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Untitled Article
We had ourselves hedged our minds round about with the sevenfold shield , fabricated by misinformation , and fastened on by prejudice . We ridiculed , as became our truly respectable condition in life , the notion of living without masters or servants ; we talked , with easy volubility ^ of equalized intellects and community of wives ; and we were accustomed ,, at proper intervals ^ to retail , in the true Copperas style , our routine jokes about the plethoric
indolence to be produced by communities ; and about dukes and dustmen , marchionesses and milk-maidens c living together , working their quarter of an hour a day , systematized into equality and parallelogrammed into concord * . ' There is , however , a time for all things ; and when we read such a statement of the condition of the working classes as that presented by Dr . Kay , of Manchester , —when "we see , amidst all the whirl , and bustle , and fever of excitement , which the commercial world exhibits , the difficulties which persons in the happy middle ranks find in directing their sons
to any pursuit which is not pre-occupied to excess ;—when we consider the reduced profits of the masters , bolstered up as far as possible by the sadly reduced wages of the workers , and by the pernicious alchemy which coins the blood and spirits of hapless and joyless infancy f into the odd halfpence and farthings ;—when we perceive , through the whole band and chorus of society , a grand ,
resistless , and prevalent thorough-bass of present discontent , and painful anticipation , we incline to the imagination that there is something in our existing predicament which ought to be changed . When we see the working-classes energetically bent on effecting or at least attempting , their emancipation , by the peaceable exercise of economy and sobriety , assisted by mental and moral cultivation , we are disposed to quit our laughter and to drop our jokes , new and
excellent as they are , and seriously to ask , ' What may these things mean ?'—When , too , we see and hear that delegates from associated bodies travel hundreds of miles , bringing voices from the four winds , to meet in grave congress at Manchester or at Birmingham , in London or Liverpool , reporting the actual existence of several hundreds of such co-operative societies , we almost doubt the propriety of hinting or paragraphing off the question any longer , and begin to think that it is time we knew and told
something about the matter . We might have made our list of co-operative works a page in length , for the quantity of cheap information on this subject is very great , but it were vain to attempt the notice of such a host . We are , therefore , content with a few . The first we chose , as fairly expecting . it to contain an aggregate account of the state of co-operation , up to the time of the meeting—the others we may have occasion to refer to in the course of our remarks *
? New Monthly Magazine , Jan . 1832 , p . 2 . f See the narratives and statements by Mr . Oastler , of J-. eeds , as quoted in tno newspapers ,
Untitled Article
522 Co-operation .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1832, page 522, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1818/page/18/
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