MR. HUGHES'S IDEAL.
THERE has been in our time no manlier public career than that of the Christian Socialists, of whom Mr. Thomas Hughes is, perhaps, the best-known living figure, and who is certainly none the less popular from the eager candour with which he concedes to others far less generally known—who have spent themselves even more completely in the same cause— the honour and the gratitude which is their due. The speech •which Mr. Hughes delivered at Manchester on the occasion of the remarkable testimonial presented to him last Saturday, for his honourable work as Chairman of the Co- operative Union, was a very remarkable one, full of the genius both of the man and of the cause,—of the man, for its noble impulsiveness and strenuous fidelity to the moral element in the Co-operative movement,—of the cause, because Mr. Hughes sees very clearly that without making something more --of the Co-operative movement than a movement for obtaining for the labourers a larger part of the profits of production and distribution than they had hitherto obtained, the movement itself will lose all depth and earnestness. But we should like to discuss with Mr. Hughes whether his ideal of the Co-operative movement really covers what in his speech he seems to make it cover, namely, the doctrine that competi- tion should be excluded altogether from amongst the principles of trade, as a non-Christian principle and a source of both social and industrial deterioration. If he goes so far as this, we cannot pretend to go with him ; and we doubt very much whether he does go so far. Some of the language which he uses in this speech, and which he has used again and again in dealing with the same subject, looks like it ; but knowing as we do how militant-, not to say martial, is Mr. Hughes's spirit, how heartily he appreciates the manliness of all the nobler forms of struggle and conflict, and how sincerely he recognises that almost every kind of good has come of emulous effort, we cannot believe that he means to say what some of his -language appears to say, or to assert that competition, which is only emulation in another form, ought to be banished from amongst the guiding principles of commercial life, any more than from amongst the guiding principles of military tactics and strategy. Describing his early experience of the results of the old economical doctrine that competition, pure and simple, is the only power which ought to regulate commercial matters, Mr. Hughes says :— " My rooms were in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and I passed daily, twice at least, through the horrible nests of squalor and vice which then stood on the site of the New Law Courts. I soon found that (with the exception of thieves and beggars) these nests were peopled by slop- workers—poor men, women, and children, who, if their employersconld only-have flogged them, would have been in a far worse case than any negro slave. I saw that the competitive struggle for life had brought them to this pass; and yet the most approved teachers in reviews and newspapers, which I had begun to read, and even in Parliament, were insisting on free competition' as a corollary to Free-trade,' and a necessary pillar of industrial prosperity. The natural consequence was that I had all but become a physical-force Chartist, when the late Mr. Maurice became Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn. He at once gathered a number of young students round him for the discussion of social questions and work amongst the poor, and within a year I had thrown over Chartism as a delusion, had become a Christian Socialist, and was hard at work establish- ing associations amongst the London slop-workers. I have never swerved' from -that slay to this, and am, if possible, to-day, a more convinced Christian Socialist than I was in 1849. And you all know well, for I have always proclaimed it that it is as a Christian Socialist that I have worked cordially in your ranks ever since, through bad and good times. You call yourselves co-operators, and I prefer thertither name ; but I am careless about names so long as we mean the-same thing, and- the same thing we have always hitherto .profeased toctriesn.in our anion. Yonimay sot, some of you at least, accept the form-of my belief, that co-operation is the application of the principles of Christianity to trade and industry,' and, above all, of that central principle,—` Bear ye one another's burdens.' Bat yen have laid it down as the basis of your union that men are tueant•to be fellow-workers, not rivals ; and that justice, and not the higgling of the market, must regulate exchange ; so that you have only pat the Christian Socialist formula into different words, moaning the same thing."
Now, we are not going to argue against Mr. Hughes on the question of the slop-sellers. We really never have understood, and never shall understand, why the enthusiasm for political economy, when it was comparatively a new science, carried away its expositors so completely that they virtually declared it to be independent of the Ten Commandments, and a higher law than the law of brotherly love. The obvious truth is that a man who lives by employing labour as the great a sweaters " have always employed labour, lives by cruelty and bad work ; and why cruelty and bad work should be extenuated because there are miserable people to be found who will submit to cruelty and who can be tempted to do bad work, it passes a common-sense understanding to discover. But when you have gone so far as this, that no man has a right to get rich on the produce of cruelty and bad work, simply because there are persons wretched enough to endure the one and to do the other, we have not got nearly so far as de- claring competition unchristian and at variance with the law of Christ, " Bear ye one another's burdens." There are many cases in which it is extremely difficult to decide where cruelty begins ; and if competition is altogether unchristian, we hardly know how that question is to be determined. Sup- pose a man can give such wages as will support healthy men or women in comparative health and comfort, so long us they remain single, but which would be wholly insufficient for married men or women on whom a family depends, is it to be called cruel and unchristian to keep wages down to this point on the ground that if you raise them higher you will lose a great market which you might otherwise command 1 We say no. We say, that so long as you insist that the labourer is worthy of such hire as will keep him in health and in hope, and in the way to turn out thoroughly good work, competition may fairly and rightly determine the rest, and that an employer is not bound, and will often, indeed, make a mistake if he binds himself, to ignore cheapness, in other words, to ignore the command of the largest of all markets for his goods. Now, if this he so, it is evident that competition is not excluded. An employer who says,— I can get good work from healthy people, and give them hope of better work, at such or such a rate of wages, which is lower than that of the highest firms of employers, but lower only because I intend my goods to be sold to the poor, and to be, therefore, wanting in finish, though good of their kind ; and, therefore, I hope to make a great quantity of such goods, and offer them at a price which'will undersell the goods of my competitors,' is, as we maintain, if he follows out his own rule, competing on perfectly • sound principles, and doing the poor consumer a great benefit by his competition. Nor does the fact that he pays his workmen on the wise co-operative principle, by giving them a share of the profits, in the least diminish the essentially competitive character of this commercial policy. He can only get at the poor class of buyers by offering greater cheapness ; and if he offers greater cheapness on sound principles, by diminishing the expenditure of time and training on mere elegancies of work, by choosing strong but plain materials, and by inducing his workmen to take less wages than they could perhaps elsewhere command in the hope of sharing the profits of a large business, he -is, we maintain, quite right in competing for custom by offering the attraction of superior cheapness. It is the attempt to drive men into bad work and bad health by underpaying them that casts a slur on competition. Competition within sound limits is of the essence of all hearty life, even of all hearty Christian life ; and, so far as we can judge Mr. Hughes by. his own writings, we should have thought that he would be the first to acknowledge this. The teachers in every good school really emu- late each others' efforts to improve the teaching ; the scholars in a good school emulate each others' efforts to improve -the learning. And competition in trade is many nothing in the world, so long as it is kept within due limits, but emulation in a perfectly right field of enterprise. It is right, not wrong, to turn out a cheaper article than any one else, so long as the article so turned out is an honest one, is known for what it is, pretends to no better quality than it really has, and embodies geociework and,, perhaps we ought ;to Ada, work tending to beemate,bettar, and better, in its produatien, So far from banishing competition frona wauxonerceN 74ve would have all producers compete with each other, which of them,— while paying his workmen well, and on principles which hold out hope to them of being paid better,—can turn out the cheapest goods by which nobody will be taken-in, but which will really be all that the public are encouraged to believe them to be. Competition, as it seems to us, should be included in, instead of being excluded from, the Co-operative ideal. Co-operation will lose all its briskness, unless Co-operative Societies heartily compete.with each other how best to serve the public ; how best to pay their workmen ; how best to secure good workmen ; and how to obtain honourably the cheapest and soundest material. Such competition, instead of putting any slight on the Christian exhortation, " Bear ye one another's burdens," really fulfils it. And we heartily wish that Mr. Hughes would confine his denunciation of competition and cheapness to a denunciation of cruel competition and illusory cheapness. Within these limits there is still as good a field for healthy competition as there is in any other department of public life.
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