriving themselves of the
money they waste it in expenditure even more un-
productive than the wages of the man in plush who
jumps up behind a rich man's carriage. Suppose
now that instead of devoting the money to prolong
idleness, they were to combine it to employ labour
—make capital of it. Two hundred and fifty
pounds a week is a thousand pounds a month ; and
the sum might be doubled or quadrupled were an
end proposed adequate to the effort.
This, it will be said, is co-operation. It is, and
co-operation—the formation of societies of working
men, acting on their own account, without the
intervention of an employer, and dividing the
whole profits of their labour—is what we re-
commend. Not absolutely ; not as that which
has been scientifically ascertained to be su-
perior to individual competition as a meats
of combining capital and labour and distri-
buting their joint produce, but rather acknow-
ledging it to be an inferior system, and yet for
all that the best one to follow under the circum-
stances. Some of these circumstances we will
briefly mention. In the first place, the spirit of
elms association is at this time stronger among the
workmen of England than it his been at any pre-
vious period of our history, and it insists on taking
form and body. A writer in the Weshaissater
Ra-
view, Professor Dustier, in an article defending
the principle of trades unions, tells us
that " the feeling of working men, whether
" unionists or not, is almost unanimous in favour
"of the societies ;" that " the men actually en-
" rolled in those bodies are the very flower of the
" trade ;" and that " their leaders are, as a re-
" neral rule, able and high minded men." As
instances of their aptitude iu dealing with large
/UM of money, lie mentions that in 1858 the
Amalgamated Engineers expended 82,3261., re-
taining a balance of 28,7221. The income of the
Mmons' Society is about 15,0001. a year. Sums
of this magnitude are handled by men earning
thirty or thirty-five shillings a week. The circum-
stance that we are compelled to regard Professor
Berm-yen argument as radically defective, and the
tendency of his article pernicious, does not blind
ua to the evidence he brings forward es to the
strength of the associative principle among the
classes who live by bodily labour. That principle
will assert itself. Hitherto, we hold, it has
led to much idleness and waste. It is time it
should appear as a constructive power. The ems
of the builders seems to be one in which a co-
operative society would supply an organ adapted
to the circumstances of the trade, and capable
of taking up the labour which the present dispute
has divorced from capital.

The very fact of the dwatufaction of the work-
men with the results of the prevailing relation of
capital and labour, apart from all question as to
its reasonableness, makes the institution of • co-
operative society for the working builders desira-
ble. It is in vain to reason with excited clam
feelings, and worse than vain to ►ppeal to what is
called "public opinion" against the men. Such ap-
peals have hitherto been made on the ground of a
supposed interest in society adverse to the workmen.
The general community has first been made au
interested party in the dispute, and then appealed
to for an impartial judgment. Such procedure, of
course, only envenoms Om strife. It is not by
waggon loads of tracts on political economy