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excess it brings more ephemeral glory than permanent advantage. Mr. Chamberlain has the fault, and as a result, he is more feared than respected, and more respected than loved. It is easy for a Liberal to detect the absence of personal enthusiasm for Mr. Chamberlain among the Conservative ranks. The convert is always a suspect. At the same time, the party recognises a deep debt owing to him, and is ready to cheer him when he is at close quarters with the enemy. Mr. Balfour seems more amicably disposed towards him than any one else. Perhaps that is because Mr. Chamberlain gives and takes knocks with the Opposition that should really have fallen to his own lot. If Mr. Balfour's indolence likes a deputy leader in debate, Mr. Chamberlain's vanity cherishes the delight of being that deputy. The Egoist again!

THE FATAL DEFECT.

In spite of his brilliant oratorical gifts, Mr. Chamberlain has never been regarded as an orator in the full sense of the word. Lucid, clear, incisive, ironic, sarcastic, and polished is his speech; but it glitters rather than glows, and is effective rather than inspiring. It lacks the sublime moral fervour and lofty passion for humanity that made the oratory of Mr. Gladstone a flaming torch, whereby great enthusiasms caught fire and blazed throughout the land. Mr. Chamberlain's creed, at its best, is more of head than of heart. He is more a Kitchener than a Roberts of politics-bloodless and cold, not inhuman, of course, but by no means a sentimentalist. He may be the dictator of Birmingham; he will never be the idol of the men in the street. Mr. Chamberlain lacks imagination, and can never become a great statesman whose lot it is to read his history in a nation's eyes. He may be classed, however, as a very clever politician who has deciphered many notable electoral triumphs in the ballot-box. His private life has always appeared as beyond reproach, adorned by all the respectable family virtues. It will always be said that Mr. Chamberlain, while bitter to his political opponents, was mindful of his friends. In that he competes with his chief, Lord Salisbury. If the latter built a ministerial refuge, "The Hotel Cecil," Mr. Chamberlain created a "Birmingham gang," and earned the gratitude of respectable mediocrity as represented by Mr. Jesse Collings and Mr. Powell Williams. In selecting such modest henchmen Mr. Chamberlain displayed customary astuteness. He repaid personal loyalty without surrounding himself by possible rivals. That, too, is the way of the Egoist!

Even if Mr. Chamberlain gets no further than the Colonial Secretaryship, his career will represent a considerable success for a political Sir Willoughby Patterne, who lies under the suspicion of having given up conviction for convenience when the "ready excuse of Home Rule presented itself. J. B. HOBMAN.

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CO-OPERATORS AND THE NEW

CENTURY.

A GREAT WORK TO BE DONE.

"For the cause that lacks assistance,

'Gainst the wrong that needs resistance,

For the future in the distance,

And the good that we can do."

To the mere party politician the thirty-third Annual Co-operative Congress, held at Middlesbrough in May last, is at once a portent and a warning. To the humanitarian whose sole interest in politics lies in the fact that politics may be made a powerful lever for the uplifting and the enuobling of mankind, the proceedings of this the first British Co-operative Congress of the Twentieth Century are, on the other hand, full of hope and inspiration.

During the past half-century co-operation has done a great and good work in connection with the industrial, commercial, and social life of the nation; but its political life, so far as direct action is concerned, has hitherto been almost entirely neglected. At the recent Congress, however, it was made very evident that co-operators are beginning to realise that the co-operative movement, in common with the whole industrial, commercial, and social life of the nation, is "cribbed, cabined and confined" by barriers that political action alone can remove; and signs were not wanting that the co-operators, trained for more than half a century in the art of self-government on truly democratic lines, are becoming disgusted with the misgovernment of the "ruling classes" of this country, and are by no means indisposed to take the matter in hand and insist upon the thorough democratisation of British institutions.

Co-operators of the old school, of course, stand aghast when they see the good ship about to embark upon the stormy waters of politics, but it is manifest that the old watchword, "No politics," has now lost its power, and that, come what may, the co-operators of to-day take a broader view of life, and have a bolder grasp of its realities and responsibilities than the co-operators of yesterday.

In this there is no departure from cc-operative ideals and cooperative principles, but as the cause progresses the ideals become clearer, and it is seen that the great principles upon which

co-operation is based apply to every department of life. As the Bishop of Durham (Dr. Westcott, D.D.) said at the Congress luncheon:

"The movement did not represent to him merely a wise arrangement for buying and selling, or an association of any particular class; but it embodied the true relation of men to men. That conviction led him, more than thirty years ago, to enter with thorough spirit into the co-operative movement, and that conviction had sustained his faith in the movement ever since. It was his duty to endeavour to bring his faith into the common relationships of life, and he saw in the co-operative movement a serious and a successful, though an imperfect, embodiment of what was a great principle, namely, that we were all members one of another. That was his idea of the co-operative movement, and it was brought home to him by the original rules of the Rochdale Pioneers."

Again, at the opening of the Co-operative Exhibition, his Lordship spoke in a similar strain:

"The permanent success of their endeavours was to be measured not by the accumulation of money, but by the ennobling of character. The primary question which each had to face and to answer was not what personal gain had he secured, but how was his effort made effective for all in the highest possible way. There was room for many experiments, but the central thought was clear and commanding the elevation of the worker through his work, the elevation of man, as man, for one object. The cause advanced and the ideal grew clearer, and for his own part he believed in the ideal. Nothing which did not rest upon the ideal, the eternal truth, could succeed; nothing which did could fail."

The broader outlook upon life and the bolder grasp of its realities and responsibilities were strongly evidenced in the able presidential address delivered by Mr. J. Warwick. Briefly reviewing the history of the co-operative movement, Mr. Warwick said:

"It fell to the lot of the nineteenth century to evolve from its social life in Toad Lane, Rochdale, something that had in it all the elements essential to inspire a hope that the day had dawned upon the people when their social salvation had come.

"In the year 1844. . . twenty-eight men combined together. Their capital, which they pooled, was £28; their trade for the first year, £710. At the close of the year 1900 there were in the United Kingdom 1464 distributive societies, having a membership of 1,709,371, with share capital amounting to the fabulous sum of £20,586,231, doing a trade of £50,053,567, and handing back to the membership no less a sum than £7,747,338, showing a net saving on the spending power of the consumer of 15 per cent."

Then, looking to the future with faith and hope grounded on the experience of the past, he continued:

"One of the chief aspirations of the human race is for freedom, nor can we forget that the principal motive that prompted the Rochdale Pioneers. to adopt their new system was to find through it a way to emancipationemancipation from the commercial exploitation of the age, emancipation from the industrial serfdom that ground down the workers, emancipation from the tyranny that arose from the trading conditions under which they lived.

"Ladies and gentlemen, their work is not yet finished. It is for us to take it up. The poor, the oppressed, the wretched we still have with us, notwithstanding the uplifting work that has been done during the last fifty years.

"We are not oblivious of the many potent agencies that are at work in our land, their united trend being to raise life to a higher plane, to close the gap that gave birth to that great bane of human society-social distinction. But we claim-pardon the presumption, if you call it so that co-operation possesses a peculiar genius to accomplish this which no other social movement of ancient or modern times has possessed, namely, its automatic or self-acting system of self-help; inasmuch as it places within the reach of the consumer a means of using every resource within himself, with a minimum amount of waste. This is the economic principle upon which our system is based. . . . Our societies we number by the thousand, our members by the million, our capital, trade, and investments by the tens of millions, and the annual savings to our people by the millions-all the outcome of an insignificant period of time called fifty years, which is as a drop of water when compared with the ages that are gone by.

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Surely here we find sufficient to raise us above the plane of a mere hopefulness up to that higher ground that gives inspiration and courage, as we look out upon the possibilities of this bran new century, whose threshold we have just stepped upon, and in whose lap there lies an unwritten scroll, waiting for the records of the time that is to be.

"If these records have to compare favourably with the past, the horizon of our vision must be widened; we shall need our light set to a wider focus than our fathers. It would be well, therefore, for us to have a momentary halt for adjustment to our new environments, our very successes having brought with them increased responsibilities. At a very low computation, the distributive societies of England, Scotland, and Wales are now doing a trade which, but for their existence, would have kept going over four thousand private shopkeepers, all doing a fairly large trade. These we have either supplanted or hindered from coming into existence by doing our own work. Now, rightly or wrongly-we are not here to say which-the trading element of this country has always borne a large share in the control of our civil institutions. . . . We to-day are large traders, and, therefore, must wield considerable influence on the commerce of the country. We are large carriers and consigners of goods, and, therefore, have a large interest in tariffs. We are also large producers; hence the necessity for us to cultivate international relationship with other countries in such a way as to encourage an international exchange of the produce of the whole world. But over and above all these, we are, as we have just noted, large consumers, which necessitates our acquiring lands for the erection of depôts of distribution and all the auxiliary appurtenances that go to make up a complete co-operative store. Here we become interested in civil law, in municipal and district council life, in Acts of Parliament-in short, with all that is expressed in the word citizen. It must then appear clear, even to the lay mind, that we can no longer govern our movement in a mere parochial spirit if we wish to go forth and possess the heritage which the last century has bequeathed to us. How, then, do we govern? I said some time ago that we pooled our money, our interests. Let me say here that our government is by pooling. We pool men; we democratise them. The idea of ruling by the individual or by an oligarchy is foreign to the conception of our movement. The individual stands in the same relation to it as his money-he must merge into the whole-with this difference, that the money is limited by law, while the individual is only limited by the measure of his capacity to influence others, and can, therefore, never assume to be the voice of the

movement unless the movement speaks through him. And this we call democracy-government by the people.

"The programme of business that lies before you for consideration and discussion is some slight indication of how our ramifications are extending. We are no longer mere 'shopkeepers.' In that agenda you have the very breath of your own life. The boundary of its scope may be narrowed or it may be widened, only remember, whatever may be the issue of these three days' deliberations, it will be the reflection of the mind of our movement as represented by you. How desirable it is, then, that we should seek to look at every question that comes before us in a dispassionate spirit, and with that breadth of outlook that takes in the interests of every element of thought within the pale of our associated life.

"Especially would I commend to your special consideration and active support those matters that immediately affect us as citizens. I refer to the housing of the poor, land tenure, land values, leasehold enfranchisement, and national education. These are subjects that touch you in a twofold way. They touch you in your everyday relationship to life and in your relation to this great movement. In the housing question you have some consolation in the fact that you have done much to provide better dwellings for your people, many societies having, with their own capital and the aid of loans from the great federation-the Co-operative Wholesale Society-been able to assist their members to help themselves to a better home. . . . But after all has been done so far as capital can do it, there are other things that lie at the root of the matter. I mean the laws that affect land tenure, and which are acting as a block to the spread of industrial progress and sucking the very life out of industrial effort. You will be asked to give expression to your strength as citizens, in order that this legal anomaly may be removed from the law of the land.”

The Co-operative News, to whose excellent report of the conference we are indebted for the foregoing extracts, in an editorial commenting on Mr. Warwick's speech, said (June 1, 1901):

"Our movement does not merely suggest and encourage self-help; it develops a continually increasing capacity for it. . . . This is our most solemn duty, as it is our greatest perplexity to guard against the numbing influence of habit and routine, to multiply true co-operators, with minds elastic and alert, capable of applying their principles to ever-changing conditions and widening areas. Mr. Warwick gave the Congress an inspiring call when he invited them to face boldly the idea of expansion.

Industry and politics alike must be brought home to the individual, so that we may realise self-government and self-employment. . . . It is useless to boast that emancipation has been already attained because the law puts no obstacles in the co-operators' path, and because we enjoy a popular political franchise. This is truly emancipation in the technical sense, but all depends on the use we make of these opportunities. To make every member a true co-operator, every elector a conscientious politician-we cannot honestly deny that it seems impossible. Yet, while we remain at this stage we cannot pretend to have been emancipated from ignorance and selfishness, we have not realised that the elevation of the race now depends on our own efforts. The great want is social sympathy, for very many of those who fail in their relations as citizens would be capable of heroic effort in an emergency which clearly demanded it. In co-operation, as well as in citizenship, we are conscious of this great need. . .

"When a social problem can be successfully dealt with on co-operative lines, it is our plain duty not merely to proclaim that discovery, but to

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