our great firms. I am glad to see it
doing so, yet not altogether glad: for none of you who are engaged in
the immediate struggle between the system of co-operation and the
system of mastership know how much the dispute involves; and none of
us know the results to which it may finally lead. For the alternative
is not, in reality, only between two modes of conducting business--it
is between two different states of society. It is not the question
whether an amount of wages, no greater in the end than that at present
received by the men, may be paid to them in a way which shall give
them share in the risks and interest in the prosperity of the
business. The question is, really, whether the profits which are at
present taken, as his own right, by the person whose capital, or
energy, or ingenuity, has made him head of the firm, are not in some
proportion to be divided among the subordinates of it.

2. I do not wish, for the moment, to enter into any inquiry as to the
just claims of capital, or as to the proportions in which profits
ought to be, or are in actually existing firms, divided. I merely take
the one assured and essential condition, that a somewhat larger income
will be in co-operative firms secured to the subordinates, by the
diminution of the income of the chief. And the general tendency of
such a system is to increase the facilities of advancement among the
subordinates; to stimulate their ambition; to enable them to lay by,
if they are provident, more ample and more early provision for
declining years; and to form in the end a vast class of persons wholly
different from the existing operative:--members of society, possessing
each a moderate competence; able to procure, therefore, not indeed
many of the luxuries, but all the comforts of life; and to devote some
leisure to the attainments of liberal education, and to the other
objects of free life. On the other hand, by the exact sum which is
divided among them, more than their present wages, the fortune of the
man who, under the present system, takes all the profits of the
business, will be diminished; and the acquirement of large private
fortune by regular means, and all the conditions of life belonging to
such fortune, will be rendered impossible in the mercantile community.

3. Now, the magnitude of the social change hereby involved, and the
consequent differences in the moral relations between individuals,
have not as yet been thought of,--much less estimate