1. You have now everything I have yet published on political economy;
but there are several points in these books of mine which I intended
to add notes to, and it seems little likely I shall get that soon
done. So I think the best way of making up for the want of these is to
write you a few simple letters, which you can read to other people, or
send to be printed, if you like, in any of your journals where you
think they may be useful.
I especially want you, for one thing, to understand the sense in which
the word "co-operation" is used in my books. You will find I am always
pleading for it; and yet I don't at all mean the co-operation of
partnership (as opposed to the system of wages) which is now so
gradually extending itself among our great firms. I am glad to see it
doing so, yet not altogether glad: for none of you who are engaged in
the immediate struggle between the system of co-operation and the
system of mastership know how much the dispute involves; and none of
us know the results to which it may finally lead. For the alternative
is not, in reality, only between two modes of conducting business--it
is between two different states of society. It is not the question
whether an amount of wages, no greater in the end than that at present
received by the men, may be paid to them in a way which shall give
them share in the risks and interest in the prosperity of the
business. The question is, really, whether the profits which are at
present taken, as his own right, by the person whose capital, or
energy, or ingenuity, has made him head of the firm, are not in some
proportion to be divided among the subordinates of it.
2. I do not wish, for the moment, to enter into any inquiry as to the
just claims of capital, or as to the proportions in which profits
ought to be, or are in actually existing firms, divided. I merely take
the one assured and essential condition, that a somewhat larger income
will be in co-operative firms secured to the subordinates, by the
diminution of the income of the chief. And the general tendency of
such a system is to increase the facilities of advancement among the
subordinates; to stimulate their ambition; to enable them to lay by,
if they are provident, more ample and more early provision for
declining years; and to form in the end a vast class of persons wholly
different from the existing operative:--members of society, possessing
each a moderate competence; able to procure, therefore, not indeed
many of the luxuries, but all the comforts of life; and to devote some
leisure to the attainments of liberal education, and to the other
objects of free life. On the other hand, by the exact sum which is
divided among them, more than their present wages, the fortune of the
man who, under the present system, takes all the profits of the
business, will be diminished; and the acquirement of large private
fortune by regular means, and all the conditions of life belonging to
such fortune, will be rendered impossible in the mercantile community.
3. Now, the magnitude of the social change hereby involved, and the
consequent differences in the moral relations between individuals,
have not as yet been thought of,--much less estimated,--by any of your
writers on commercial subjects; and it is because I do not yet feel
able to grapple with them that I have left untouched, in the books I
send you, the question of co-operative labor. When I use the word
"co-operation," it is not meant to refer to these new constitutions of
firms at all. I use the word in a far wider sense, as opposed, not to
masterhood, but to _competition_. I do not mean, for instance, by
co-operation, that all the master bakers in a town are to give a share
of their profits to the men who go out with the bread; but that the
masters are not to try to undersell each other, nor seek each to get
the other's business, but are all to form one society, selling to the
public under a common law of severe penalty for unjust dealing, and at
an established price. I do not mean that all bankers' clerks should be
partners in the bank; but I do mean that all bankers should be members
of a great national body, answerable as a society for all deposits;
and that the private business of speculating with other people's money
should take another name than that of "banking." And, for final
instance, I mean by "co-operation" not only fellowships between
trading _firms_, but between trading _nations_; so that it shall no
more be thought (as it is now, with ludicrous and vain selfishness) an
advantage for one nation to undersell another; and take its occupation
away from it; but that the primal and eternal law of vital commerce
shall be of all men understood--namely, that every nation is fitted by
its character, and the nature of its territories, for some particular
employments or manufactures; and that it is the true interest of every
other nation to encourage it in such speciality, and by no means to
interfere with, but in all ways forward and protect, its efforts,
ceasing all rivalship with it, so soon as it is strong enough to
occupy its proper place. You see, therefore, that the idea of
co-operation, in the sense in which I employ it, has hardly yet
entered into the minds of political inquirers; and I will not pursue
it at present; but return to that system which is beginning to obtain
credence and practice among us. This, however, must be in a following
letter.