CHAPTER VIII ROBERT OWEN

AMONG that queer bunch of visionary and Utopian socialists, to whom in some undefined proportion is usually ascribed the paternity of socialism, Robert Owen (1771–1858) presents some strange contrasts to his nearest bed-fellows. Saint-Simon had been an aristocrat, always conscious of the fact. Fourier, if we look at his drab life in the cold light of dawn, had been at best an unsuccessful commercial traveller. Godwin, to go further back, was obviously, in the world's estimation, destined to be a confused and bankrupt bookseller. Louis Blanc (coming further down than the fathers) was a journalist, graduating to an uneasy position in an uneasy government, as a prelude to a prolonged exile. It used to be a common reproach that one or other of many Cabinet Ministers, while aspiring to control the destiny of an empire, would have been incompetent to run a whelk-stall—though the special appropriateness of this particular entrepreneurial venture for purposes of comparison and contrast was never wholly clear. But the implied criticism, so far as it was justified, might certainly have been applied to the earlier socialists: they criticised the management of the world, but they themselves had ‘done nothing’ and had shown no marked ability, either in managing their own or other people's affairs. Robert Owen, up to a point, is a bird of entirely different plumage. True, he spent his last years in a rather undefined state of dependence; but so long as he cared for making money, he showed that he could do the trick. In the great years of his uprising, he made it clear that he could beat the magnates of the Industrial Revolution at their own game; if success in business and the accumulation of capital was to be the acid test of managing a whelk-stall, Robert Owen could give abundant evidence of his competence. Indeed, had his life stopped at the right moment (for this purpose) he might have been the ideal copy-book boy for innumerable volumes on Self-Help and Industry: ‘Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings.’ If, in fact, Owen threw aside his supreme qualification for inclusion in the works of Samuel Smiles, it was an act of voluntary abdication, in pursuit of another vision.

As a matter of literal fact, Robert Owen did, on one momentous occasion, stand, or at least bow, before the Queen, on the presentation of Lord Melbourne—dressed up like a monkey, as he complained. Owen was then (1839) of doubtful respectability, and loyal hearts (in particular as represented by the delightfully named ‘Society for Peaceably Repressing Infidelity’) were moved to concern and alarm for the safety of their young and uncontaminated sovereign. Doubtless, however, the wisdom of Solomon should not be taken over literally; and in its broad interpretation, there is here another obvious contrast between Owen and the other founders. At the height of his influence and powers, Owen knew everyone; he was indeed a European figure. Saint-Simon had unquestionably his aristocratic connections, but somehow he rather gives the impression of a decayed gentleman, who has put much aside. Godwin at one time had an immense reputation, but it was essentially literary. Fourier knew no one, apart from his landladies and their cats, and latterly a few disciples as uninfluential as himself. But Owen, among the early socialists, is a portent: a man who has made money, and to whom at one time all doors were open.

One other preliminary consideration arises. Few figures in the history of socialism represent, as does Owen, the combination of theory and practice; and it follows that even in what is designed to be, as exclusively as may be, a history of thought and doctrine, the biography of Owen asserts itself. In a sense his Ufe was his socialism, and even if he had refrained from writing the whole of his lengthy series of books and pamphlets (and much more), he would still have been a remarkable figure in the history of socialism. Owen, once he yielded to the vice, never stopped writing, and he never ceased ‘trying’ and projecting; and in the fabric of his life, his writings and his strivings are inextricably interwoven.

It may, however, be possible even in the case of Owen to confine the biographical details within bounds. Owen was born in 1771 in Newtown, Montgomery, where his father had a combined business of sadler, ironmonger and postmaster. If Owen plunged young into life, it is not to be assumed that he was driven by poverty; it was merely the custom of the age and of his people. He seems to have acquired all that his school could teach him by the time he had reached seven, and thereafter for two years he was promoted to be an ‘usher’—two lost years, he regrets, ‘except,’ he adds, ‘that I thus early acquired the habit of teaching others what I knew.’ In view of the subsequent seventy-five years of didactic activity, this salvage from the wreck of these two years has an ominous and foreboding sound. At nine he was by way of being a shop assistant in his native town, and at ten he journeyed to London, and soon afterwards was employed at Stamford with a linen-draper bearing the improbable name of McGuffog. In spite of his labours, he was able to read much, confusedly, at Stamford. After some years, he was back in London, in a shop at Ludgate Hill, where he was grotesquely overworked; and so to Manchester, where his meteoric career began. By the age of 19, he had become manager to Drinkwater, cotton-mill owners in Manchester, with (having regard to the year, 1790, and his age) the almost princely salary of £300 a year. In due course, after various moves onwards and upwards—ever the conscientious, hard-working young man—there came in 1797 the purchase on behalf of himself and his partners of the New Lanark establishment from Dale (and subsequently, as becomes a business romance, his marriage to Miss Dale), and so finally in 1800 he came into his own kingdom, and in his own characteristic words, ‘entered upon the government of New Lanark.’

To a very large extent, Robert Owen is New Lanark, and New Lanark has little significance apart from Robert Owen. Here, also, his glory is unsullied; in everything else in the life of Owen there is frustration and failure, however greatly he may have designed; and indeed, as the years advance, there is too frequently a touch of the grotesque which is even more fatal than failure. But in New Lanark he wrought a miracle, not merely unaided, but in the face of obstacles over and above those inherent in the task. There were difficult partners, shying at philanthropy, and there were consequently business reshufflings. He was distrusted as an alien by the jealous Scot. He would have us believe that many of his flock knew only Gaelic¹; even in 1800, it was an unusual accomplishment among pauper children drafted from Edinburgh; perhaps their Scots accent was such that to Owen, a Welshman, it might just as well have been Gaelic. But despite friction with his partners and sullenness from his workers, at least in the early stages, Owen persevered until the face of New Lanark was entirely transformed. Doubtless Owen would have said that all this was a witness to the truth and the efficacy of the theories on which he acted. We shall presently survey his writings so far as they bear on this period; for the present it may be a sufficiently accurate first approximation to regard Owen as of the school of Godwin in these matters. The doctrine he sought to apply in New Lanark was the familiar theory of human irresponsibility, Godwin's ‘Necessity,’ the view that men are good or evil according to their environment, and that therefore an improved environment, resting on improved education, provides the path to all progress. It is, however, fairly clear that what wrought the miracle was Owen's personality, and not abstract devotion to the theory of ‘Necessity.’ Indeed, it might plausibly be argued that a thoroughgoing belief throughout a community that no one was responsible for anything might lead to the most deplorable results. If, the more I wallow in sin, the more eager do my fellow-men become to express their sympathy with me because of the malady from which I suffer, and to find excuses for me in the notorious deficiencies of my parents, it may be that I, enjoying sympathy, may qualify for still larger doses. It may be doubted whether even a sermon-tasting Scottish community would be reformed by listening to Owen preaching his favourite sermon; but there is nothing absurd in believing that they may have been saved, and perhaps awed, by his personality, his zeal, and his obvious sincerity in all the works of his hands.

New Lanark, when Owen assumed the government, was probably more degraded than most similar places at the time of the Industrial Revolution. To a considerable extent it had been recruited in Dale's time by child-labour drafted from the workhouses of Edinburgh and Glasgow at an incredibly early age. The adult population seems to have consisted largely of thieves, drunkards and blackguards. Systematically, Owen proceeded to turn this citadel of vice into a model village. He turned off the supply of over-juvenile juveniles, and as education was in his theory the centre of all things, he began his great work with infant schools. On this side of his activities Owen was not merely a pioneer, but he held views which entitle him to a place in the history and theory of education. That singing and dancing should occupy so large a place in the scheme of things was an innovation in this environment. Meanwhile, perhaps somewhat dictatorially and undoubtedly somewhat patriarchally, Owen continued the work of reformation. A tolerable standard of cleanliness was attained without too much effort. Drunkenness was a more difficult failing to eliminate; but even here, by controlling the public-houses, Owen got what he wanted. Scarcely any aspect of welfare known to us to-day was neglected by Owen in these years, culminating in the ‘Institution for the Formation of Character,’ the opening of which on January 1, 1816, was the occasion of one of Owen's most characteristic speeches. This institution was in fact meant to be a centre of communal life. During all these years, the fame of New Lanark spread, and increasingly it became a place of pilgrimage, visited by princes, prelates and potentates and by all and sundry who departed saying that the half had not been told. Looking back, towards the end of his life, Owen described the inhabitants of New Lanark as having been ‘literally a self-employing, self-supporting, self-educating, and self-governing population.’¹ This is perhaps New Lanark seen, not wholly justly, through a shimmer of years; for Owen always was, and never could be anything but, the benevolent autocrat. Yet, whether self-governed or more probably Owen-governed, it remains indisputable that out of the dross and grime of the Industrial Revolution, he made a fair community where little girls were taught to sing and dance, and where, as he boasts, there was not ‘one legal punishment inflicted upon any one of these people during that period.’ One may not inappropriately borrow the words used by Disraeli in describing another village which obviously drew its inspiration from New Lanark; ‘The men were well clad; the women had a blooming cheek; drunkenness was unknown; while the moral condition of the softer sex was proportionately elevated.’¹ This was the first stage of Owen's life, during which he was pre-eminently the successful and model employer, in all matters of welfare more than a century before his time.

In the second phase of his life, Owen was primarily a dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions. The two parts of his life, although in a sense well-defined, inevitably overlap to a considerable extent. It is probable that almost from the outset Owen looked on New Lanark as a model on which the whole world was later to be fashioned. Along with fairly orthodox activities directed to a limitation of the hours of labour, he began increasingly fairly early in the New Lanark days, to advocate the establishment of communistic settlements, his famous ‘parallelograms.’ Much of later Owenite history is occupied with the attempt to establish such ‘villages of co-operation.’ Though he did not finally and formally sever his connection with New Lanark until a considerable number of years later, the turning-point in Owen's life was probably the public meeting which he addressed in London on August 21, 1817, when he went out of his way to make a frontal attack on ‘the errors—gross errors—that have been combined with the fundamental notions of every religion that has hitherto been taught to man.’² Later he was assumed to have made a similar frontal attack on the whole institution of marriage, although on one view he might have been interpreted as having merely demanded easier conditions of divorce. But the effect of his supposedly infidel and immoral views was to deprive Owen increasingly during the remainder of his Ufe of that very large measure of public, and indeed distinguished, support which he had enjoyed when he was primarily the model employer. Of his experiments in communism, the most famous was that of New Harmony in Indiana, which he acquired from the Rappites in 1824. Others were at Tytherly in Hampshire, and at Orbiston near Glasgow. All of these, sooner rather than later, fell into a decline and expired for reasons which will be found analysed in the biographies of Owen. New Harmony is also notable because it devoured a large part of the wealth previously accumulated by Owen, so that his later years were spent in comparative poverty. Apart from these communistic experiments, which were in a sense the fulfilment of certain of his New Lanark writings, Owen, back in Europe and finally severed from business, gave himself up to such projects as the ‘Grand National Consolidated Trades Union’ and the ‘National Equitable Labour Exchange,’ a marvellous store or bank, whose object it was to eliminate money in the ordinary sense. And so on to advanced old age Owen continued campaigning, never ceasing to proclaim the faith that was in him, though fewer listened, never desisting from writing, though fewer read and of these perhaps some read with a smile, ever scattering his seed in many fields, yet reaping no visible harvest.

Before turning to such of Owen's writings as it may be necessary to take down from the bookshelf, it may be well to supplement the foregoing bald biographical details by looking at the man himself. For again it is more important than it is with many of those who stray through this book that we should ask what manner of man this Robert Owen was. Admittedly, he is something of an enigma. Mr. Podmore, greatly daring, ventured to suggest that he ‘was not, by the modern standard, a good man of business.’¹ Certainly, over large tracts of his life, especially in the second phase, he showed precious little business or common sense. Yet on the crude test of ‘getting there,’ Owen advanced from being a miscellaneous message-boy to wealth, influence and controlling power in what, for such a transformation, was a remarkably short period of time. Probably the secret of business success was as much of a mystery in the days of the Industrial Revolution as in later times; but if business ability is proved by being successful at business; then it is difficult to deny that Owen, at least in his younger days, had this ability.

On this point there may have been something of a break in Owen's life; having made money in the first phase, he proceeded to show, in more senses than one, that he did not know the meaning of money. But in all other respects, Owen's life is of a singularly uniform texture. His dominating characteristic—one that may become rather nauseating if expressed too frequently—was without doubt the love of his fellow-men. Yet though Owen's presentation of benevolence may at times grate, he was unquestionably sincere; he was indeed aflame with a passionate love of humanity. With this it must be admitted that he never lived down the education he gave himself. In his early youth he read too much, and he read too much without guidance; as a consequence he read with more zeal than profit. An autobiography put together by an octogenarian may not be the safest authority on the intellectual development of the writer as a child; but if we are to believe Owen's Life, his views on all essential matters were ‘set’ by the time he was twelve. He had already discovered the ‘errors’ in all religions; he had already realised that he was but the creature of the influences to which he was subjected. As he went through life, Owen showed himself utterly incapable of shedding an old idea or of acquiring a new one. There is a devastating remark by Harriet Martineau to the effect that ‘Robert Owen is not the man to think differently of a book for having read it.’

The consequences were somewhat disturbing, both on his own contemporaries and on all who have come after. He imagined he was a pioneer when in fact he was but playing amateurishly with problems which have engaged the mind of man since the beginning of time. He became more and more dogmatic, the complete egotist, underrating all others, indeed assuming the ignorance of all others as a first axiom. Behind all he wrote, and doubtless behind all he spoke, could be heard the words: ‘I'm not arguing with you: I'm telling you.’ As a result he became the greatest bore of his generation, seizing every occasion to pour out interminably his theories on the formation of character. Yet his personality was such that he was greatly loved by those who knew him; we of subsequent generations, who may not see his countenance, can clutch at nothing to relieve our boredom. Owen is tolerable to anyone who confines himself to what he wrote up to 1821; but beyond that he kept on writing and writing and writing, saying the same thing over and over again, for ever returning to the same point of departure,

Like a homing pigeon, never by doubt diverted.

When we turn to his writings, it is, as has been indicated, almost absurdly true that the reader can get all that he needs or requires in a very small sample of the whole. The essays which are comprised in A New View of Society and the so-called Report to the County of Lanark are almost in themselves sufficient; even within this limited compound Owen says all the essential things much oftener than once.¹ Owen's point of departure is essentially the same as that of Godwin, although from this common central core he subsequently branches in different directions, above all in his applications. Almost the whole of Owen is comprised in one proposition which, with significantly little change, he continued to repeat throughout the years. That proposition is that our characters are made for us, and that accordingly we are in no way responsible for what we are. Owen considered that he had discovered a new science, which he called ‘the science of the influence of circumstances,’ though in fact the development of the science never got much beyond the frequent reiteration of the fundamental proposition.

As concise a statement as any is that contained in the Third Essay (of A New View of Society), where it takes this form with all the added emphasis of italicised type:

Every day will make it more and more evident that the character of man is, without a single exception, always formed for him; that it may be, and is, chiefly, created by his predecessors; that they give him, or may give him, his ideas and habits, which are the powers that govern and direct his conduct. Man, therefore, never did, nor is it possible he ever can, form his own character.¹

This is the error which the human race must in some way formally renounce, and Owen resorts to what is, for him, considerable violence of language in denouncing this evil legacy. It is ‘a fundamental error of the highest possible magnitude’; it is ‘the true and sole origin of evil’; it has been ‘the Evil Genius of the world.’ Rising to further heights, the notion that individuals form their own character becomes ‘this hydra of human calamity, this immolator of every principle of rationality, this monster.’² Almost a generation later, the principle of Good is ‘the knowledge that man is formed, without his consent, by nature and society’; while the principle of Evil is ‘the supposition that man forms himself.’³

It follows, on Godwinian lines, that since our character is made for us, character may be moulded by changing the environment, but Owen differs from Godwin in the emphasis he lays on the mathematical precision with which any desired result can be obtained in this great human laboratory:

Any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of the proper means; which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men.⁴

Further it will become

evident to the understanding, that by far the greater part of the misery with which man is encircled may be easily dissipated and removed; and that with mathematical precision he may be surrounded with those circumstances which must gradually increase his happiness.⁵

This explains the importance of education in Owen's scheme of things; for there is literally nothing that education cannot do. Godwin, it will be remembered, shied at education as a possible regenerator, not because of his lack of faith in the power of education, but because of the impossibility of finding the right preceptors in a world where all school preceptors are fettered by their old school ties. But Owen has no such qualms, and education may produce the perfect community:

On the experience of a life devoted to the subject, I hesitate not to say, that the members of any community may by degrees be trained to live without idleness, without poverty, without crime, and without punishment; for each of these is the effect of error in the various systems prevalent throughout the world. They are all necessary consequences of ignorance.¹

The plasticity, especially of the young, is a point to which Owen frequently recurs:

Human nature, save the minute differences which are ever found in all the compounds of the creation, is one and the same in all; it is without exception universally plastic.²

As a result of this plasticity and the mathematical precision with which the educational manipulator can work, ‘the rising generations may become in character, without any individual exceptions, whatever men can now desire them to be, that is not contrary to human nature.’³

With Owen it follows also that ignorance, vice and misery are more or less different words for the same thing, and that (as in Socrates and Godwin) knowledge and virtue are identified. It is not merely that, in general terms, ignorance is the sole obstacle in the way of realising a world without crime and without poverty; but that in some mysterious way (which flies in the face of most mundane experience) happiness is in proportion to knowledge:

When the knowledge he receives is true and unmixed with error, although it be limited, if the community in which he lives possesses the same kind and degree of knowledge, he will enjoy happiness in proportion to the extent of that knowledge. On the contrary, when the opinions which he receives are erroneous... his misery will be in proportion to the extent of those erroneous opinions.⁴

Again, as in Godwin, truth has but to be seen to be embraced: it imposes itself:

Let truth unaccompanied with error be placed before them; give them time to examine it and to see that it is in unison with all previously ascertained truths; and conviction and acknowledgment of it will follow of course.⁵

Such is the philosophical framework of all Owen's thoughts, and it is already adequately presented in A New View of Society, although in the foregoing summary a few supporting phrases have been borrowed from elsewhere. It will be noticed how close in all this he stands to Godwin. Men have their characters formed for them; no one can will his beliefs. No one is responsible for anything. Consequently the whole idea of punishment is out of place. Owen frequently complains that Society makes men criminals and then punishes them for their crimes. Also there is no conceivable foundation for private displeasure or public enmity; hence also ‘the irrationality of being angry with an individual for possessing qualities which he had not the means of preventing.’¹ This high standard of refraining from all anger, Owen endeavoured to realise, and with considerable success.

Into all these questions of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate, heaven forbid that we should enter. With the discussion of such problems, it will be remembered, the fallen angels beguiled the tedium of their waiting hours, ‘and found no end in wandering mazes lost’; and to such higher intellects of more ampler leisure such issues may be left. It may merely be observed that the argument for improved environment does not require for its support the extreme view regarding the formation of man's character postulated by Owen. The wonderful works at New Lanark might have been founded on common sense, and not on the curious hybrid between metaphysics and theology which, in Owen's imagination, supplied the driving power.

Education, as has been noted, is to be the great engine of transformation. Apart from noting that Owen has a healthy distrust of bookish learning, and that his object is to make children rational creatures and not mere receptacles of decanted knowledge, skilled in knowing all the answers, his educational theories may be left to the educational expert.² But again, although this represents unquestionably one of the brightest sides of Owen, he frequently mars his argument by grotesque overstatements, and by the exuberant and buoyant expectations with which he regards the coming world. By the application of his system, he says, there will be produced characters which even in youth will ‘greatly surpass the wise and learned of the present and preceding times.’³ The adoption of his plans ‘will show the boasted acquirements of Greece, of Rome, and of all antiquity, to be the mere weakness of mental infancy.’⁴ And if these rosy prospects may be thought to be lacking in precision, there is nothing vague about his bold undertaking on behalf of the child properly trained on Owenite lines: ‘Before he is twelve years old he may with ease be trained to acquire a correct view of the outline of all the knowledge which men have yet attained.’⁵

Of remedial measures apart from education, Owen (at the stage of A New View of Society) suggests an overhauling of our legislation with a view to ‘withdrawing’ (by which presumably he means ‘repealing’) those laws which rest on the erroneous doctrine that man is responsible for the formation of his own character. It would be a curious question to enquire how far such an instruction to the Parliamentary draftsman might not result in the repeal of all existing legislation, and the diligent research student could possibly unearth passages in the later Owen indicating that he would not be averse from such a solution. But what he has in fact primarily in mind, as ripe for ‘withdrawal,’ are the laws which train the population to every kind of crime, those which encourage ‘the consumption of ardent spirits,’ those which legalise and sanction gin-shops and pot-houses, gambling and lotteries. To these, which are legitimate and orthodox fields of reform, Owen adds among the laws which should be withdrawn the rather cryptic phrase, ‘those of punishment.’¹ Contrary to his usual practice, he does not dwell on this; but the implication clearly is that all penalties of any kind should be abolished.

Alongside education and the repeal of laws inspired by the ‘erroneous principle,’ there is a third proposal in which Owen is a century in advance of his times. He suggests the need of a thorough-going system of labour statistics as a preliminary to the State providing work for the unemployed. The information is to be supplied ‘by the clergy, justices of the peace, or other more competent persons,’²—the ‘other more competent person’ being a distant foreshadowing and adumbration of the Ministry of Labour official. His suggested questionnaire is reasonably concise and to the point. The return should cover: (i) the average price of manual labour in each district; (ii) the number dependent on their labour (or the parish) for support, who are at the time unemployed, but are yet able to labour, i.e. the number available; (iii) the number partially employed, and the extent of their partial employment; (iv) a statement in respect of each of their former employments, and the ‘best conjectures’ as to the kind and quantity of work each may be supposed capable of performing. This ‘best conjecture’ seems to bring Owen agreeably into direct relationship with the manager of the present-day Employment Exchange, who also on many occasions is still reduced to his ‘best conjectures.’ And Owen adds to his discussion:

It would, perhaps, prove an interesting calculation, and useful to Government, to estimate how much its finances would be improved by giving proper employment to a million of its subjects, rather than by supporting that million in ignorance, idleness and crime...³

a question which, with appropriate modifications, some have still the temerity to ask.

So far we have been concerned with those aspects of Owen's teaching that spring more or less directly from his views on Man and the formation of Man's character. Perhaps those parts of his argument which rest on general humanitarian considerations, rather than on logic-chopping discussions on Man's will, make a stronger appeal to our generation, if only because here Owen is more universally human. Here indeed Owen rises to real eloquence—if indeed the eloquence be his; for there is a vague tradition that Owen, who became an increasingly barbarous writer as he advanced in years, had the prudence to have his earlier writings, or some of them, revised by Francis Place. When he pleads for justice to the oppressed, above all when he upholds the cause of the little children, he touches a chord which still vibrates; and he is, perhaps curiously, no less effective because in the earlier days his argument is reinforced by the consideration that it pays to be kind. The most famous of these passages—unfortunately too long for unabridged quotation here—is in the Address to the Superintendents of Manufactories, etc., originally prefixed to the Third Essay in A New View. Here he contrasts the care given to the animate and that given to the inanimate machines:

Many of you have long experienced in your manufacturing operations the advantages of substantial, well-contrived, and well-executed machinery.

Experience has also shown you the difference of the results between mechanism which is neat, clean, well-arranged, and always in a high state of repair; and that which is allowed to be dirty, in disorder, without the means of preventing unnecessary friction, and which therefore becomes, and works, much out of repair....

If, then, due care as to the state of your inanimate machines can produce such beneficial results, what may not be expected if you devote equal attention to your vital machines, which are far more wonderfully constructed?

When you shall acquire a right knowledge of these, of their curious mechanism, of their self-adjusting powers; when the proper main-spring shall be applied to their varied movements,—you will become conscious of their real value, and you will readily be induced to turn your thoughts more frequently from your inanimate to your living machines; you will discover that the latter may be easily trained and directed to procure a large increase of pecuniary gain, while you may also derive from them high and substantial gratification....

... And when in these transactions you estimate time by minutes, and the money expended for the chance of increased gain by fractions, will you not afford some of your attention to consider whether a portion of your time and capital would not be more advantageously applied to improve your living machines? From experience which cannot deceive me, I venture to assure you, that your time and money so applied, if directed by a true knowledge of the subject, would return you, not five, ten, or fifteen per cent. for your capital so expended, but often fifty, and in many cases a hundred per cent.¹

This somewhat lengthy quotation may perhaps be forgiven, because it shows Owen at his best, both in substance and in manner of expression, combining the sweetness of reason with the wisdom of serpents, reconciling philanthropy with fifteen per cent. When he deals with the evils of child labour in the Address to the British Master Manufacturers, there is just a suggestion of righteous indignation in the voice of Owen, although indignation was alien alike to his temperament and his principles. Pleading that no child should be employed under the age of twelve, he argues (as in the passage already quoted) that the child who is put to work at too early an age is an ‘inferior instrument’:

I think an intelligent slave master would not, on the sole principle of pecuniary gain, employ his young slaves even ten hours of the day at so early an age. And we know that judicious farmers will not prematurely put their young beasts of burden to work; and that when they do put them to work it is with great moderation at first, and, we must remember too, in a healthy atmosphere. But children from seven to eight years of age are employed with young persons and women of all ages, for fourteen or fifteen hours per day in many of our manufactures, carried on in buildings in which the atmosphere is by no means the most favourable to human life.¹

In his appeal to his fellow-manufacturers, another and more modern note creeps in. It is a plea for a policy of high wages on the ground of the importance of maintaining the purchasing-power of the population at large. No evil, he says, ought to be more dreaded by master-manufacturers than low wages of labour. By virtue of their numbers, the workers must always be the greatest consumers of all articles. High wages and general prosperity go together. Moreover, in the manufacturers' interest, the worker should not merely be well paid; he ought to have the time and the instruction necessary to make him a judicious purchaser.²

While Owen's starting-point in this matter is thus an appeal, as from one employer to another, to do the right thing in their own interest, he not unnaturally arrives at a condemnation of the ‘system’ and to the familiar analysis of the evils of individualism, which is more in line with the socialist tradition. So far as the worker is concerned, the position has been brought to ‘a point of real oppression.’ ‘The employer regards the employed as mere instruments of gain.’³ So also he speaks of the ‘blind avarice of commerce.’ More in line with the exploitation theories Owen refers to the inventions of the Industrial Revolution as having ‘created an aggregate of wealth, and placed it in the hands of a few, who, by its aid, continue to absorb the wealth produced by the industry of the many.’⁴ As a consequence, ‘the mass of the population are become mere slaves to the ignorance and caprice of those monopolists.’ Much later Owen was to speak of ‘the money-making, health-and-happiness-destroying factories of our country’¹; it is clear that even when he was part of the machine he looked at it dispassionately from the outside.

From this it is an easy transition to consider Owen's criticisms of individualism, although in fact the question arises more prominently in connection with his communistic proposals which will be noted presently. In the earlier writings, to which in fairness to Owen reference alone should be made, the most clear statement occurs in a passage in the Report to the County of Lanark in commendation of the principle of co-operation. Here, after having condemned the present arrangement of society as ‘the most anti-social, impolitic, and irrational that can be devised,’ he continues:

From this principle of individual interest have arisen all the divisions of mankind, the endless errors and mischiefs of class, sect, party, and of national antipathies, creating the angry and malevolent passions, and all the crimes and misery with which the human race have hitherto been afflicted.

In short, if there be one closet doctrine more contrary to truth than another, it is the notion that individual interest, as that term is now understood, is a more advantageous principle on which to found the social system, for the benefit of all, or of any, than the principle of union and mutual cooperation.²

There is in its implications an even more extreme passage in one of the London speeches of 1817—the notorious speech of August 21—where in contrasting life under what he calls the ‘cottage system’ as against complete co-operation, he paints a somewhat grotesquely glowing picture of what happens when all men have all things in common, so that even widowhood would not be the awful thing it now is. Even if a dear one dies ‘they have consolation in the certain knowledge that... they have many, many others remaining.’ ‘As far as the eye can reach or imagination extend’ there are thousands and thousands ready and willing to offer aid and consolation. As another poet has it:

Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!

But indeed, when love of humanity becomes so diffused, it is in danger of becoming sloppy; and the Kuss der ganzen Welt may afford little real consolation in bereavement. As against this dream-world, where thousands and thousands are prepared to stand by, in the contrary condition:

All are individualised, cold and forbidding; each being compelled to take an hundred-fold more care of himself than would be otherwise necessary; because the ignorance of society has placed him in direct opposition to the thousands around him.¹

Later in life Owen came to denounce private property with a full-blooded vigour which may be equalled, but is certainly not excelled, elsewhere: ‘Private property is one of the great demoralising and repulsive powers, arising from the laws of men, and is the cause of innumerable crimes and gross injustice.... It is strongly calculated to make man look upon his fellow man as his enemy, and to create general suspicions of the motives and actions of strangers, and even of neighbours.... The evils of private property tend in all directions.’² But down these many alleys it is unnecessary to follow Owen.

We have listened to Owen giving most excellent advice to his fellow-manufacturers. Not unnaturally, Owen being Owen, counsel is also freely imparted to the other side. It is, however, less excellent advice, having regard to the frailty of man, and it derives its interest almost exclusively from the light which it throws on Owen and the curious workings of his mind. It is found at its best in An Address to the Working Classes, dated March 29, 1819. He assures the workers that ‘the time is at hand’—but unfortunately there is one formidable obstacle. All uncharitableness and anger must be laid aside; in other words, the working classes must rise to a full appreciation of the Owenite doctrine that no one is responsible for what they are, and that therefore there can be no rational ground for anger, even against their greatest oppressors and their most bitter enemies. Owen presents his favourite sermon in tabloid form for the rumination of the workers:

An endless multiplicity of circumstances, over which you had not the smallest control, placed you where you are, and as you are. In the same manner, others of your fellow-men have been formed by circumstances, equally uncontrollable by them, to become your enemies and grievous oppressors. In strict justice they are no more to be blamed for these results than you are; nor you than they; and, splendid as their exterior may be, this state of matters often causes them to suffer even more poignantly than you.³

If the workers show any desire violently to dispossess the rich of their power, emoluments and privileges, ‘the contention between the rich and the poor will never have an end.’ Owen indeed seeks to impose on the working classes a kind of Credo, an adherence to the only faith, as a necessary condition of the day being at hand:

Are you then prepared to look upon all your fellow-creatures, in power and out of power, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, good and bad, as beings formed solely by the circumstances of their birth, and who have been made as they are, whatever they may be, from causes which exclude the possibility of the smallest control on their parts in the formation of those faculties and qualities they may happen to possess? If you cannot see and comprehend this truth, then is the time not yet come for your deliverance from the depths of mental darkness and physical misery.¹

This line of argument is rendered possible because we are on the eve of a period when the poor will be able to relieve themselves of their poverty without infringing on the possessions of the rich. In future, ‘the least gifted member of society will experience a larger share of continued and permanent happiness than has hitherto fallen to the lot of the most fortunate.’ Besides, as is indeed obvious on Godwin's principles, the rich are not really such a bad lot. We have seen that frequently they suffer more poignantly than the poor: they ‘call for our pity, not blame.’ As if all that were not enough, Owen gives his own personal guarantee that the rich are not without their claim to a possible share of the world's decency:

It must be satisfactory to you to learn that I have had the most evident proofs from many individuals, high in these classes, that they have now a real desire to improve your condition.²

One wonders how the ‘working classes’ reacted to this curiously maddening mixture of naiveté, condescension, philosophical generalities, and sheer obtuseness. At least it helps one to understand the saying that in conversation with Owen ‘you could not put him in a passion nor keep yourself out of one.’³

In endeavouring to present a general picture of Owen's system of thought, a certain number of citations have already been given, which in their context will be found to have relation to his proposals for the establishment of communistic settlements, or villages of co-operation—‘Owen's parallelograms,’ as they were familiarly called with an intended touch of ridicule. There is little doubt that Owen from the outset regarded New Lanark as an experiment to be applied later to the whole nation, and indeed in the days of his more grandiose dreams, to the world at large. As early as the second essay in A New View he had asked what there was to prevent such a system from being immediately adopted into national practice.¹ The argument for his increasingly communistic settlements is first elaborated in the Report to the Committee for the Relief of the Manufacturing Poor (1817), and it occupies a central position in the Report to the County of Lanark (1820). Later, of course, it is the staple of all his writings.

In its first appearance, Owen's ‘Plan’ was devised as a remedy against unemployment. He had already postulated in A New View of Society that it was a primary duty of every government that cared for its subjects ‘to provide perpetual employment of real national utility, in which all who apply may be immediately occupied.’² The acknowledgment of such a duty was more than ever urgent in the circumstances of the times, of which Owen gives a penetrating analysis. The Industrial Revolution had, he argued, brought with it greatly increased productive power. In the result, ‘individual interest... found mechanism to be a cheaper agency than manual labour’; workers were accordingly dismissed, and ‘labour in consequence rapidly fell in value.’³ It was this fall in the value of labour which, Owen contended, had to be remedied and for which his Plan was devised. If value is thus to be restored to manual labour, it can be done only by employment on the land, and accordingly what is aimed at is the creation of ‘limited communities of individuals, on the principle of united labour and expenditure, having their basis in agriculture, and in which all should have mutual and common interests.’⁴ Elsewhere, in the Lanark Report, he speaks of the great error that has been committed ‘in separating the worker from his food.’⁵ The worker therefore is to go back to the land, but not wholly to the land; the habitations of Owen's vision are described as ‘combined agricultural and manufacturing villages.⁶

Such settlements are to be financed by the State in one way or another. The minimum number in each will be 300, ‘men, women and children in their natural proportions,’ with a maximum of 2,000; but somewhere between 800 and 1200 is indicated as the optimum.⁷ The inhabitants will live in large buildings arranged in a parallelogram, and the apportionment of the various wings to their respective uses is amply detailed by Owen. Pleasing pictorial representations of these may be unearthed by diligent students in the literature of the period. They are obviously first cousins of the Phalanstère, although Fourier, on whom Owen acted as a perpetual irritant, never admitted kinship. Of the success of such villages of co-operation Owen never entertained any doubt. He held that with the increased power of production, it was possible ‘to saturate the world with wealth’¹; but owing to our mismanagement—and here he strikes a modern note—‘in the midst of the most ample means to create wealth, all are in poverty, or in imminent danger from the effects of poverty upon others.’²

As additional aids to prosperity, Owen has two further recommendations. The first is that we should abandon the plough and return to the spade.³ It may be doubted whether Owen knew very much about either the spade or the plough; but that, of course, is no reason why he should not dilate at very considerable length on the superiority of the spade as an agricultural instrument. With the spade, Great Britain and Ireland could support in high comfort a population greatly exceeding one hundred millions; whereas, relying on the plough, it was already supposed to be greatly overpopulated. Owen's passion for the spade is perhaps best viewed as merely an additional resonant bee in his teeming bonnet; but of course it may be linked up with a semiconscious realisation that if ever his villages of co-operation were realised, having regard to their population and the area assigned to them, their agriculture would probably of necessity have to take the form of market gardening.

The other aid to prosperity is concerned with more fundamental problems, being nothing less than a suggestion for a new standard of value, which is necessary, if we are, in a pleasing phrase, ‘to let prosperity loose on the country.’⁴ Owen, it is to be feared, was not a currency expert—who is?—and a perusal of his arguments may produce in the mind of the reader a pale reflection of that confusion in which Owen groped. On the side of theory his observations have some interest, inasmuch as they show Owen stretching forth a hand—a somewhat shaky hand—towards Marx; on the practical and historical side, they have some significance as supplying the basis on which that later fiasco, the National Equitable Labour Exchange, was based.

Expressed broadly, Owen's position here is tolerably clear. It is ‘that the natural standard of value is, in principle, human labour, or the combined manual and mental powers of men called into action.’⁵ Obviously, the difficulty under any circumstances of applying a labour standard will be considerably accentuated by lumping manual and mental powers together. It would be an invidious task to check up on the amount of effort (and experience) the spring poet puts into a love song. In order to make labour the standard of value, it will be necessary, says Owen, to ascertain the amount of it in all articles to be bought or sold.¹ All articles thereafter are to be exchanged at what he calls their ‘prime cost.’ The awkward fact, as was made manifest in the experience of the National Equitable Labour Exchange, is that there can never be any guarantee that people at large will be willing to exchange at the rates so determined, assuming indeed that it is possible to determine such rates at all. Almost inevitably a notional number of hours comes to be assigned as that necessary for the commodity's production, and in arriving at a decision in this matter, the calculator consciously or unconsciously bases himself on what is happening in the open market, where the despised money prices prevail. Owen, although he fails to make his proposals clear, at least remained faithful to the view that money, as we know it, is an evil. Much later he declared that until we should have disabused our minds of this insane money-mystery, it was impossible that the world could be other than a great lunatic asylum.² At this later stage a paper money resting on the credit of the British Empire appears to represent his aspirations.³

Thus launched, preferably with the aid of the spade and a new standard of value, the villages of co-operation will propagate until all the world is shaped in their similitude. It is the usual naively pathetic vision which has sustained so many dreamers, again rather reminiscent of Fourier's faith in the triumphant spread of the Phalanstère, but perhaps still more in line with Louis Blanc's confidence that competition would be driven out by competition, so that the beaten capitalist would come creeping into the workshop. Not merely will society permit these new establishments to supersede other forms of enterprise, since these latter are ‘wretchedly degrading’⁴; a more cogent argument is that the parish poor, for whom in the first place these projects were devised, will under the new arrangements become the envy of the rich and the indolent.⁵ Here indeed is an inverted principle of ‘greater eligibility.’ No wonder that Owen could say that the utmost bounds of his ambition was to become an undistinguished member of one of these happy villages⁶; or that he could claim with his usual buoyancy that ‘to resist the introduction of this plan, in any part of the world, will now be as vain and useless, as for man by his puny efforts to endeavour to preclude from the earth the vivifying rays of the sun.¹

Owen is commendably vague as to how his parallelograms are to be run; but it is perhaps of the essence of dreams that they achieve their effect by the vividness of the general impression rather than by consistency of operative detail. The villages, townships, or whatever they may be called, are to be governed by Committees of all the members of a certain seniority. But in the last analysis, they will run themselves, so that in a sense we come back to Godwin once more: ‘In a short time the ease with which these associations will proceed in all their operations will be such as to render the business of governing a mere recreation.’² Later in life, as his dreams became still more exuberant, Owen was to make the surprising discovery that each township was to become ‘the immediate agent of God, to carry into execution the laws of the Universal Creating Power’³; and on this basis he exercised his fancy and ingenuity in strange flights of constitution-mongering. But there was one current bogy in particular which Owen would in no wise allow to becloud his vision of a world gone parallelogram. This was the suggestion that the Malthusian devil of over-population might lurk in ambush on the path towards his earthly paradise. Owen will not have Malthus at any price. In an observation which may not indeed go to the root of the matter, but at least goes some distance in that direction, he remarks that Malthus ‘has not told us how much more food an intelligent and industrious people will create from the same soil, than will be produced by one ignorant and ill-governed.’⁴ Even if one may not accept his suggestion that the ratio is as one to infinity (meaning, of course, as infinity to one), this remains a just observation, and more to the point than his general argument that ‘each individual brings into the world with him the means... sufficient to enable him to produce food equal to more than ten times his consumption.’⁵ His attitude is stated more explicitly in one of his later writings, where in effect his answer is that the question cannot arise until the whole surface of the globe is studded with parallelograms; if that time ever does arise, the population of the world (having been for long indoctrinated with Owenism) will be ‘highly good, intelligent and rational,’ and they will know far better what to do than this present most irrational generation. But to worry about these questions at the present moment, when the earth is comparatively a waste and a forest, is ‘one of the thousand insanities with which the present generation is afflicted.⁶ Thus, like the burden of the National Debt, in old-fashioned Financial Science, the responsibility is waltzed on to a future generation; but the underlying assumption which justifies this postponement is that the village of co-operation will march relentlessly across the sands of the Sahara, through the dark swamps of the upper Amazon, and across the lonely high places of Tibet.

Perhaps it is not expedient, within the allotted framework, to carry further the presentation of Robert Owen. His views on marriage are outside our province, and are only of slight interest because here is still one further point in which he approaches somewhat to Godwin. His views on religion are of some significance because of the reasons underlying his comprehensive antagonism towards all the orthodoxies of the world; it was that all known religions were guilty of the fundamental error involved in holding that a man may be held responsible for the formation of his character, and trafficked in rewards and punishments accordingly. They were therefore guilty of what, in Owen's eyes, was the greatest of all heresies; they were tied to the ‘principle of evil’ On a larger canvas it would be interesting to illustrate Owen's dislike of political action and agitation, and indeed his distrust of the political machine generally. Though the second part of his life was a succession of fiascos, ending in the shoals and shallows of a very peculiar type of spiritualism, there is nevertheless force in the contention that in countless ways he was one of the most pervading influences in the later nineteenth century, and that, in current jargon, his was a seminal mind. Yet the ordinary man turns back to the miracle of New Lanark, as the crowning achievement of Owen, who, in the darkest days of the Industrial Revolution, showed, even if in undemocratic ways and building on strange principles, what love could do to regenerate a fallen community. And even if the second part of his life was barren of achievement, so far as the world's coarse thumb and finger could assess, Owen's life is memorable, if not unique, in presenting us with a man who achieved wealth and success, and yet, counting these as dross, cast them aside to gain for his fellow-men a greater salvation: ‘Blessed is the rich that is found without blemish, and hath not gone after gold. Who is he? and we will call him blessed; for wonderful things hath he done among his people.’