saving to buy or build a house, it is just as long and as hard to save enough money as it was before. He cannot really raise his wages, unless he can keep prices down, as well as wages up. Or more accurately, his wages are only raised when he receives in wages a larger proportion of the market value of his day's work. If he gets three-fourths, when the product of a day's work is worth two dollars, he is better paid than if he gets two-thirds, when the product of a day's work is worth three dollars, because he can buy more with the former than with the latter.

The co-operative method identifies labor and capital as democracy does the people and the government, making the workman his own paymaster. John Smith joins his savings and perhaps his tools with those of thirty other John Smiths, and, after a while of hardship and pinching, finds himself master of the situation. Their workshop is not grand, their tools not the best for all varieties of the business, their capital not very extensive, although "mony mickles mak' a muckle;" but they put their hearts into the business, for it is their own business, and they are fighting for independence and competence. They waste nothing, they render no eye-service, they pull hard to get over the rough places, and in ten years time they are dependent on no man. They are now their own paymasters, and tolerate no drones in the hive, while they get as "fair day's wages for a fair day's work" as the market permits. The picture is not an ideal one. We have seen it realized in more than one Western town, and especially in Cincinnati, where the business of manufacturing furniture for the area drained by the Mississippi is largely in the hands of co-operative factories.

But what of the capitalist? Is his occupation gone? By no means. He has always held that the rate of wages ought to be fixed by free competition, without terrorism or illegal combination. He can now test his own sincerity and consistency in competing with co-operation. If he is wise, he will do as a great number of English firms have done, and we are glad to know that a number of our iron men have followed their example. He will combine co-operation with capital, by distributing all the surplus profits above a certain fixed percentage among his employees. Some of these English firms had rarely gained this percentage (say fifteen) in previous years, but when they adopted this system they found that they always had a large surplus to

distribute among their workmen. Waste and eye-service, two great leaks in our manufactories, were abolished by giving men a personal interest in their work; hence the increase of the profits. But if our capitalist is not wise to discern the signs of the times, he will find that the best workmen, those who are capable of self-denial and perseverance, will not work for less wages nor for more hours than their neighbors in the co-operative factory have fixed for themselves. The workingmen now settle all these questions for themselves, simply on the ground of what the work will afford.

Objections to the co-operative system will at once occur to most minds; but experience shows that they are not insurmountable. It might be supposed, for instance, that the need of a large capital at the start would be fatal to the plan;, but in northern England, where the workmen had no friends to help them to money, co-operation has been a splendid success, as may be seen from the columns of The Co-operator, published for years past in Manchester, by Ben Pitman, the phonographer. In the south, especially in London, the movement failed at first, just because it was fostered and patronized by benevolent capitalists. Its beginning was at Rochedale, in Lancashire, in 1848. Who shall say what its end will be, at the rate at which it has developed the workingmen's power of accumulation? In France and Germany, in spite of the bitter opposition of the Socialists, it is decidedly gaining ground. Several Parisian trades are now largely conducted on this plan, and it has been virtually introduced into the management of at least one extensive railroad. The answer, therefore, to this objection is the actual success of the plan. Solvitur ambulando.

Another objection which might be met by the same answer is in regard to the organization of the human material in co-operation. How are drones to be kept out? how are competent men to be put in places of trust? how are dishonest hands to be kept out of the treasury? how are the terms of admission and withdrawal to be equitably adjusted? That the working classes possess great power of adaptation and organization no one will deny who knows any thing of trades unions. Experience shows that they do not lose their heads when they essay co-operation; that they are at least as shrewd as other men to see who can lead and who cannot; who can be trusted and who cannot. They have

as good an eye for detail and for fair dealing as any class. They do manage to make the method succeed, in spite of difficulties which are not greater than those which every private firm must encounter in the same line of work.

The subject has another aspect in which it concerns the future of the Republic. Mr. Charles Francis Adams has given it as his opinion that the growth of giant corporations is among the great dangers that threaten the national peace and prosperity. The spectacle displayed in the courts and marts of a sister commonwealth adds emphasis to his warning. Hitherto these corporations have been always composed of capitalists; and to this fact they owe much of their dangerous character. The growth of co-operation will, we trust, furnish a corrective force to preserve the social balance. It will render the rapid accumulation of wealth less easy on the one hand, and by raising the whole average and level of the wealth of the masses, will deprive any egregious peaks of their threatening prominence. It will, on the other hand, extend to all classes the power that comes with the organized control of great capital. Great corporations whose interests are those of the people at large will arise to exert the same sort of influence as belonged to the great guilds of craftsmen in the middle ages. May we not hope that in the future the two great social forces-numbers and wealth-will work together in harmony and with a true identity of interest in all things, as the Jachin and the Boaz of the social fabric.

ROBT. E. THOMPSON.

ACROSS THE CONTINENT.

STATION yourself in the baggage-room, if any, of our great railway depots; and you shall read strange stories of travel and adventure in the innumerable labels pasted on the innumerable trunks which are about to be checked once more-somewhere. This burly trunk, which, supplied with apertures for the admission of air, would comfortably house a whole barnyard of poultry, bears unmistakable signs of maltreatment at the hands of Miss Flora McFlimsey, who has more than once banged down its lid

violently on discovering that it contained "nothing to wear." This trim old wooden box, browned with age, and bound with stout cords, appears to have been more generous, judging from its excellent preservation; for it is a sailor's sea-chest, and the wardrobe of a sailor is not elaborate. But this small and wellworn leather trunk has rattled, and rolled, and slid over thousands of miles of land and ocean; for you can see the checks of the Schweizerhof of Luzerne, the Bohemian customs-mark at Aussig, where it was inspected on passing to or from the North German Confederation, the Grande Vitesse direction of the Chemin de fer du Nord, the red label of the Paris and Folkestone Express, besides Adams Express and Wells, Fargo & Co. Should we amuse ourselves longer with such matters, we might find Turkish crescents, Prussian eagles, and local express cards, jostling each other on the sides and lids of the trunks with the charming confusion of an advertising drop-curtain; but the whistle has sounded, and it is time we take our places in the car to accompany the baggage we have seen westward.

He who travels from Philadelphia to Pittsburg, per Pennsyl vania Central railroad, makes the trip across the continent in miniature. Our majestic Delaware supplies the place of the Atlantic; the rich counties of Chester, Delaware and Lancaster play the part of the fertile States of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois; the Susquehanna represents not unworthily the noble Mississippi, and the Juniata the Missouri; the Blue mountains the Alleghanies, the gradual ascent to the base of which finds its counterpart in the broad prairies of Nebraska and Wyoming, which rise five thousand feet in five hundred miles. The Alleghanies are the Pennsylvania Rocky mountains, and the little valleys on their summit prepare us for those of Laramie and Utah; and, finally, we descend into the valley of confluence of the Alleghany and Monongahela, just as we descend the Sierra Nevada to the valley of confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers; and then we must stretch our imagination to the uttermost to see in the rolling tide of the Ohio the gorgeous surf of the Pacific ocean.

My gentle reader may object to such a simile as that. I have associated the Laramie plains and the Utah basin and the Nevada desert together in comparing them to the little valleys on the summit of the Alleghanies; whereas our geographies teach

1

us that they are separated by chains of mountains bearing different names. In answer, I would say that over the entire length of twelve hundred miles west of the first chain of the Rocky mountains there is such a constant succession of ranges that it is difficult, if not impossible, to say where the boundaries of the separate systems of mountains should be placed, if we do not • consider all these ranges as parts of one great system. The Laramie plains lie at an elevation above tide water of about seven thousand feet; those of Utah at about four thousand feet; the Nevada plains about the same, (the lowest point traversed by the railroad being 3,921 feet;) while Omaha, the eastern terminus of the Union Pacific railroad, on the Missouri river, has an altitude of not quite a thousand feet, and Sacramento, the western terminus of the Central Pacific railway, of but fiftysix feet. It may therefore be granted (to poetic license, if you will) to consider all that country intermediate between Cheyenne, in Wyoming Territory, and Colfax, in California, rockily mountainous.

Having thus cast a glance at the Pennsylvania model of our continent, we hurry on to see the reality. We Philadelphians are amongst the most incredulous, of the immense enterprise and success of our fellow-countrymen in the far west, of all "Easterners;" in proof of which fact, one has only to witness how insignificant a part our fellow-citizens play in the development of the great West. True, some of the most prosperous of the early pioneers hail from our city; and there are always plenty of townsfolk to grasp you by the hand and ask you whether Welsh's National circus and theatre is as popular now as ever, and whether Jones' hotel is still the fashionable place of the city; but where you see or hear the name Philadelphia once, you hear New York, Boston, St. Louis, Chicago-yes, Baltimore and Providence-thrust at you twenty times. "From Philadelphia, eh?" said a hardy mountaineer to whom I had just mentioned the place of my nativity. "Oh, yes! I know where that is: in Pennsylvany, isn't it?" and delighted at having at the same time paid my birthplace a graceful compliment and given a proof of his thorough acquaintance with geography, he resumed the pipe he was smoking with great self-complacency. Your bona fide Philadelphian, who has never journeyed towards the setting sun, will unfailingly be astonished at the cosy and civil