In Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five, when he was fifty-five years old, he sailed for America. He gave lectures in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington on his new order of economics. He was listened to with profound attention. At Washington he was the guest of the President, and on invitation addressed a joint session of the Senate and the House, setting forth his arguments for Socialism.
The Moravians at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had founded their colony as early as Seventeen Hundred Twenty. The Zoarites, the Economites, the Separatists, the Shakers and the Rappites had been in existence and maintained successful communities for a score of years.
Robert Owen visited these various colonies and saw that they were all prosperous. There was neither sickness, vice, poverty, drunkenness nor disease to be found among them. He became more and more convinced that the demands of an advancing civilization would certainly be co-operative in nature. Chance might unhorse the individual, but with a community the element of chance was eliminated. He laid it down as a maxim, evolved from his study, observation and experience, that the community that exists for three years is a success. That no industrial community had ever endured for three years, save as it was founded on a religious concept, was a fact that he overlooked. Also, he failed to see that the second generation of communists did not coalesce, and as a result that thirty-three years was the age limit for even a successful community; and that, if it still survived, it was because it was reorganized under a strong and dominant leadership.
Communists or Socialists are of two classes: those who wish to give and those who wish to get. When fifty-one per cent of the people in a community are filled with a desire to give, Socialism will be a success.
Perhaps the most successful social experiment in America was the Oneida Community, but next to this was the Harmonyites, founded by George Rapp. The Harmonyites founded Harmony, Indiana, in Eighteen Hundred Fourteen. They moved from Pennsylvania and had been located at their present site for eleven years. They owned thirty thousand acres of splendid land at the junction of the Wabash and Ohio Rivers. They had built more than a hundred houses, and had barns, stores, a church, a hall, a sawmill, a hotel and a woolen-factory.
Now when Owen went to Pittsburgh, he floated down the Ohio to Cincinnati and then on to Harmony. He was graciously received and was delighted with all he saw and heard.
Owen saw the success of the woolen-mill, and declared that to bring cotton up by steamboat from the South would be easy. He would found cotton-mills, and here New Lanark should bloom again, only on an increased scale.
Would the Rappites sell?
Yes; they wanted to move back to Pennsylvania, where there were other groups of similar faith.
Their place, they figured, was worth two hundred fifty thousand dollars. Owen made an offer of one hundred fifty thousand dollars, which to his surprise was quietly accepted. It was a quick deal.