Every economist should be a humanitarian; and every humanitarian should be an economist. Charles Dickens, writing in Eighteen Hundred Sixty, puts forth Scrooge, Carker and Bumball as economists. When Dickens wanted to picture ideal businessmen, he gave us the Cheeryble brothers—men with soft hearts, giving pennies to all beggars, shillings to poor widows, and coal and loaves of bread to families living in rickety tenements. The Dickens idea of betterment was the priestly plan of dole. Dickens did not know that indiscriminate almsgiving pauperizes humanity, and never did he supply the world a glimpse of a man like Robert Owen, whose charity was something more than palliation.
Robert Owen was born in decent poverty, of parents who knew the simple, beautiful and necessary virtues of industry, sobriety and economy. Where this son got his hunger for books and his restless desire for achievement we do not know. He was a business genius, and from genius of any kind no hovel is immune.
He was sent to London at the age of ten, to learn the saddler's trade; at twelve he graduated from making wax-ends, blacking leather and greasing harness and took a position as salesman in the same business.
From this he was induced to become a salesman for a haberdasher. He had charm of manner—fluidity, sympathy and health. At seventeen he asked to be paid a commission on sales instead of a salary, and on this basis he saved a hundred pounds in a year.
At eighteen a customer told him of a wonderful invention—a machine that was run by steam—for spinning cotton into yarn. Robert was familiar with the old process of making woolen yarn on a spinning-wheel by hand—his mother did it and had taught him and his brothers and sisters how.
Cotton was just coming in, since the close of "George Washington's Rebellion." Watt had watched his mother's teakettle to a good purpose. Here were two big things destined to revolutionize trade: the use of cotton in place of flax or wool, and steam-power instead of human muscle. Robert Owen resigned his clerkship and invested all of his earnings in three mule spinning-machines. Then he bought cotton on credit.
He learned the business, and the first year made three hundred pounds.
Seeing an advertisement in the paper for an experienced superintendent of a cotton mill, he followed his intuitions, hunted out the advertiser, a Mr. Drinkwater, and asked for the place.
Mr. Drinkwater looked at the beardless stripling, smiled and explained that he wanted a man, not a boy—a man who could take charge of a mill at Manchester, employing five hundred hands.
Robert Owen stood his ground.