outsiders must look to themselves; what they have to see to is, that every unionist gets as much and gives as little as possible. No one can doubt that this is a most serious business, and that organizations such as these do threaten the prosperity of our industry. Nevertheless, for my own part I accept unionism as on the whole a benefit to this nation. Without it our working classes would be far less powerful than they are at present, and I desire that they should have their fair share of power and of all national prosperity. The free and full right of association for all lawful purposes is guaranteed to all our people. They had better use it now and then, unwisely and tyrannically, than be unable to use it at all. I shall be glad to see the day, and I fully believe it will come, when Trades Unions will have played their part, and become things of the past. But they have still a part to play, and until they are superseded by other associations, founded on higher principles and aiming at nobler ends, their failure and disappearance would be a distinct step backwards— an injury, not an advantage, to the nation and to civilization.

What hope, then, is there of the rise of other associations amongst our people of nobler aim than their Trades Unions? I said just now that the "organization of labour" had been going on amongst us by means of two parallel movements. Of one of these the Trades Union, or fighting movement-I have already spoken; and we now come to the Cooperative movement, to which I have looked for five-and-twenty years, and still look with increasing hope, for the solution of the labour question, and a building up of a juster, and nobler, and gentler life throughout this nation. The present Cooperative movement is not thirty years old. The store of the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers, which has become worldfamous now, was established in the year 1844 by a few labouring folk, of very small means and very high aspirations. Their first venture in goods, not amounting to more than some 201. worth, but all that they could command, was

trundled in a wheelbarrow to the little room in Toad Lane, where they started on the trifling work of making trade honest, and delivering their brethren of the working class with themselves from the bondage in which they were held by the credit system, by thriftlessness, by intemperance. On the 28th of September, 1867, I had the pleasure of attending a great gathering of Co-operators at Rochdale to celebrate the opening of their new central store. This new central store is only their chief place of business. It is a fine building four stories high, and surmounted by a clock with a bee-hive on the top of it. The building cost 10,000l., and-besides giving ample room and convenience for their great trade in the shape of shops, offices, store-rooms, workshops, committee-rooms-on the third story there is a library with an area of 150 square yards, and a news-room containing an area of 170 square yards; and on the fourth floor, one large room for lectures and meetings, capable of seating 1,500 persons comfortably. The number of members exceeded 7,000, the business reached 60,000l. a quarter, the profits 40,000l. a year, and the assets of the society 120,000l.

But I am running away from my text. There have been other examples in plenty, as remarkable though not so well known as that of Rochdale; but it is with the movement as a whole, not with individual cases, that we are concerned. It may be said to have begun, then, in 1844. For the next few years it struggled on slowly but surely. The first meeting of representatives of the different stores and associations met at Bury, and afterwards in Manchester, in 1851, to consult and take measures for obtaining legal recognition, and for concerting joint action. There were fortyfour societies represented, and the delegates drew up rules for the guidance of the Co-operative movement. To these rules-this first public statement of the objects of the Co-operative ParliamentI must return presently. The inconvenience of having to carry on trade without a legal status was remedied in

and inexperience." In this way the weakest village store gets precisely the same advantages in purchasing its few shillings' worth of goods as Halifax, Oldham, or Rochdale, with their monthly thousands.

But it is impossible to bring before you in the space I have at my disposal anything like proofs of a tithe of the good which this movement has done; how it is steadily strengthening and purifying the daily lives of a great section of our people. I wish I could induce all here to look into the matter carefully for themselves. Meantime I may say that it has in the first place delivered the poor in a number of our great towns from the credit system, which lay so hard on them twenty years ago—for the Co-operative system is founded scrupulously on ready-money dealings. Next it has delivered the poor from adulterated goods and short weight and measure. It has developed amongst them honesty, thrift, forethought, and made them feel that they cannot raise themselves without helping their neighbours.

The management of business concerns of this magnitude has developed an extraordinary amount of ability among the leading members, who in committees, and as secretaries and buyers, conduct the affairs of the stores throughout the country. As their funds have accumulated they have been invested in corn mills and cotton mills, most of which have been managed with great ability and honesty, and are returning large profits. There have been failures, of course, as there must be in all movements; but in scarcely any cases have these been owing to the deep-seated dishonesty, the lying, the puffing, and trickery, which have brought down in disgraceful ruin so many of our jointstock companies. I have been speaking hitherto chiefly of the societies known as Co-operative stores which are concerned with distribution; but associations for production are now multiplying, and at least as great results may be looked for from them. In those few which I have had the opportunity of watching, I can speak with the greatest

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confidence of the admirable influence they have exercised on the character and habits of the associates. But I prefer to call in here the testimony of one who has had as much experience and done as much work for the Cooperative movement in England as any living man. "If," writes Mr. Ludlow, a co-operative workshop has sufficient elements of vitality to outlast the inevitable storms and struggles of its first few years, it begins to develop a most remarkable series of results. Co-operation first expels from the shop drunkenness, and all open disorder, which are found wholly inconsistent with its success; introducing in their stead a number of small adjustments and contrivances of a nature to facilitate work, or promote the comfort of the worker. By degrees it exterminates in turn the small tricks and dishonesties of work which the opposition of interests between the employers and employed too often excuses in the worker's eyes; it is felt to be the interest of each and all that all work should be good-that no time should be lost. Fixity of employment meanwhile, coupled with a common interest, creates new ties between man and man, suggests new forms of fellowship, till there grows up a sort of family feeling, the only danger of which is, its becoming exclusive towards the outside. Let this state of things last a while and there is literally developed a new type of working man, endued not only with that honesty and frankness, that kindness and true courtesy which distinguish the best specimens of the order wherever they may be placed, but with a dignity and self-respect, a sense of conscious freedom, which are peculiar to the co-operator. The writer. met with such a type first in the Associations Ouvrières of Paris. He has since had the happiness of seeing it reproduced, with variations as slight as the differences of nationality might render unavoidable, in English co-operative workshops; and he therefore believes that its development may be confidently looked forward to as a normal result of co-operative production."

These two parallel movements-differing fundamentally in their principles and objects—have had this in common, that they have done more than all other causes put together to raise the condition of the great mass of the working people. By increasing manifold their power and weight, they have at last won for them a place side by side with the other classes of the community; and have given them a large share in, if not the ultimate control of, the government and the destinies of our country. While they were disorganized they were powerless. They have found out the worth of organization, and are perfecting it in both directions with an energy which must have very serious results for the whole nation. That much of what they are doing in their Trades Unions is causing alarm, and raising a spirit of hostility to these organizations throughout the country, is plain to the most careless observer. I am not here to defend many of their acts and much of their policy. I feel the truth of many of the accusations which are brought against them of their carelessness of the common weal in the pursuit of their own ends; of the tyranny which they sometimes exercise over minorities in their own body; of the deterioration in work, the dawdling and incompetence. which in many trades are not unjustly laid at their door.

But before we blame them for these things, let us glance back at the history of the country during the last fifty years, the period of the immense development of our material prosperity, and see whether there is not another side to the picture, whether much may not be pleaded on their side in mitigation.

Fifty years ago the intensely national and aristocratic system under which England had lived for centuries, and which had carried her through the great struggle with Napoleon, with so much glory and at such fearful cost, was tottering to its fall. Happily for the nation the cost broke down the system, and in 1832 the first Reform Bill brought the middle class fairly into partnership in the government of the

British Empire-indeed, in the last resort (as has been proved so often since), handed over to them the ultimate controlling power. During the next thirtyfive years, whenever they have been deeply moved, all opposition has gone down before them. Those years therefore stand out as a distinct period in our history, unlike and apart from anything which went before them. With the trading class as ultimate rulers, this period has been an industrial one, and that class may well point with pride to its achievements, and claim that the sturdiness and energy which carried England so triumphantly through the great revolutionary war have not failed her in their keeping. The contrast between Great Britain in 1832 and 1867 is indeed astounding. In 1832 no railway ran into London, no iron ship had been built, and no steamer had crossed the ocean. The power

of carrying out great enterprises by associated capital did not exist except by special privilege. All the necessaries of life-air, light, and foodwere heavily taxed. The press was shackled by stamp duties and paper duties. The Post Office was a hindrance rather than a help to communication. The Poor Laws were pauperizing and degrading the nation. We were even then the workshop of the world, but a shop in which the workers were hampered and trammelled by bandages of all kinds, which look to us now inconceivably mischievous and childish. On their advent to power the middle class found themselves bound hand and foot. They have burst every_bond. The period between the two Reform Bills set all these fiscal confusions and absurdities straight. It has covered the land with railways, and all seas with iron steamers; the earth is belted by the telegraphs of English companies. Every restriction on the association of capital has disappeared. Food and light are untaxed to rich and poor. All imposts enhancing the cost of consumption are gone, or are so reduced as to be no longer burdensome. We have the New Poor Law, an improvement at any rate on

the old, and leaving perhaps little to be desired from a middle-class point of view. We have the penny post and a free press. In the same period the capital of the country has multiplied at the rate Mr. Gladstone has told us. These are the fruits of the admission of the middle classes to their fair share in the government of the country-no mean fruits, surely, and attained in the active life of one generation. There are still men in the House of Commons who sat in it before 1832. The representative man of the best side of this period, Mr. Gladstone, to whom the great financial reforms which followed the repeal of the Corn Laws are due more than to any other, was already then in the full vigour of manhood.

But what did this same period of middle-class ascendency do for the working classes?

Far

The great free-trade struggle was its culminating point, the repeal of the Corn Laws its crowning victory. A middle-class victory, it is true, but carried by the help of the working classes in the great towns, with whom the cry of the cheap loaf did good service. But it was not the appeal to their pockets which carried the working classes into the free-trade camp. more powerful than the cheap-loaf cry with them was the grand, if somewhat vague, teaching of the free-trade leaders, of a reign of peace and universal goodwill between nations, which the overthrow of aristocratic and commercial monopolies, and the breaking down of restrictions on trade, was to inaugurate. I have no space here to prove the point, but let those who doubt it take one recent instance of the comparative power of self-interest and of high principle with the masses of our people. I refer to their conduct during the American war and the cotton famine, when the chance of averting want from their homes was resolutely put aside lest the cause of the slave in America should be imperilled. Does any man doubt now that, if our operatives had cried out for breaking the blockade, Napoleon's insidious proposals for intervention would

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have been accepted, and the Southern negroes would have remained enslaved to this day? I own it seems to meand I say it with some shame for my own class-that, in our great free-trade struggle, the only part of our people which has nothing now to regret for the part they took is the working class. Our territorial aristocracy and their retainers fought for their monopoly. Our trading classes preached justice, freedom, and the vital interests which are common to all nations; but what they fought for was, as the last quarter of a century has shown too clearly, not any commercial millennium in which honest goods and just prices should reign, but the greatest possible facilities for buying cheap and selling dear. working class seized on the noble and human side of the teaching of their natural leaders-are still, indeed, proclaiming that "labour is of no country," that "all nations are meant to live in peace and friendship "—but have protested by the two movements we have been considering to-night against the notion that the world is to be saved and set right by unlimited competition; and they have been hitherto the class which has taken least by the results of the struggle. Laissez faire may have done great things for other classes; for them it has only proved a hard taskmaster, and the new period of our history, which commenced in 1867, when the sceptre passed from the middle class, and the first years of which have been so full of change, will witness the struggle between that central belief of the middle-class period and the belief in, and practice of, organization, which has carried our working classes (who are after all, be it remembered, the great majority of the nation) into partnership with the upper and middle classes. The middle-class period, they will remember, left the labour question almost untouched; and it was not till they had gained a voice in legislation that the Masters and Servants Bill, the Trades Unions Bill, the Hours of Labour Regulation Act, and the Mines Regulations Bill have become law. Bearing these