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Subject Area: Political Theory
Collection: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill

13.: Cooperation: Notes 1825 - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXVI - Journals and Debating Speeches Part I [1820]

Edition used:

The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXVI - Journals and Debating Speeches Part I, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988).

Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.

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13.

Cooperation: Notes

1825

MS, Trinity College, Cambridge, Add. MS c. 8026. These notes seem most closely connected with No. 12, though they bear on the whole issue between the Owenites and the Benthamites; perhaps they formed the basis of Mill’s opening speech, of which only a fragment (No. 10) remains.

allegation. Competition is the cause of the distress which is diffused over all classes.

Answer.

1. Deny that there is general distress. Only labourers.

2. The produce is divided into wages profits and rent.

Competition does not lower rent.

Competition does not lower profits, 1. by making people sell cheap. 2. by making people produce little. Competition only equalizes profits.

Competition does lower wages. But there is another competition tending to raise them. Narrow the former competition and wages would be high.

3. Shew what would take place if population were diminished. That profits would be little more than high wages. That rent would be little or none, and that little might be appropriated. 1. expenses of general govt. 2. all local expenses, roads, bridges, canals, etc. 3. education. 4. if necessary distributed among the labourers themselves.

4. Labourers equally rich with American labourers, and far happier.

5. What could Mr. Owen’s system do more? Cooperative production? Equal distribution? Household saving?

6. Could they do it without limiting the population? Shew that they could not.

7. Shew the purgatory to be gone through. Effect of taking away the motive to work.

8. Mr. Owen’s system of education.1 Shew what is its improbability, regard it as a hazardous experiment.

9. Shew that the same system of education could be adopted now. E.g. infant schools, and if adopted that it would give us all that we could have by Owen’s system and more: the pleasures and virtues of individual freedom of action. If then Owen’s system brings men more speedily to this state, let us have it, and when brought let the comm. dissolve.

10. Shew that it cannot. Impr. in education why necessarily progressive: Protract the evils to be gone through.

11. The end sooner attained without Owen’s system, because education would not have to struggle with self-interest.

12. Recapitulation and Conclusion.

[1 ]An Outline of the System of Education at New Lanark (Glasgow: Wardlaw and Cunningham, 1824), by Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen (1801-77), gives the details of the system, founded on the belief that character is formed by circumstances, and directed towards associating in the child’s mind individual happiness and that of the community.