New Lanark was making money because it was producing goods the world wanted. But its workers were tabu in respectable society, and priestly hands were held aloft in pretended horror whenever the name of Robert Owen, or the word "Socialism," was used.
Owen refused to employ child labor, and issued a book directing the attention of society to this deadly traffic in human beings. The parents, the clergy and the other mill-owners combined against him, and he was denounced by press and pulpit.
He began to look around for a better environment for an ideal community. His gaze was turned toward America.
Robert Owen's plan for abolishing vice and poverty was simply to set the people to work under ideal conditions, and then allow them time enough for recreation and mental exercise, so that thrift might follow farming. In reply to the argument that the workman should evolve his own standard of life, independent of his employer, Owen said that the mill with its vast aggregation of hands was an artificial condition. The invention, ingenuity and enterprise that evolved the mill were exceptional. The operators for the most part lacked this constructive genius, the proof of which lay in the very fact that they were operators.
To take advantage of their limitations, disrupt their natural and accustomed mode of life, and then throw the blame back upon them for not evolving a new and better environment, was neither reasonable nor right.
The same constructive genius that built the mill and operated it should be actively interested in the welfare of the people who worked in the mill.
To this end there should be an ideal village adjacent to every great mill. This village should afford at least half an acre of ground for every family. In the way of economy, one building should house a thousand people. It should be built in the form of a parallelogram and contain co-operative kitchens, dining-rooms, libraries, art-galleries and gymnasia. It should be, in fact, a great University, not unlike the great collection of schools at Oxford or Cambridge. All would be workers—all would be students.
The villages should be under the general supervision of the government, in order to secure stability and permanency. If the mill management failed, the government should continue the business, because even if the government lost money in the venture, at times, this was better than always to be building jails, prisons, insane asylums, almshouses and hospitals.
In sections where there were no mills or factories, the government would construct both mills and villages, to the intent that idleness and ignorance might be without excuse. To this end Owen would ask all landowners, or holders of estates of a thousand acres or more, to set apart one-tenth of their land for ideal villages and co-operative mills to be managed by the government.