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Untitled Article
chewed , Immorality checked and kept in abeyance , and ' Terryalts * # nd < Whjtefeet' and * Blackfeetf rendered docile and industrious , —to the wonder and delight of the canny and cautious Scot , who erected a threshing machine for this thriving community , glad enough and willing enough to save their labour by using machines of their own .
We have heard sneerers and ill-informed talkers say of the cooperative system , that it is regardless of the truest principles of political economy . But a co-operative community must thrive by the joint operation of Labour , assisted by machinery , and by the judicious division of its powers ; by gradually accumulating Capital , the stored-up surplus' of former labour ; and by a mutually profitable course of exchanges with other bodies or with , individuals . Your 4 Working Man ' s Companion , ' in his last
publication , The Rights of Industry , ' properly and tersely calls a co-operative community * a large partnership . ' It is so . — -And the considerable interest that the Firm will have in the national prosperity , will be its best security against any attempt to injure or subvert the existing institutions of profit and capital .
Such then , or something like this , is the present state of cooperation in this country . Its perfection is looked to by thousands , as the great , the inevitable « change '—* The change from error and misery to truth and happiness / Man is unseryed . Neither the government , nor the wealthy , nor the Useful Knowledge Society , have evinced the power to serve the suffering
ninetenths , nor are the capitalists themselves , that we can discern , much better off , for the starvation of the labourers . They in ^ crease their fixed capital ; they double and quadruple their productive powers , they glut their markets , and they lack consumers . Let co . operative communities be established , and they will create a nation of consumers . Man is unserved . He must serve
himself by his own intelligence and industry , assisted by the known surprising effects of division of labour , and of exertions in large masses . Miss Martineau writes to prove that labour is respectable . She is right , supposing all to be labourers / as in the ' wilds' of Africa ; as in a co-operative community . She goes on to show by sequent narratives that competition and machinery may co-existwith starvation . This , alas ! is too true . She further on lauds Norfolk farms
of 2000 acres , and exhibits her Nortons and Walters to explain how much better it were that small farms should be absorbed into the large ones ; sinking the small farmer into the labourer , 4 with good wages . ' Could she only have shewed the odd nook of British ground where the agricultural labourer can still earn good wages , it were well . Yet must she be heedful , for the secret once told , we will wager our best steel pen that , be it at the Lizard , at John o ' Groat ' s house , or in some unimagined El Dorado in the centre of Dartmoor or Chatmoas , it will soon be completely ruined by
Untitled Article
, ft& 6 Cooperation .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1832, page 526, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1818/page/22/
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