But a co-operative engineering works where all the capital is subscribed by the workers is a practical impossibility. In the first place, the number of workers in proportion to the amount of capital required in an engineering works is very small, and no group of ordinary workers could subscribe to start a factory and keep it going. In the second place, even if a factory could be started, the competition of the open market would throttle it in its birth. The keen buying and selling and manufacturing need highly educated and highly skilled men. Capable men are to be found in the ranks of the workers, but men with the necessary technical and commercial knowledge to run a large competitive engineering concern are extremely rare among them. Outside men would have to be engaged for such work and for the theoretical side of the business. This means high salaries, which the worker capitalist would object to; and it also takes the management out of the hands of the worker, and thereby destroys the whole basis of co-operation. It would be quite easy for an engineering business to grow out of a co-operative society's need of machinery of various kinds, but it is quite a different thing when one enters the open market. In the two or three cases where co-operation, apart from the large co-operative societies, is in practice, it will be found that the business has in the first place been built up privately, and the capital has afterwards been gradually transferred to the workers. There is no instance of workers getting together and clubbing their savings, and so starting a competitive business and earning their living thereby. (_f_) BONUS SYSTEMS. There are many bonus systems, and here again the advantages depend largely on the moral principles of the employer who adopts them. It does not follow that because an employer gives a bonus on work done that the conditions of work in his factory are good. Even with the best bonus system prices may be cut and conditions may become unbearable. Indeed, the adoption of a bonus system is often an excuse for driving and tyranny. They have one advantage over profit sharing and co-partnership: they do not interfere with the independence of the worker. I refer, of course, to those systems which have no connection with profit sharing or co-partnership, but where the bonus consists of a weekly payment for excess production above a specified minimum. A bonus system is based on a piece price or on individual or collective output in a certain time. It is therefore an offshoot of piece work, but it has a guaranteed minimum wage attached to it. Whatever happens, the worker gets his guaranteed minimum, and if he produces more work than is allowed for in that minimum he gets a fixed bonus at the end of the week or month. It differs from profit sharing in that it depends on quantity of work done and not on profit made.