The hundredth birthday of the Co-Operative Movement passed almost unnoticed among Catholics in this country. The only commemoration was a supplement to the Catholic Worker. This is in keeping with the strange aloofness of Catholics in Great Britain from the movement. Yet it contrasts with the interest displayed by Catholics in many other lands.

In the United States the well-known Queen’s Work and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference set up a joint committee to celebrate the Rochdale Centennial. The celebrations were a great success and included a letter from the Papal Secretary of State, two nation-wide rallies, leaflets and folders, special sermons and talks to school children and the publication of a pamphlet. In Quebec, where a Dominican edits an official co-operative journal, in Nova Scotia, where the movement owes much to a Catholic university, and in many other areas the celebrations were on as vast a scale and were supported by leading members of the hierarchy.

Addressing a petition to the Legislature of Nova Scotia in 1866, Bishop MacKinnon described St. Francis Xavier College of Antigonish as having “spacious and commodious buildings’’ and an enrolment which had “reached the high number of fifty-eight.” He pointed out that “the said College is the only institution in Eastern Nova Scotia, inclusive of Cape Breton, in which the sciences of Logic, Metaphysics, Ethics, and Moral and Dogmatic Theology are now taught,” and he asked that it “be empowered by charter to confer degrees on such of its pupils as after due examination shall have been. proved worthy of the honour.” The power was granted, and eighty years have passed since the Bishop signed his petition. The two wooden houses which seemed “spacious and commodious” to him have become a campus in brick and stone, and the student body has grown from fifty-eight to over seven hundred.

The institution with this humble beginning has become better known than perhaps any other small university in the world. The good Bishop would be pleased with that, but he would be amazed to find that it has achieved this fame for work which he never thought of as a university function. Eighty years ago—and indeed almost down to our own day—the university concerned itself solely with those attending regular intramural classes.

All the economic problems of our time are dominated by the debate between property and collectivism. Serious and irrefutable reasons militate in favour of each. Human reason requires the safeguard of personal property: living space for the family, the guarantee of personal freedom, the obligation and sanction of initiative . . . But on the other hand economic reasons involve the introduction of spheres of increasing collectivisation: appearance of process of collective production . . . multiplied returns . . . higher purchase . . . The co-operative solution is the standard one: it has, in fact, been advocated by the Holy Father in his memorable allocution in September, 1944, on the integration of human privileges, of personal or family property and the economic advantages of collectivisation. Hence its future. It is, we think, the most efficacious formula for the adjustment of the tension between capital and labour.

But this tension is not the only one that inflames the great leconomic conflicts of our age. Other tensions have also to be relieved—that between agriculture and industry, between production and distribution—and beyond these properly economic tensions those others between rulers and subjects, between teachers and taught—not to mention those between ideological and spiritual groups . . . All these problems are only distinct on the surface.

Money can only be understood in terms of power. In the hands of the consumer it is power over goods. In the hands of the creative capitalist it is power over the means to produce goods. In the hands of the finance-capitalist, or money-lender, it is not only power over producers and consumers, but power as well over nations and their governments. The technique of money-lending on its simplest level is to make an advance against security, draw interest, and at an agreed date receive back the capital sum—other things being equal, a perfectly honest transaction. If the more ambitious money-lenders kept to this even routine, however, they would be a very long time attaining power. What they desire, therefore, is that the money they lend shall either be repaid to them when its buying power has been greatly enhanced, or that it shall not be repaid at all, thus enabling them to foreclose on their mortgage and become possessed of their victim’s capital assets. These two motifs have long determined the course of economic history, explaining slump and boom, and enabling a small band of international lenders and manipulators to become the virtual masters of the world. The method was explained, with almost incredible candour, in an article which appeared in The U.S.A. Bankers’ Magazine on August 26th, 1934: —

’ Bonds and mortgages must be foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When through a process of the law the common people lose their homes they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of government applied by a central power of wealth under the control of leading financiers.