If, finally, you desire a special instance of the impossibility of producing an improvement in the condition of the working class in any other way than by free association through this helpful intervention of the State, you may look to England, that country which is most frequently called in evidence to prove the possibility for an association of individual workingmen established purely and exclusively through their unassisted powers, to improve the condition of the whole class—­England, which in fact must appear best suited, for various reasons based on its particular national conditions, to carry out this experiment, without, nevertheless, demonstrating thereby a similar possibility for other countries.

And this special instance comes directly from those English workingmen’s associations which up to this time have usually been referred to as triumphant proof of such an assertion.  I speak of the Pioneers of Rochdale.  This cooeperative society, organized in 1844, established in 1858 a spinning and weaving establishment with a capital of L5,500 sterling.  According to the statutes of this association, the workmen employed in the factory, whether they were stockholders in the association or not, drew a profit, in addition to the usual wages, equal to that distributed as dividends to the stockholders—­the arrangement having been made that the annual dividends should be reckoned and distributed both on wages and on capital stock.  Now the number of stockholders of this factory is one thousand six hundred, while only five hundred workmen are employed there.  Accordingly, there exists a large number of stockholders who are not also workmen in the factory; on the other hand, all the workmen are not at the same time stockholders.  In consequence of this an agitation broke out in 1861 among the workingmen stockholders who did not work in the factory, and also among those who were both employees and stockholders, against the workmen who were not stockholders receiving a share of the profits.  On the part of the workingmen stockholders the principle was laid down simply and frankly that, according to the usual custom in the whole industrial world, the claims of labor were satisfied with the wages and that wages were determined by supply and demand (we have seen above by what law).  “This fact,” relates Professor Huber in his report of this affair, “was considered valid without further question, as the natural condition, needing no further justification, in opposition to a quite exceptional, arbitrary innovation, even though it were according to the statutes.”  Bravely, but only with very dimly understood emotional reasons, this proposition for the changing of the statutes was opposed by the original founders and managers of the association.  In fact, a majority of five-eighths of the workingmen stockholders voted for the change of the statutes, taking exactly the same position as the capitalist employers, and the change was defeated for the time being only because, according to the