great good can be bought without a price? The march of society to its most signal triumphs is always over the wounded and the slain. Our business is to go on with all humanity and tenderness, but still to go on. There is sacrifice in advancing, but there is neither safety nor honour in retreat.

Working men, once enabled to act together as the owners of a joint capital, will soon find their whole view of the relations between capital and labour undergo a radical alteration. They will learn what anxiety and toil it costs to hold even a small concern together in tolerable order; what amazing difficulties there are in the way of organizing, by voluntary consent, that industrial discipline which capital now enforces; and what losses, what cruel disappointments in markets, what trembling uncertainties, may carry off the mind of the owner of capital in painful abstraction when the children are on the knee at the fireside, or may whiten the hair on a sleepless pillow. Operatives who go through this experience will find not only their thoughts, but their sympathies enlarged. They will grow both in wisdom and in charity.

Partnership an Instrument of Social Improvement.

Upon such narrow grounds of policy, then, as might be suggested by a mere zeal for the safety of property, facilities should be given for partnership amongst working men; but my advocacy of them does not rest upon these grounds. The joint-stock principle appears to me to be an instrument of immense latent capacities for elevating the condition of the whole labouring class to a higher grade, both of material comfort and of intellectual and moral cultivation, than they have yet attained. It is, therefore, their clear and undoubted right to have the use of this instrument, and those who would withhold it from them must do so at their peril. Already they show that they are not incapable of wielding it with effect. Joint

stock enterprises have been set on foot by working men, and in the teeth of all legal obstructions have been carried to a successful issue. Many have failed, but some have completely succeeded, and, in such a case, one success outweighs a hundred failures. Every failure is a warning, every success is an example. The failure in each case serves, as it were, to mark some new rock in the chart of the industrial navigation, but the single success is the discovery of a deep and spacious harbour in which whole navies may ride in safety.

The form in which the principle of working-class partnership has been most successful, is that of co-operative stores. In some of the large manufacturing towns, as at Rochdale and Leeds, stores for the distribution of various articles of consumption, and mills for grinding corn, have been set up, and are now in operation. The shareholders sought to obtain two things: first, to secure articles perfectly free from adulteration; and, secondly, to obtain them as nearly as possible at wholesale prices. Their belief is, that in both ways they have succeeded. To me it would seem that the gain in either way can be at best but slight, if the joint-stock plan be compared with that of obtaining the articles from an equally large store of a private capitalist, and whatever the gain may be, of course it involves the risk of mismanagement, and of loss to the capital invested; but if the parties concerned believe that there is a gain, and that the gain is worth the risk, and if they go on steadily with this scheme of co-operative distribution, acquiring from day to day new powers of industrial combination, learning to look at many questions from a point of view at which they never stood before, and constantly growing in habits of mutual trust, then the worth of the whole process, considered merely as one of practical education, is inestimable, and it is quite certain that by means of it they are qualifying themselves for safely undertaking, at a future period, schemes of wider scope and greater difficulty. But the co-operative store is not the only form in which this kind of partnership has been successfully carried

out. The reader of Mr. Mill's work is aware that, both in England and in France, and still more in the United States, enterprises of greater difficulty have been carried on, in joint shares, held either wholly, or partly and in conjunction with employers, by working men. It is not necessary to repeat what he has already placed in so striking a light, but it is well to point out that the path, upon which it is here contended that the working class should be encouraged to advance, is exactly the same path in which the middle class has moved on before them, with as much difficulty, as many stumblings, and in the face of as many prophecies of disaster, as any that can attend the efforts of those who may follow.

Joint-Stock Undertakings by the Middle Classes.

The power of acting upon the principle of joint-stock cooperation is one which has been slowly and gradually acquired by the middle class, and at each new step in the progress, though, as it ascends, the eye is ever sweeping over a wider future, the foot sinks in pitfalls and morasses, and the labouring hand is cut and wounded by those thorns and sharp rocks which beset the paths of all pioneers. Fifty years ago none of the great joint-stock enterprises of the present day would have seemed more than the dream of a projector. As late as 1826, men of much wisdom and foresight were persuaded that the liberty then given for the formation of joint-stock banks of issue would lead to fearful abuses. The experiment was tried, however; the new and extraordinary powers which it involved. were entrusted to the middle class, and, whatever mistakes may have been made during the five-and-twenty years of its continuance, it is probable that not one of its original opponents would now hesitate to admit both its pecuniary success and its admirable effect as a discipline upon those concerned in the operation. At a later period the still larger enterprises for the formation of railways were undertaken, upon calculations so vast and complex as to involve hazards beyond all previous

experience. Disastrous errors were indeed committed, and it is not to be denied that the mismanagement of many railway boards was stained by something worse than miscalculation, by reckless and scandalous abuse of trust, which admits of no palliation. But seeing the wholesome and general indignation which that misconduct excited, and seeing too the vigorous and effectual efforts made in so many cases to retrieve that disorder, it must also be acknowledged that here again there has been a discipline, however dearly bought, which will yield valuable results hereafter.

Moral Aids to Co-operation.

The working classes, who now show so much eagerness in all the great towns to make new trials of the same prolific principle which in the hands of the middle class has wrought such wonders, ought to have not only legal facilities, but such friendly encouragement as those who are interested in their improvement may be able to afford them. There is great shallowness of mind in that economical purism which condemns as illegitimate all help or patronage which is not obtained on the hardest terms of the market. If a promising enterprise can be helped through a feeble infancy by generous sympathy, until it acquires strength to stand alone, it is not an evil, but a double good, for the mere economical triumph is then instrumental in creating those moral bonds by which classes are most firmly linked together. All that is important in such cases is, to see that the stamina are sound, and that the nursing need be only temporary; but this is necessary, for unless the elements of strength and future self-support exist, all bolstering by friendly loans and patronage is cruelty under the disguise of charity.

Neither have we any right to exclude the influence of generous motives amongst the members of the working classes themselves. It is true that schemes which depend for success on the daily and hourly operation of a higher range of motives

than those which are found to govern men, will be swept away by the first wave which reaches a foundation so sandy; but it is not true that great temporary sacrifices may not be made, and successfully made, for the establishment of a favourite scheme, and wherever the disposition to do this exists, it deserves not repression, but admiration. Amongst the cooperative societies of Paris there were striking instances of this. One which was composed of cabinet-makers, went on working for weeks, scarcely able to obtain a customer-seeing their little capital gradually sinking,—yet with patient zeal and care still finishing piece after piece of their beautiful workmanshipand, nobler still, sharing such means as they had, so as to sustain all by the same equal slender allowance, until, having endured almost to the point of starvation, their heroic devotion was crowned at last by the appreciation of the public with complete success1. Who can contemplate a case of that sort without feeling that the personal qualities evinced in it are of infinitely more worth than keenness in driving bargains, or the caution which believes all men to be uniformly selfish? There is no class of the English population which contains finer elements of character than that of artizans or skilled labourers. The upper and middle classes know them chiefly from what takes place in strikes, and misjudge them accordingly. Combinations and strikes are the result of their deep conviction that the interests of capital are in irreconcilable opposition to those of labour, and that in the present industrial arrangements of society they get less than justice. Place them in a position in which truer views of reality will give their impulses fair play, and it may come to pass that they will teach us all unexpected moral lessons.

The account is in one of the earlier numbers of the Christian Socialist. I am not sure that the success of this deeply interesting enterprise has not been endangered or destroyed under the present Government of France, from the suspicion that the co-operative bodies were politically dangerous.