d that it must supply itself with a switch engine
to do the switching of the cars from its mine to the main track, at an
additional cost of $4000. When this was accomplished they had to enter
the market in competition with a bitter opponent who had been fighting
them since the opening of the mine. Having exhausted their funds and not
seeing their way clear to securing additional funds for the purchase of
a locomotive and to tide over the nine months ere any contracts for coal
could be entered into, they sold out to their competitor.

But a cause more fundamental perhaps than all other causes of the
failure of cooperation in the United States is to be found in the
difficulties of successful entrepreneurship. In the labor movement in
the United States there has been a failure, generally speaking, to
appreciate the significance of management and the importance which must
be imputed to it. Glib talk often commands an undeserved confidence and
misleads the wage earner. Thus by 1888, three or four years after it had
begun, the cooperative movement had passed the full cycle of life and
succumbed. The failure, as said, was hastened by external causes and
discrimination. But the experiments had been foredoomed anyway,--through
the incompatibility of producers' cooperation with trade unionism. The
cooperators, in their eagerness to get a market, frequently undersold
the private employer expecting to recoup their present losses in future
profits. In consequence, the privately employed wage earners had to bear
reductions in their wages. A labor movement which endeavors to practice
producers' cooperation and trade unionism at the same time is actually
driving in opposite directions.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] See Chapter 1.

[21] In the thirties the term "union" was reserved for the city
federations of trades. What is now designated as a trade union was
called trade society. In the sixties the "Union" became the "trades'
assembly."

[22] See below, 152-154.

[23] See below, 285-290, for a discussion why American labor looks away
from legislation.

[24] The Constitution read as follows: "It alone possesses the power and
authority to make, amend, or repeal the fundamental and general laws and
regulations of the Order; to finally decide all controversies arising in
the Order; to issue all charters.... It can also tax the members of the
Order for its maintenance."

[25] See above, 98-100.

[26] The "local assemblies" generally follow