Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/611

Rh per annum. "These manufacturing enterprises have not, however, been conducted on co-operative lines. ... The work-people in their factories are not co-operators. They do not share in the profits of the business. They receive simply the market rate of wages." They are on just as bad terms with their co-operative employers as they would be with individual capitalists, and they have endeavored to better their condition by entering upon strikes; or, in other words, the great Co-operative Distribution Society managers, in Great Britain, finding that it was essential to their success as manufacturing producers, have adopted, without scruple, all the methods and rules that prevail in similar establishments which have been incorporated and are managed solely with a view to the profit of their individual capitalists or stock-holders."

But this is not the whole story. Besides these great wholesale co-operative distribution societies which have engaged in manufacturing, there are a large number of smaller and weaker similar societies in Great Britain which are also attempting to manufacture the same description of goods for the profit of their more limited circle of members; and these last now complain that they are absolutely unable to withstand the competition of the larger wholesale societies, which, purchasing labor at the lowest rate in the open market, denying any participation of profit to their workmen, and working upon the largest scale, are enabled to produce and sell cheaper. "So that all the disastrous effects of unlimited and unscrupulous competition, for which co-operation was expected to be a cure, are showing themselves among the co-operators, and another example is to be added to the record of modern economic experience, of the strong industrial and commercial organizations devouring the weak."

An element of international character and importance, growing out of the improvements in production through machinery, should also not be overlooked. Whatever of advantage one country may have formerly enjoyed over another by reason of absolute or comparative low wages, is now, so far as the cost of machine-made goods is concerned, through the destruction of handicrafts, and the extended use and improvements in machinery, being rapidly reduced to a minimum. For, apart from any enhancement of cost by taxes upon imports, there is at present but very little difference in all countries of advanced civilization in the cost of machinery, of the power that moves it, or of the crude materials which it converts into manufactures. The machine, therefore, which enables the labor of one man to dispense with the cheap labor of ten men, practically reduces any advantage which the manufacturer in France, Germany, or other countries, paying nominally low wages, has heretofore had over the manufacturer of England, or of the United States, to the simple difference in the cost of the labor of the operative who manages the machine in different places; and all experience shows that the invariable concomitant of