A history of socialism

by Thomas Kirkup

The workman’s share in the benefits of the industrial revolution was doubtful. Great numbers of his class were reduced to utter poverty and ruin by the great changes consequent on the introduction of machinery; the tendency to readjustment was slow and continually disturbed by fresh change. The hours of work were mercilessly long. He had to compete against the labour of women, and of children brought frequently at the age of five or six from the workhouses. These children had to work the same long hours as the adults, and they were sometimes very cruelly treated by the overseers. Destitute as they so often were of parental protection and oversight, with both sexes huddled together under immoral and insanitary conditions, it was only natural that they should fall into the worst habits, and that their offspring should to such a lamentable degree be vicious, improvident, and physically degenerate.

In a country where the labourers had neither education nor political or social rights, and where the peasantry were practically landless serfs, the old English poor law was only a doubtful part of an evil system. All these permanent causes of mischief were aggravated by special causes connected with the cessation of the Napoleonic wars, which are well known. It was in such circumstances, when English pauperism had become a grave national question, that Owen first brought forward his scheme of socialism.

Robert Owen, philanthropist, and founder of English socialism, was born at the village of Newtown, Montgomeryshire, North Wales, in 1771.[^[1]] His father had a small business in Newtown as saddler and ironmonger, and there young Owen received all his school education, which terminated at the age of nine. At ten he went to Stamford, where he served in a draper’s shop for three or four years, and, after a short experience of work in a London shop, removed to Manchester.

His success at Manchester was very rapid. When only nineteen years of age he became manager of a cotton-mill, in which five hundred people were employed, and by his administrative intelligence, energy, industry, and steadiness, soon made it one of the best establishments of the kind in Great Britain. In this factory Owen used the first bags of American Sea-Island cotton ever imported into the country; it was the first cotton obtained from the Southern States of America. Owen also made remarkable improvement in the quality of the cotton spun. Indeed there is no reason to doubt that at this early age he was the first cotton-spinner in England, a position entirely due to his own capacity and knowledge of the trade, as he had found the mill in no well-ordered condition and was left to organise it entirely on his own responsibility.

Owen had become manager and one of the partners of the Chorlton Twist Company at Manchester, when he made his first acquaintance with the scene of his future philanthropic efforts at New Lanark. During a visit to Glasgow he had fallen in love with the daughter of the proprietor of the New Lanark mills, Mr. Dale. Owen induced his partners to purchase New Lanark; and after his marriage with Miss Dale he settled there, in 1800, as manager and part owner of the mills. Encouraged by his great success in the management of cotton-factories in Manchester, he had already formed the intention of conducting New Lanark on higher principles than the current commercial ones.

The factory of New Lanark had been started in 1784 by Dale and Arkwright, the water-power afforded by the falls of the Clyde being the great attraction. Connected with the mills were about two thousand people, five hundred of whom were children, brought, most of them, at the age of five or six from the poorhouses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The children especially had been well treated by Dale, but the general condition of the people was very unsatisfactory. Many of them were the lowest of the population, the respectable country-people refusing to submit to the long hours and demoralising drudgery of the factories. Theft, drunkenness, and other vices were common; education and sanitation were alike neglected; most families lived only in one room.

It was this population, thus committed to his care, which Owen now set himself to elevate and ameliorate. He greatly improved their houses, and by the unsparing and benevolent exertion of his personal influence trained them to habits of order, cleanliness, and thrift. He opened a store, where the people could buy goods of the soundest quality at little more than cost price; and the sale of drink was placed under the strictest supervision. His greatest success, however, was in the education of the young, to which he devoted special attention. He was the founder of infant schools in Great Britain; and, though he was anticipated by Continental reformers, he seems to have been led to institute them by his own views of what education ought to be, and without hint from abroad.

In all these plans Owen obtained the most gratifying success. Though at first regarded with suspicion as a stranger, he soon won the confidence of his people. The mills continued to prosper commercially, but it is needless to say that some of Owen’s schemes involved considerable expense, which was displeasing to his partners. Wearied at last of the restrictions imposed on him by men who wished to conduct the business on the ordinary principles, Owen, in 1813, formed a new firm, whose members, content with 5 per cent of return for their capital, would be ready to give freer scope to his philanthropy. In this firm Jeremy Bentham and the well-known Quaker, William Allen, were partners.

In the same year Owen first appeared as an author of essays, in which he expounded the principles on which his system of educational philanthropy was based. From an early age he had lost all belief in the prevailing forms of religion, and had thought out a creed for himself, which he considered an entirely new and original discovery. The chief points in this philosophy were that man’s character is made not by him but for him; that it has been formed by circumstances over which he had no control; that he is not a proper subject either of praise or blame—these principles leading up to the practical conclusion that the great secret in the right formation of man’s character is to place him under the proper influences, physical, moral, and social, from his earliest years. These principles, of the irresponsibility of man and of the effect of early influences, are the keynote of Owen’s whole system of education and social amelioration. As we have said, they are embodied in his first work, A New View of Society; or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character, the first of these essays (there are four in all) being published in 1813. It is needless to say that Owen’s new views theoretically belong to a very old system of philosophy, and that his originality is to be found only in his benevolent application of them.

For the next few years Owen’s work at New Lanark continued to have a national and even a European significance. His schemes for the education of his workpeople attained to something like completion on the opening of the institution at New Lanark in 1816. He was a zealous supporter of the factory legislation resulting in the Act of 1819, which, however, greatly disappointed him. He had interviews and communications with the leading members of Government, including the Premier, Lord Liverpool, and with many of the rulers and leading statesmen of the Continent. New Lanark itself became a much-frequented place of pilgrimage for social reformers, statesmen, and royal personages, amongst whom was Nicholas, afterwards Emperor of Russia. According to the unanimous testimony of all who visited it, the results achieved by Owen were singularly good. The manners of the children, brought up under his system, were beautifully graceful, genial, and unconstrained; health, plenty, and contentment prevailed; drunkenness was almost unknown, and illegitimacy was extremely rare. The most perfect good-feeling subsisted between Owen and his workpeople; all the operations of the mill proceeded with the utmost smoothness and regularity; and the business still enjoyed great prosperity.