just as paid generals give to republics the leadership which kings used to supply in monarchies.  There are in the savings-banks of many manufacturing centers in our country amounts which if capitalized would place the workingmen of those towns in industrial independence; moneys which, in some instances, are actually furnishing the borrowed capital for their own employers.  In such towns our workingmen have saved enough to capitalize their labor, but for lack of the power of combination, let the advantage of their own thrift inure to the benefit of men already rich.  They save money and then loan it to rich men to use in hiring them to work on wages, while the profits go to the borrowers of labor’s savings.

     But the chief value of co-operation, in my estimate, is its
     educating power.  It opens a training school for labor in the
     science and art of association.

Labor once effectively united could win its dues, whatever they may be.  The difficulties of such association have lain in the undeveloped mental and moral condition of the rank and file of the hosts of labor. * * *

Now, of this effort at co-operation I find scarcely any trace in the trade organizations of our workingmen.  Trades-unions have until very lately passed the whole subject by in utter silence.  What has been done by workingmen in this country in the line of co-operation has been done outside of the great trade associations, which form the natural instrumentalities for organizing such combination.  They offer the mechanism, the mutual knowledge, the preliminary training in habits of combination, which together should form the proper conditions for the development of co-operation.  Is it not a singular thing, considering the manifold benefits that would come to labor from such a development, that the attention of these great and powerful organizations has not heretofore been seriously called to this matter. * * *

The story of such attempts as have already been made in this direction is one of a sad and discouraging nature to all who feel the gravity of this problem.  Again and again great organizations have risen on our soil, seeking to combine our trade associations and promising the millennium to labor, only to find within a few years suspicion, distrust, and jealousy eating the heart out of the order, and disintegration following rapidly as a natural consequence.  The time must soon come let us hope, when the lesson of these experiences will have been learned.

These are some of the salient faults of labor—­faults which are patent to all dispassionate observers.  The first step to a better state of things lies through the correction of these faults.  Whatever other factors enter into the problem, this is the factor which it concerns labor to look after if it would reach the equation of the good time coming.  No reconstruction of society can avail for incompetent, indifferent,