James Hayden Tufts

“ But free trade in name is not free trade unless the parties are really free—free from ignorance, from pressure of want. If one party is weak and the other unscrupulous; if one competitor has a lower standard of living than the other, freedom of trade will not mean genuine coöperation. Such coöperation as means good for all requires either an equality of conditions between traders and laborers of competing nations and of nations which exchange goods, or else an international control to prevent unfair competition, exploitation of weaker peoples, and lowering of standards of living. ”

“ Yet though submerged for long periods, the principle of coöperation has asserted itself, step by step and it seldom loses ground. Beginning usually in some group which at first combined to resist dominance, it has made its way through such stages as equality before the law, abolition of special privileges, extension of suffrage, influence of public sentiment, interchange of ideas, toward genuine participation by all in the dignity and responsibility of political power. ”

“ Who can fail to see that common welfare comes not without common intention?
The second great defect in our economic order, from the point of view of coöperation, has been the inequality of its distribution. This has been due largely to competition when parties were unequal, not merely in their ability, but in their opportunity. And the most serious, though not the most apparent, aspect of this inequality, has not been that some have more comfort or luxuries to enjoy; it is the fact that wealth means power. ”

“ The only safety is in the general and intelligent desire for the public interest and common welfare. At this moment almost unanimous acceptance of responsibility for what we believe to be the public good and the maintenance of American ideals—though it brings to each of us sacrifice and to many the full measure of devotion—bears witness to the ability of human nature to adopt as its compelling motives a high end which opposes private advantage. ”

“ Dominance implies inequality, direction and obedience, superior and subordinate. Coöperation implies some sort of equality, some mutual relation. It does not exclude difference in ability or in function. It does not exclude leadership, for leadership is usually necessary to make coöperation effective. But in dominance the special excellence is kept isolated; ideas are transmitted from above downward. In coöperation there is interchange, currents flowing in both directions, contacts of mutual sympathy, rather than of pride-humility, condescension-servility. ”

“ Early in this great process of social organization three divergent types emerged, which still contend for supremacy in the worlds of action and of valuation: dominance, competition, and coöperation. All mean a meeting of human forces. They rest respectively on power, rivalry, and sympathetic interchange. Each may contribute to human welfare. On the other hand, each may be taken so abstractly as to threaten human values. I hope to point out that the greatest of these is coöperation, and that it is largely the touchstone for the others.
Coöperation and dominance both mean organization. ”

“ Religion presents a fascinating mixture of coöperation with dominance on the one hand, and exclusiveness on the other. The central fact is the community, which seeks some common end in ritual, or in beneficent activity. But at an early period leaders became invested, or invested themselves, with a sanctity which led to dominance. Not the power of force, but that of mystery and the invisible raised the priest above the level of the many. And, on another side, competition between rival national religions, like that between states, excluded friendly contacts. ”

“ The principle of dominance deters from coöperation, not only the people that seeks to dominate, but peoples that fear to be dominated or to become involved in entangling alliances. Doubtless a policy of aloofness was long the safe policy for us. We could not trust political liberty to an alliance with monarchies, even as with equal right some European peoples might distrust the policies of a republic seemingly controlled by the slavery interest. At the present time one great power professes itself incredulous of the fairness of any world tribunal ”

“ There is, from the outset, one defect in the coöperation between buyer and seller, employer and laborer. The coöperation is largely unintended. Each is primarily thinking of his own advantage, rather than that of the other, or of the social whole; he is seeking it in terms of money, which as a material object must be in the pocket of one party or of the other, and is not, like friendship or beauty, sharable. Mutual benefit is the result of exchange—it need not be the motive. ”

“ The code of masters exalts liberty—for the ruling class—and resents any restraint by inferiors or civilians, or by public opinion of any group but its own. It has a justice which takes for its premise a graded social order, and seeks to put and keep every man in his place. But its supreme value is power, likewise for the few, or for the state as consisting of society organized and directed by the ruling class. Such a group, according to Treitschke, will also need war, in order to test and exhibit its power to the utmost in fierce struggle with other powers. ”

“ And until education, invention, and intercommunication have done their work of elevation, international control must protect and regulate.
In many respects the obstacle to international coöperation which is most difficult to remove is the strong and still growing sentiment of nationality. This is not, like dominance, a waning survival of a cruder method of social order; it is a genuine type of coöperation. Rooted as it is in a historic past, in community of ideals and traditions, and usually of language and art, it wakens the emotional response to a degree once true only of religion. ”

“ It knows the liberty of nature, the liberty of the strong and the swift, but not the liberty achieved by the common effort for all. It knows justice, but a justice which is likely to be defined as securing to each his natural liberty, and which therefore means non-interference with the struggle for existence except to prevent violence and fraud. It takes no account as to whether the struggle kills few or many, or distributes goods widely or sparingly, or whether indeed there is any room at the table which civilization spreads ”

“ The factory competes with the hand loom and banishes it. The trust competes with the small firm and puts it out of business. The result is monopoly. When plants or inventions are thus said to compete for a place, there is frequently no room for both competitors, and no social gain by keeping both in the field. Competition serves here sometimes as a method of selection, although no one would decide to grow weeds rather than flowers because weeds are more efficient. In the case of what are called natural monopolies, there is duplication of effort instead of coöperation. ”

“ Abstract rights to the soil, to trade, to expansion, must be subordinate to the supreme question: How can peoples live together and help instead of destroy? This can be approached only from an international point of view.
The second obstacle, unsocial competition, is for trade what dominance is in politics. It prevents that solution for many of the delicate problems of international life which coöperation through trade might otherwise afford. Exchange of goods and services by voluntary trade accomplishes what once seemed attainable only by conquest or slavery. ”

“ If we rule out monopoly the best way to gain great success is likely to lie through meeting needs of a great multitude; and to meet these effectively implies entering by imagination and sympathy into their situation. The business maxim of "service," the practices of refunding money if goods are unsatisfactory, of one price to all, of providing sanitary and even attractive factories and homes, and of paying a minimum wage far in excess of the market price, have often proved highly remunerative. Yet, I should not place exclusive, and perhaps not chief, reliance on these methods of appeal. ”

“ But all this is the strongest argument for genuine coöperation, since by this only can diversity be helpful, even as it is only through diversity in its members that a community can develop fullest life. A world organization based on the principle that any single group is best and therefore ought to rule, or to displace all others, would be a calamity. A world organization which encourages every member to be itself would be a blessing. ”

“ What bearing has this sketch of the significance and progress of coöperation upon the international questions which now overshadow all else? Certainly the world cannot remain as before: great powers struggling for empire; lesser powers struggling for their separate existence; great areas of backward peoples viewed as subjects for exploitation; we ourselves aloof. ”

“ A group practicing cut-throat competition will simply reverse the order: first, struggle to put rivals out of the field; then, monopoly with unlimited power to control the market or possess the soil. It appeals to nature's struggle for existence as its standard for human life. It too sets a high value upon liberty in the sense of freedom from control, but originating as it did in resistance to control by privilege and other aspects of dominance, it has never learned the defects of a liberty which takes no account of ignorance, poverty, and ill health. ”

“ In unfair competition there is no common purpose of public service or of advancing skill or invention; hence, no coöperation. The coöperative purpose or result is thus the test of useful, as contrasted with wasteful or harmful, competition.
There is also an abstract conception of coöperation, which, in its one-sided emphasis upon equality, excludes any form of leadership, or direction, and in fear of inequality allows no place for competition. Selection of rulers by lot in a large and complex group is one illustration ”

“ A herding instinct or a common need of defense or of food supplies may bring together early groups, and will to power may begin the state, but it is the living together which generates laws and wakens the craving for liberty and the struggle for justice. Seer and poet doubtless contribute to progress by their kindling appeals to the imagination and sympathy; the philosopher may, as Plato claimed for him, live as citizen of a perfect state which has no earthly being, and shape his life according to its laws ”

“ Power is likewise a value in a coöperating group, but it must be power not merely used for the good of all, but to some extent controlled by all and thus actually shared. Only as so controlled and so shared is power attended by the responsibility which makes it safe for its possessors. Only on this basis does power over other men permit the free choices on their part which are essential to full moral life. ”

“ The contending rivals are in reality uniting to stimulate each other. Without the coöperation there would be no competition, and the competition is so conducted as to continue the relation. Competition in the world of thought is similarly social. In efforts to reach a solution of a scientific problem or to discuss a policy, the spur of rivalry or the matching of wits aids the common purpose of arriving at the truth. Similar competition exists in business. Many a firm owes its success to the competition of its rivals which has forced it to be efficient, progressive. ”

“ The strongest point in the nationalist programme is, however, not in any wise opposed to coöperation, but rather to dominance or non-social competition. The strongest point is the importance of diversity combined with group unity for the fullest enrichment of life and the widest development of human capacity. A world all of one sort would not only be less interesting, but less progressive. We are stimulated by different customs, temperaments, arts, and ideals. ”

“ One great need is to substitute a different standard of success for the financial gains which have seemed the only test. Our schools of commerce are aiming to perform this service, by introducing professional standards. A physician is measured by his ability to cure the sick, an engineer by the soundness of his bridge and ship; why not measure a railroad president by his ability to supply coal in winter, to run trains on time, and decrease the cost of freight, rather than by his private accumulations? ”

“ What are we to understand by the Ethics of Coöperation? Can we find some external standard of unquestioned value or absolute duty by which to measure the three processes of society which we have named, dominance, competition, coöperation? Masters of the past have offered many such, making appeal to the logic of reason or the response of sentiment, to the will for mastery or the claim of benevolence. ”

“ It must then choose between a future world order based on dominance, which means world empire; a world order based on nationalism joined with the non-social type of competition, which means, every nation the judge of its own interests, continuance of jealousies and from time to time the recurrence of war; and a world order based on nationalism plus international coöperation, "to establish justice, to provide for common defense, to promote the general welfare, and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." ”