Chapter 9 - Co-Operation -
From Poverty by James Platt

Social mobility has got easier as time has gone by. We know that opportunities to rise to a higher social class, a higher income and standard of living, were rare in Victorian Britain. This chapter, written in 1884 without the benefit of the hindsight we have now, speculates on how working men (forget women in 1884) could raise their social status and escape poverty by co-operating, by working together. It sumises that the best way of doing this is not through strikes and confrontations, but through the co-operative societies.