Cooperative Production Author:Benjamin Jones Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. A Start1ng Po1nt. Professor Marshall, in his inaugural address at Ipswich, reminded us that 'the co-operative productive society in its rudiment... more »ary form ts a product of all ages and all races and all places, and the independent productive societies which we find now scattered over the whole of Great Britain are representatives of a very ancient race. In a few cases, as for instance in some local institutions connected with quarrying and with fishing, they have an unbroken descent from remote antiquity till now V In giving this reminder, Mr. Marshall has done good service j for, among a portion of the co-operative body, as well as among the public generally, there has been a tendency to look upon co-operation as a new thing that had its origin some forty or fifty years ago ; while the truth seems to be that co-operation has always been a means for the more or less conscious endeavours of the people to preserve, or recover, their rights in the state of dependence which is entailed by the system of division of labour, and the necessary adjunct of exchange of products. The benefits of the system more than compensated for the loss of liberty sustained when the state of individual isolation was destroyed ; but there have always been efforts to secure the advantages of both states, while eliminating their disadvantages; and this is really what is meant, and what is aimed at, by co-operation. In Carlyle's Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, a book that no one would have expected to contain infonna- 1 Co-operative Congress Report, 1888, pp. 5, 6. D tion on this subject, there is a brief but very interesting account of a body of men, who in 1649 had associated together on terms of perfect equity and charity at St. George's Hill, near Cobham, Surrey; and of an...« less