Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/589

 offices of the management may soon be in their hands."

Huber reports further in this matter that most of the associations producing on a factory scale have fallen in at the outset with the general custom, evidently without any further consideration or any consciousness of a principle. Only a few have adopted the cooperative principle in favor of labor, and Huber must further admit, although very unwillingly and with a heavy heart, for he is a partisan of cooperation depending upon individual workingmen alone: "There is no doubt that this question will very soon come to discussion and decision in all the producing associations where the opposition of capital and labor exists, and that the competition of the industrial macrocosm (i. e., the world's industry as a whole) is reproduced in the coöperative microcosm (the individual world represented by the workingmen 's associations)."

You see, Gentlemen, if you reflect about these facts that great questions can be solved only in a large way, never in a small way. As long as the universal wage is determined by the above-considered law, the small associations will not be able to escape the prevailing influence of it; and what does the working class as a whole gain, or the workingman as such, whether he works for workingmen employers or for capitalist employers? Nothing! You have only scattered the employers to whose profit the result of your labor falls. But labor and the working class are not set free. "What does it gain by this? It gains only depravation, only corruption, which now takes hold of it and sets workingman as an exploiting employer against workingman. The employers have changed in person; but labor, the only source of production, remains, as before, dependent upon the so-called wage—that is, the maintenance of existence. Under the influence of this law the perversion of conceptions is so great that, in our instance, even those workingmen stockholders not employed in the factory, instead of recognizing that they owe their dividends to the labor