Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/769

Rh necessary to the maintenance of a "connection." The good will of a business year by year declines in value in the market. In some measure needless competition arises from the improved modern facilities of locomotion by virtue of a curious illusion: merchants and manufacturers seem to think that the mere aggregation of the small districts in which business was done in the past increases the area of the total market, as if taking down fences affected the aggregate acreage of contiguous farms. If the factories and warehouses engaged in the supply of the home market were distributed throughout Great Britain in sections of equal population, their over-supply would be plain.

For all the baffling difficulties which the enlargement of the area of trade has introduced into business, and all the parasitical expenses which have fastened themselves upon it, coöperation offers a remedy—a remedy, however, only to be applied as intelligence and trustworthiness advance. The costly war and waste of isolated competition are signs and tokens that men can not trust each other, and have not mutual forbearance enough to combine for common ends in securing for themselves competence and content.

The leaders of English coöperation, while busily engaged in forwarding their plans of distribution, are constantly striving to apply their principles to the more important field of production. If the identification of the interests of buyer and seller is fraught with advantage, still greater advantage awaits the successful fusion of the interests of capital and labor. Up to the present time, however, the experiments in this direction have not been promising, and the case of production now seems to stand where the case of distribution did forty or fifty years ago. Workmen are not educated up to it yet; neither, it would seem, are the men of capital. The Messrs. Briggs, at their White wood collieries, divided for several years a percentage of their profits among their employees, leaving for their own share a sum larger than they believed would have come to them under the usual system of hiring. A plan similar to that of the Messrs. Briggs has been followed by Messrs. Fox, Head & Co., at Middleborough. Another method adopted extensively in Yorkshire and Lancashire is for workmen to invest their savings in shares of joint-stock manufacturing companies. The vast business now conducted by coöperative stores has in some measure opened up a path for cooperative manufacturing, but to an extent very limited in proportion to the business transacted, and in a manner very remote from perfect coöperation. At the Leicester shoe-factory and elsewhere the workmen are hired for wages, just as ordinary capitalists hire, and have no share in profits. The difficulties of managing a store are not few, but they are far less troublesome than conducting production on purely coöperative principles. When every workman in a concern has a voice and vote, in the present state of morals and intelligence, the disputes are interminable as to their respective rates of payment, the proportions of profit which shall be divided between capital,