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Its members were commonly known as the "Christian Socialists." They had but scant success, and in 1854 dissolved the Association and founded instead a "Working Men's College" in London, which long remained a centre of coöperative and reformatory agitation. So far, this effort to extend and regulate the movement came rather from outside sympathizers than from coöperators themselves.
Men were, and ought to be, equal cooperators, not only in politics, but in industries and all the affairs of life. All the citizens are participants in the sovereign authority. Their sovereignty is inalienable; power may be transmitted, but not will; if the people promise to obey, it dissolves itself by the very act if there is a master, there is no longer a people.
I recall my enthusiasm on the day when I set forth to lecture at New Harmony, Indiana, for I had early been thrilled by the tale of Robert Owen, as every young person must be who is interested in social reform; I was delighted to find so much of his spirit still clinging to the little town which had long ago held one of his ardent experiments, although the poor old cooperators, who for many years claimed friendship at Hull-House because they heard that we "had once tried a cooperative coal association," might well have convinced me of the persistency of the cooperative ideal.
It keeps three boys busy all day covering the territory between the cooperators' homes. The delivery system is essential because the membership is scattered throughout the entire city. There are fourteen employees in the grocery and bakery.
One of the old-time cooperators denounced the modern method as "too much like cut-throat business" and declared himself in favor of "principles which may have failed over and over again, but are nevertheless as sound as the law of gravitation." Mr.
New Statesman, May 30, 1916. "Special Supplement on the Cooperative Movement." Indeed the success of the consumer's cooperative movement in European countries has been marvellous, even measured by bare figures. In all Europe in 1914, there were about 9,000,000 cooperators of whom one-third lived in Great Britain and not less than two and a half millions in Germany.
There was even more on the business side of country life: how Marty had joined forces with the Grange and the county agent and the cooperators of the creamery and the elevator and the school teachers. And so on, and so on. J.W. would be the last to worry about such a program; it just fitted his ideas. But it made him a little more interested in the Sunday services.
But the experiments had been foredoomed anyway, through the incompatibility of producers' cooperation with trade unionism. The cooperators, in their eagerness to get a market, frequently undersold the private employer expecting to recoup their present losses in future profits. In consequence, the privately employed wage earners had to bear reductions in their wages.
To control agricultural production in that way would necessitate a financial operation which the State would shrink from, and which it would be impossible for urban cooperators to finance. We had better make up our minds to let farmers be syndicalists, controlling entirely the processes of agricultural production themselves.
Eventually when the Order had grown to include nearly all useful members of society so the plan contemplated it would control practically the whole market and cooperative production would become the rule rather than the exception. So far, therefore, as "First Principles" went, the Order was not an instrument of the "class struggle," but an association of idealistic cooperators.
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