CO-OPEEATION.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 4026, 23 November 1881, Page 3

CO-OPEEATION.

(To the Editor of the Evening &tab.) Sib, —Fallacies live long, and die bard. The fallacy of the people's land being private property has lived long, and will, no doubt, die very hard ; especially white the gross fallacy maintains of returning to Parliament such men as the present legal candidate, whose business and interest are identical with those of the land shark and capitalist. It is, however, as equally true as these fallacies are false, that the legislature at no very distant date will have to deal with these questions, as also with that of the equal social and industrial rights of men, and the painfulness and difficulties of these grave subjects will only be increased by unnecessary delay. It has been shown that to debar any man from earning an honest living—as all taxation of industry and trade must do to very many —is the worst of tyrannies; that to restrict the production and distribution of^wealth must be in the highest degree impolittc^cnd absurd; that to impose taxes and dutf&s, not according to man's means and property, but according to his wants; to tax poor men's wages, through their consumption, and spare rich men's estates ; to tax industry, and spare

idleness ; to add one hundred per cent, at x'leaßt. in taxation in dealer's profits and charges, when the revenue derivable from leasing the land might be collected easily for a half per cent., are solecisms only to be accounted for by the fact that landholders have governed the colony from its commencement, and have legislated to save their own estates, let who would suffer instead. The active employer— the mental worker—is defrauded by the usurers. They calculate to deprive him of all the fruits of his labor, except just what will suffice to maintain him and his family. The cost of education alone may have been one or two thousand pounds, but the usurers ignore this cost if the worker becomes a wealth-maker, and not a parasite. A youth of fifteen years of age must have cost £500, if the care taken of him were all reckoned as is the cost of a horse, a bouse, or a steam engine. But the hirer of the youth or man takes no account of bis cost, and does not pay interest of £25 or £30 a year in addition to the wages (which is equivalent to the subsistence of the horse) for the use of the man. The principles of cooperation demand new relationships wilb. capital, and assume as a basis an equitable division of profits instead of a paltry - wages extension. Against lifeless money and machinery labour places living and skilful heads and hands, without which the first mentioned possessions are useless.. Labour contends that capital has arisen from the ignorance of its powers,

and the absorption of its production by a wages fraud and slavery. Co-operation seeks to work the plant of capitalists upon equitable conditions, and knowing that the system which has hitherto degraded labour has not been created by the present capitalists, it is not contemplated in the remotest degree to annoy or injure them. The object is to elevate labour to its proper power and dignity, and through co-operation to share the result of labour, thereby driving poverty away from honest and industrious men for ever. If the capitalists wisely read the signs of the times, they will join { labor in its universal enterprise, and UO power on earth can injure its success. The wages system must cease, and will cease' ere long in Europe and America. It must be to the interest of each worker, mental or manual, to make wealth abundant. At present it is not so, and abundance means through money, destitution to those who have made it. I beg my readers to reflect on this and the effect on workers of what is called an " overstocked market." The wheat producer has produced too much wheat, and his children are breadless on that account! The builder has built too many houses, and he is out of work and houseless on that account! The shoemaker has made too many shoes and boots, and as a sinful and insane consequence bis wife and children are shoeless! So it is throughout, and the usurers' newspapers, books, and their legal orators spout of " over production " as though that must inevitably cause destitution. They rant about "surplus population," " over production," " over stocked markets" and dissipate the people's estate at one and the same time. —I am, &c, Laboubee. November 21st, 1881.