CO-OPERATION TO-DAY.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 236, 2 October 1908, Page 6

CO-OPERATION TO-DAY.

TRACING THE MOVEMENT.

In the V.M.C.A. lecture ball last night Mr Andrew Gray, of Wellington, delivered a lecture on "Co-operation," in which he dealt particularly with the Rochdale system, and traced the movement in general. There was not a laxge attendance. Mr A. H. Elkin presided. The lecturer opened his address by dealing with the industrial movement at the conclusion of the seventeenth century. He traced the condition of the worker from the time when he -was his o 1 *"! master, doing everything under his own roof, to the time of the advent of la-bour-saving machinery, which was the beginning of the specialising of industries, the beginning of the factory system. W T ith the coming into vogue of the factory system of spinning came the apprenticeship system, when children, as young as five years some of them, were marketed like slaves, and hundreds of them worked for 18 hours a day. The lecturer touched upon the humanitarian treatment of employees by Richard Owen, who effected a social reform by treating his factory hands well, assisting them to live in sanitary conditions and to improve their minds. Owen later erected the famous New Lanwark institution for the improvement of character. In referring to the inception of cooperatives and the various village communities which were inaugurated in different countries on socialistic-communis-tic lines, but which were failures, he auoted Henry Drummond: "Anything out of touch with its environment must' die." Mr Gray said that the co-opera-tive system commenced with the Rochdale system, which held that the consumer was the person to be considered. It had been objected that the movement had had the 'effect of lowering prices and.-wiping out the small shopkeepers altogether, but that was a desirable effect when the general community benefited. Some co-operative societies defeated true co-operative principles by allowing individuals to possess large numbers of shares. True co-oneration meant cooperation for the reciprocal benefit of the community.