an from heavy volumes, the answer. The great
association of the poorer classes--yourselves--that is the State.

And why should not your great association have a helpful and fruitful
effect upon your smaller associated groups? This question you may also
put to those who talk to you about the inadmissibility of State
intervention and about Socialism and Communism in the demand for it.

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 wa