Wing B1830. First published the year before, this second edition has a new “Discourse for Imploying the Poor” by Chief Justice Hale, a new address “To the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament” (it had previously been addressed “To the Children of Light, in Scorn called Quakers”) and an address “To the Thinking and Publick-Spirited” along with a request to the public for subscriptions. In addition there are ten substantive alterations to the text, including raising the estimate of the cost for each college from £15000 to £18000, punishments should be “rather abatements of Food, &c. then Stripes”, there should be fishing colleges on the coast, children should be bred up in temperance, work should be found for the blind and lame to avoid idle hands, etc.
The second - much revised - edition of John Bellers’s extraordinary pamphlet which outlined a radical co-operative community in which no money would be needed and where the elderly would be cared for and children educated.
This remarkable pamphlet outlines a striking new potential model for society which covers many social concerns present today. The work begins with an introduction in which Bellers writes:
“It’s the Interest of the Rich to take Care of the Poor, and their Education, by which they will take Care of their own Heirs: For as Kingdoms and Nations are subject to Revolutions and Changes much more (and nothing commoner than) for private Families to do so; and who knows how soon it may be his own Lot, or his Posterities, to fall poor? Is there any Poor now, that some of their Ancestors have not been Rich? Or any Rich now, that some of their Ancestors have not been Poor?” (p.1)
“…it is for this first piece that Bellers is best remembered. In it, he advocates the establishment of free-standing, co-operative communities in which no money would be needed and all middlemen eliminated. The pamphlet describes the college as a mixed agricultural and manufacturing settlement wherein 300 people, 200 of them labourers and craftspeople, would live and work. It would be, in Bellers’s words, an ‘Epitome of the World’, with the addition that children would be educated and the elderly and ill looked after. Such colleges would be run in a rather paternalistic manner by people able to contribute at least £100 to the original foundation; but both in their organization and the expectation that each college should be free-standing and self-sustaining they prefigure many nineteenth-century experiments in co-operation. More than this, contained within the description of the colleges is a substantial critique of the nature of value, which had a profound impact on both Robert Owen (who had 1000 copies of the pamphlet reprinted in 1817, ensuring its continued importance for nineteenth-century writers) and Karl Marx, who refers to Bellers at least four times in Das Kapital and describes him as a “**veritable phenomenon in the history of political economy”** (ODNB).
“What Bellers advocated and what Marx adopted was a pure form of a labour theory of value. In Bellers’s words, the college “will make labour and not money, the standard to value all necessaries by.” More than this, in his Proposals he asked “if one had a hundred thousand acres of land, and as many pounds in money, and as many cattle, without a labourer, what would the rich man be, but a labourer.” (ODNB).
Provenance: The Lawes Agricultural Library, Rothamsted Experimental Research Station, Harpenden, Hertfordshire, old ink stamp and ink number “6899/1927” which suggests 1927 as the purchase date) on the front pastedown. The Research Station was founded on farmland owned by Sir John Bennet Lawes, 1st Baronet (1814-1900), an agricultural chemist, and the library of early agricultural books (one of the best in the world) was formed by Sir (Edward) John Russell, Kt (1872-1965), director from 1912-43.
