Land and Building Societies constitute another form of co-operation.  These are chiefly supported by the minor middle-class men, but also to a considerable extent by the skilled and thrifty working-class men.  By their means portions of land are bought, and dwelling-houses are built.  By means of a building society, a person who desires to possess a house enters the society as a member, and instead of paying his rent to the landlord, pays his subscriptions and interest to a committee of his friends; and in course of time, when his subscriptions are paid up, the house is purchased, and conveyed to him by the society.  The building-society is thus a savings bank, where money accumulates for a certain purpose.  But even those who do not purchase a house, receive a dividend and bonus on their shares, which sometimes amounts to a considerable sum.

The accumulation of property has the effect which it always has upon thrifty men; it makes them steady, sober, and diligent.  It weans them from revolutionary notions, and makes them conservative.  When workmen, by their industry and frugality, have secured their own independence, they will cease to regard the sight of others’ well-being as a wrong inflicted on themselves; and it will no longer be possible to make political capital out of their imaginary woes.

It has been said that Freehold Land Societies, which were established for political objects, had the effect of weaning men from political reform.  They were first started in Birmingham, for the purpose of enabling men to buy land, and divide it into forty-shilling freeholds, so that the owners might become electors and vote against the corn-laws.  The corn-laws have been done away with; but the holders of freehold land still exist, though many of them have ceased to be politicians.  “Mr. Arthur Ryland informs me,” said Mr. Holyoake, in a recent paper on Building Societies, “that in Birmingham, numbers of persons under the influence of these societies have forsaken patriotism for profits.  And I know both co-operators and Chartists who were loud-mouthed for social and political reform, who now care no more for it than a Whig government; and decline to attend a public meeting on a fine night, while they would crawl like the serpent in Eden, through a gutter in a storm, after a good security.  They have tasted land, and the gravel has got into their souls.”

“Yet to many others,” he adds, “these societies have taught a healthy frugality they never else would have known; and enabled many an industrious son to take to his home his poor old father—­who expected and dreaded to die in the workhouse—­and set him down to smoke his pipe in the sunshine in the garden, of which the land and the house belonged to his child."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Paper read at York Meeting of the National Society for Promoting Social Science, 26th Sept. 1864.]