“RIDING THE MARCHES” ROUND 
 LABOUR’S ESTATE. 
 
 A PAPER 
 
 By JAMES M'VITTIE, 
 
 (Op Selkirk). 
 
 Bead at Hawick , July 16th , 1881. 
 
 ISSUED BY THE CENTRAL CO-OPERATIVE BOARD. 
 
 The title may seem a strange one for a co-operative conference, 
 and yet there may be some good lessons behind it after all ; at 
 all events an honest effort will be made to examine some points 
 of our position, and in the words of a local song, see “ giff a’ 
 oor marches, they be clear.” At this season of the year, it is, 
 whatever else, a time-honoured custom in some of our Border 
 towns, particularly in Hawick, Selkirk, and Langholm, for a 
 real or delegated authority mounted on such cattle as can be 
 conveniently got, to ride round the Common, or town’s estate, 
 and thus fulfil an annual demand of the Covenant of Bight, 
 and manifest their fealty to their feudal lord, the representa- 
 tive of the generous donor. Another reason for the riding of 
 the marches is to make sure no encroachment has been made 
 nor any of the landmarks removed. We stay not to discuss 
 whether there was any necessity for, or any real benefit from, 
 this feudal pageantry or harmless parade, simply remarking the 
 spontaneous enthusiasm and cheerful friendship which is elicited 
 and manifested on these occasions. The whole community 
 seem permeated by a kind of social magnetism so powerful and 
 contagious in its influence, that it goes out to other towns and 
 cities, sweeps lakes and seas, skips over prairie wastes, and 
 snow-capped mountains ten thousand miles removed, and in the 
 hearts and homes of the wandering Border children the very 
 hour and day of the Common-riding is revered as a kind of 
 3aered holiday, and their festive song becomes the household 
 carol. What a history of reunion do these Common-ridings tell 
 if friendships and plighted vows renewed, old sores are healed, 
 the trysts of months and years are ratified, the memories of the 
 past are soothed and sweetened, and altogether it is a happy 
 merry time. Why is it so? There can be nothing in the 
 occasion, considered by itself, to cause this social revival; 
 
 o -a -a. l VS.; 
 
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 no, but in the associations that are linked to and spring from it, 
 is found the secret of their power. No doubt there is reality 
 in the estate round which 
 
 The vener’d Provost with his marshalled host, 
 
 Ride and proclaim, with some small pride and boast, 
 
 Of some brave deed performed in days gone by, 
 
 When men were measured by their chivalry, 
 
 When king and baron their allegiance bought 
 By grants of acres of the land they sought. 
 
 But there is just as little doubt that the history of the past has 
 taught them the necessity for vigilance, lest the little that 
 remains of their estate should fall into the hands of the selfish 
 land-grabbers, and therefore with all the folly, and sometimes 
 worse than folly, that accompany these occasions, there still 
 -exists a kind of necessity for riding the marches. But I want 
 to draw your attention in this paper to another estate, a very 
 large and ever-developing estate, the most wealthy, because a 
 wealth-producing, estate in the world — the estate of labour. 
 Bor, look at wealth in any or all of its relations ; trace it to any 
 or all of its sources. Almost all that can be counted wealth 
 springs from the hands and brains of the toiler. Its character 
 is irrevocable, its title is heaven-gifted. Man’s right to live is 
 dependent on his toil, and he only lives well who fulfils his 
 part in the covenant. This, then, is our common or estate, and 
 it is a sacred duty, devolving upon every intelligent toiler, to go 
 round about the marches and see that no privilege is infringed, 
 no right stolen, no liberty curtailed. The rightful proprietor 
 of this estate is the toiler, but, like the prodigal in the parable, 
 he is either ignorant of it, or has forgot it, and is grovelling 
 beneath his dignity and true position, vainly seeking content- 
 ment as a drudge ; a low paid and little cared for serf of the 
 soil, while the hereditary lordling or avaricious capitalist has 
 taken possession of it, protected by bayonets and bribes. T n 
 spite of this league of wrong, however, truth is omnipotent and 
 eternal and must prevail, and this fundamental principle of life, 
 though latent often, “ That he who sows in tears, shall reap in 
 joy” is heard again and again. The tongues of a few brave 
 souls keep crying it aloud ; and the pen of the patriot writes it 
 in tears and in blood. The ears of the toiler are unstopped, 
 and with enlarged vision he sees the dawn of a brighter, because 
 a better, day. When will it be ? How shall it be done ? and 
 who shall lead us ? seem to be the pressing questions of the 
 

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 hour. And in our Congresses and Conferences we are riding 
 round the marches of this great estate of labour, to try if we 
 can solve these momentous questions, and already a good 
 earnest of the future has been gained. The degrading system 
 of paying a small portion in wages, and filling up to the toiler 
 in their doled out alms, enough to make life tolerable, crushing 
 out of him all sense of independence, and cursing him with a 
 beggar’s badge, is fast passing away. The great landlord 
 domination is on the wane under intelligent agitation at home, 
 and very particularly under the steady and ever increasing 
 imports from the golden West. 
 
 Where labour to the soil is brother ; 
 
 Where the sower and the reaper, not another 
 Owns the land he tills; 
 
 Where the harvest’s golden gladness, 
 
 Drives away a nation’s sadness, 
 
 As its granaries it fills. 
 
 Two things are before the landholding class as inevitable — - 
 the one or the other must be accepted ; either the land must go 
 to waste, or come back to its rightful owner — the people — - 
 whose return to the fruitful life-sustaining soil shall relieve the 
 great commercial industries of the mighty incubus a pleasure- 
 seeking aristocracy has so long thrown upon them. The return 
 of the honest toiler to the soil will be the just balance to the 
 competition of other countries. Thus blessed, Labour needs no 
 more. The land, her own, becomes obedient to her honest 
 touch, and yields a lavish increase which all the protective 
 tariffs of the world cannot affect. Protection never was, and 
 never can be, the toilers’ friend, but his greatest enemy. 
 Liberty and freedom is all he needs, and the cry of his soul is 
 unchanging. 
 
 Undo tbe fetters, let the oppressed go free 
 ’Tis right we want, not sympathy, 
 
 We battle ’gainst the wrong. 
 
 O’er wealth and laws of tyranny, 
 
 O’er lordly pomp and pedigree, 
 
 We’ll triumph ere ’t be long. 
 
 But in riding our marches, we discover another intruder in the 
 guise of a friend upon this labour estate, called capital— whose 
 long unchallenged settlement has made it put forth a claim of 
 superiority from which it dictates to the toiler and demands 
 implicit obedience and service. This intruder boasts of no blue 
 blood. It has risen from the ranks, and looks down from its 
 self -exalted position with supreme contempt upon the toiler, 
 
4 
 
 thinking that the jingle of the guinea can buy him body, and 
 soul. This capital, the handmaid, nay the servant of labour, 
 has usurped the mastery, and dictates to its own creator a line 
 of action and course of life. Never was a nation so rich in 
 capitalised wealth as the Britain of to-day, and yet her history 
 of this century and present experience is a record of splendid 
 poverty, of ornamented pauperism, of gilded fraud. Where is 
 this wealth ? Is it in the soil, the ever augmenting roll of 
 bankrupt farmers passing through the Bankruptcy Court 
 answers, No. They cannot pay rent and live. Where is 
 wealth ? Is it among the industrial classes of the population, 
 wh ) smelt their lives in labour’s furnace unceasingly, cooling at 
 intervals only to resume this smelting process ; resting only in 
 the grave. Yet are they sadly, hopelessly poor, cursed with a 
 poverty which often bears the brand of crime. Ver y the 
 wealth is not here. Where then is that wealth of which we so 
 vauntingiy boast. In the mighty useless fleets and armies, in 
 the glittering palaces and palatial mansions, in the gorgeous 
 equipages and tinselled retinues of princes, dukes, and bishops, 
 in consols, in bonds, in mysteriously accumulating and irre- 
 deemable debts, in illusory speculations, in floating bubble 
 companies and questionable banks ; in these is the wealth 
 centralised, and held with the grip of usury, parted with only 
 to recreate itself from the blood and muscle of the toiler. 
 Surely no one believes this can last for ever. Just as the 
 ascendancy of feudal dominations is doomed and fast breaking up, 
 so shall it be with this centralisation of capital, which even now 
 seems to have reached a culminating point, for the rich have 
 grown so rich that they have difficulty in disposing of it, while 
 the many have grown so poor that a slight hitch in our com- 
 mercial affairs brings them face to face with starvation. ’Tis 
 said, “ hope deferred, maketh the heart sick,” but thank God 
 it has not yet given place to despair. Hope’s fair star is on the 
 ascendant, for in our riding of the marches round labour’s 
 common or estate we come upon a bright spot where there is 
 healthy activity and progressive development. This spot is 
 Co-operation. The beginning of the end of all the un- 
 righteousness and degrading systems that have preceded, 
 and hopes still to outlive them. One of two things 
 is fast becoming a necessity in our social life, either the 
 
5 
 
 centralised wealth must be taken by force from the few or 
 taken indirectly and honestly. The latter is what co-operation 
 geeks to acomplish, and I need only quote a sentence from that 
 great speech of one of England’s truest sons, the Earl of Derby, 
 to prove that co-operation is fast fulfilling its noble mission. 
 He says : — “ I find that in 1862 the total membership of the 
 co-operative movement was 48,000, with a capital of £365,000 ; 
 in 1879, the membership was over half a million, with a capital 
 of £6,700,000. The profits in 1862 were £166,000 ; in 1879 
 £1,600,000.” Now we talk of eloquent speakers, and impress- 
 ive writers to carry on the propaganda of the movement, but do 
 not these facts bring home the power and success of co-opera- 
 tion beyond all that has been said or written upon the subject, 
 and furnish us with intelligent answers to the questions I have 
 named. If results like these have sprung from the honest com- 
 bination of a few men with a small capital, what may be 
 expected from the present position of the consolidated move- 
 ment ; and if you know the ten thousand difficulties and failures 
 that have been met and overcome in the small days of co-opera- 
 tion, can you conceive of anything so gigantic in the future 
 that can possibly frustrate the complete triumph of the work? 
 I do not ignore what to every student of social life is so appar- 
 ent, that there are innumerable barriers in our way ; intricate 
 difficulties all around us, and I would not care much for the 
 movement if it were not so ; as I am convinced the suppression 
 and extinction of wrong is the grandest, and noblest work 
 possible for man. But one thing we ought to be sure of is 
 that we are right, and if right then there is no room for despair — 
 
 For right is right as God is right, 
 
 And right the day will win j 
 
 To douot it is disloyalty, 
 
 To falter would be sin. 
 
 Trade-unionism has tried to grapple with this gigantic capitalist 
 ring. It has done something ; it has done much in many cases : 
 raised wages, and secured and extended privileges, but what it 
 has gained on the one hand it is a question of dispute if it has 
 not lost considerably more on the other. It is not higher 
 wages that will drive this usurping capital from labour’s estate ; 
 it is not privilege the toiler needs and seeks, it is right, it is 
 unfettered justice to get and use what he produces. Two great 
 questions are before the working men of every nation in the 
 
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 world for solution ; and these are — first, to break the power of 
 grinding capitalists and remove the feudal system of landlord- 
 ism. These are not Utopian fancies, they are not far-off dreams, 
 they are before us in this country struggling for immediate solu- 
 tion. Irish agitation and Liberal legislation have taken the 
 Land Question in hand, and it will never rest until the land 
 is free. Neither is the solution of the other impracticable. 
 This great co-operative movement is proving it. Not to go fur- 
 ther than Hawick for illustration ; this store has accumulated 
 £20,000. It is using, and saving, and distributing annually in 
 its own circle 50 per cent, or £10,000. Now, why should it not 
 be £200,000 ? Why should not all the mills and all the works 
 here belong to the co-operators ? Only a few years of intelli- 
 gent united effort, and nothing can hinder your possession of 
 them all without injury or violence to anyone. Why 
 should not all the farms for a large area round Hawick 
 be even more your own than Pilmuir. You need the 
 produce from them, you have intelligence and energy to work 
 them, and the co-operative movement is making the capital to 
 pay them. Then if Hawick can do this Manchester could do it 
 too. Then might the boast of “ Huz and Manchester ” have a 
 glorious meaning, and be a sort of rallying cry for smaller 
 centres. If 80 per cent of nearly all manufactured articles is 
 the product of labour, why should capital have the largest 
 share of the profits, and labour only enough to keep it in motion 
 like a machine ? There is no righteous reason why these un- 
 explainable anomalies should exist. It is no use declaiming 
 against the capitalist. It serves no lasting purpose to organise 
 strikes, and to plan and execute retaliative measures. These 
 only retard the progress of the end aimed at. No one is to 
 blame for it but the toiler himself. The proportion of the 
 toiling population is as 10 to 1 or 90 per cent. The proportion 
 of physical power, moral worth, and mental force is in the 
 same ratio. It stands to reason, then, that when this 90 per 
 cent of energy and force is possessed of intelligence enough to 
 look at the matter in a common-sense light, all that then would 
 be needed would be organisation. And where could the 10 per 
 cent of arrogant, intolerant capitalists stand when the battle 
 was set in order. Now, co-operation is not only proving the 
 possibility of the toiler taking possession of his own estate, but 
 
7 
 
 it is educating the toiler into the near probability of such 
 possession. It was disputed at first that the toiler could do 
 without credit for his daily food ; and, therefore, the shopocracy, 
 sympathising with his extreme helplessness, supplied him with 
 the necessaries of life. Of course they took his money — all his 
 money — giving him as little for it as they could, and always 
 managing to keep him in debt, which just meant slavery. But 
 co-operation has lifted, and is still lifting him out of this 
 wretched state. Then it was said he could weave, and spin, 
 and dig, but he could not trade. But co-operation taught him 
 how to trade, and now it is admitted that he can buy and sell 
 batter, sugar, and even tea, and if we can buy and sell these, 
 putting the profit from them all into our own pocket always — 
 what is it we cannot buy and sell ? And so, even the landlords 
 and capitalists say these co-operators have accomplished the 
 end they sought ; but they are mistaken, we haven’t ; for co- 
 operation says we can produce as well as consume, and we are 
 going to import our own corn and wheat, until we get the land 
 to grow it on at home, and grind it too, and get five or six 
 quartern loaves more per bag than we could get from the 
 capitalist. Then we are going to mine our own coals and iron, 
 and carry them on our own railways and steamboats ; we are 
 going to grow our own butter, and beef, and eggs ; we are going 
 to make our own leather and boots ; we are going to make our 
 own cloth and coats, dresses and bonnets ; we are going to grow 
 or import our own timber and bricks, and build our own houses 
 and furnish them too ; and from the ever accumulating profits 
 from our own estate we will be ready and able to buy the land 
 which the beggared landlords will be glad to sell. Then we’ll 
 appoint our own parliaments, elect our own executive, and the 
 best, the truest, and the noblest shall be chief. I have glanced 
 at the two great factors of wrong against which the toiler has 
 to contend, viz., the domination of class, and the centralisation 
 of capital. I have pointed to the remedy and the instru- 
 mentality, viz., intelligent combination and co-operative action. 
 One word as to when it shall be accomplished. My answer 
 to this query is when there is uniform loyalty along the 
 whole line of co-operative action. When we know our own 
 powers and can trust them. When we are prepared to 
 give up all self-seeking for fair and equitable dealing. 
 
8 
 
 When we agree to allow a large proportion of the profits 
 made by the movement to remain in it. When we arise and 
 shake ourselves free of that insinuating peddling superfluity of 
 commercial life, the system of middlemen between producer and 
 consumer, with their “ close cuts,” and “ backhanded tips>” 
 “ accommodating discounts,” and “ abominable mixtures.” 
 Seedy, needy, greedy vultures, they are courting the move- 
 ment for its ready cash on the one hand, and surreptitiously 
 planning its destruction on the other, turning by their tricks 
 our executive offices into gaming houses and our transactions 
 iuto games of hazard. 
 
 Our interest must be measured by our increasing 
 investment. Our responsibilities must not be measured 
 by tall talk or tricky arithmetic, but by having our share 
 capital up to that point that covers our fixed and 
 moveable stock, our lands, houses, and manufactories, our 
 steamboats and railways. There is no point at which it ought 
 to stop until everything which mars the complete emancipation 
 of the toiler has been removed. When will it come ? When we 
 see one common interest in all our transactions. When we cease 
 to view each other with suspicion. When we have tried men and 
 true, whom we can trust with our very lives working in uniform 
 sy stem, the principles upon which our movement rests. And when 
 we, in return, treat our officials and servants as brethren, whose 
 character and position is in our trust, giving fair remuneration 
 for their services, and the enjoyment of all just privileges, with- 
 out grudge, and likewise, a proportion of the prosperity of the 
 movement. When will it come ? It will come when we will 
 it to come. Every warm impulse, every lofty inspiration, every 
 noble thought, every generous emotion, every manly action in 
 the individual, or in the community, has its power in the 
 volition of the individual. Let us, then, brethren, resolve to be 
 co-operative in deed more than in word, and though we may 
 have to work, and wait, and watch, yet shall the consummation 
 come. 
 
 Its coming up the steep Of time, ' \ 
 
 And this fair earth is seeming brighter j 
 
 Let’s labour for the end sublim o t 
 W hile hope shall make our burden® lighter. 
 
 Co-operative Printing Society, Limited, 17, Ball ion-street, Manchester.