"Fast and faster our iron master,The thing we made, forever drives."
"Fast and faster our iron master,The thing we made, forever drives."
"Fast and faster our iron master,
The thing we made, forever drives."
But perhaps the worst of all the results of the new régime was the destruction of the personal relations which had hitherto existed between the employers and their employees. No attention was paid to the interests of the latter. The personal relation was forever gone, and only a hard, cold cash nexus remained. Wages went down at an alarming rate, as might be expected; the housing conditions became simply inhuman. Now it was discovered that a child at one of the new looms could do more than a dozen men had done under the old conditions, and a tremendous demand for child workers was the result. At first, as H. de B. Gibbins[13]tells us, there was a strong repugnance on the part of parents to sending their children into the factories. It was, in fact, considered a disgrace to do so. The term "factory girl" was an insulting epithet, and it was impossible for a girl who had been employed in a factory to obtain other employment. She could not look forward to marriage with any but the very lowest of men, so degrading was factory employment considered to be. But the manufacturers had to get children somehow, and they got them. They got them from the workhouses. Pretending that they were going to apprentice them to a trade, they arranged with the overseers of the poor regular days for the inspection of these workhousechildren. Those chosen were conveyed to their destination, packed in wagons or canal boats, and from that moment were doomed to the most awful form of slavery.
"Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the manufacturer," says Gibbins,[14]"and transfer a number of children to a factory district, and there keep them, generally in some dark cellar, till they could hand them over to a mill owner in want of hands, who would come and examine their height, strength, and bodily capacities, exactly as did the slave owners in the American markets. After that the children were simply at the mercy of their owners, nominally as apprentices, but in reality as mere slaves, who got no wages and whom it was not worth while even to feed and clothe properly, because they were so cheap and their places could be so easily supplied. It was often arranged by the parish authorities, in order to get rid of imbeciles, that one idiot should be taken by the mill owner with every twenty sane children. The fate of these unhappy idiots was even worse than that of the others. The secret of their final end has never been disclosed, but we can form some idea of their awful sufferings from the hardships of the other victims to capitalist greed and cruelty. The hours of their labor were only limited by exhaustion, after many modes of torture had been unavailingly applied toforce continued work. Children were often worked sixteen hours a day, by day and by night."
Terrible as this summary is, it does not equal in horror the account given by "Alfred,"[15]in his "History of the Factory System": "In stench, in heated rooms, amid the constant whirl of a thousand wheels, little fingers and little feet were kept in ceaseless action, forced into unnatural activity by blows from the heavy hands and feet of the merciless overlooker, and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punishment invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness." The children were fed upon the cheapest and coarsest food, often the same as that served to their master's pigs. They slept by turns, and in relays, in filthy beds that were never cool. There was often no discrimination between the sexes, and disease, misery, and vice flourished. Some of these miserable creatures would try to run away, and to prevent them, those suspected had irons riveted on their ankles, with long links reaching up to the hips, and were compelled to sleep and work with them on, young women and girls, as well as boys, suffering this brutal treatment. The number of deaths was so great that burials took place secretly, at night, lest an outcry should be raised. Many of the children committed suicide.
These statements are so appalling that, as Mr. R. W. Cooke-Taylor says,[16]they would be "absolutely incredible" were they not fully borne out by evidence from other sources. It is not contended, of course, that conditions in all factories were as bad as those described. But it must be said emphatically that there were worse horrors than any here quoted, and equally emphatically that the very best factories were only a little better than those described. Take, for instance, the account given by Robert Owen of the conditions which obtained in the "model factory" of the time, the establishment at New Lanark, Scotland, owned by Mr. David Dale, where Owen himself was destined to introduce so many striking reforms. Owen assumed control of the New Lanark mills on the first day of the year 1800. In his "Autobiography,"[17]he gives some account of the conditions which he found there, in the "best regulated factory in the world," at that time. There were, says Owen, about five hundred children employed, who "were received as early as six years old, the pauper authorities declining to send them at any later age." They worked from six in the morning until seven in the evening, andthen their education began. They hatedtheir slavery, and many absconded. Many were dwarfed and stunted in stature, and when they were through their "apprenticeship," at thirteen or fifteen years of age, they commonly went off to Glasgow or Edinburgh, with no guardians, ignorant and ready—"admirably suited," is Owen's phrase—to swell the great mass of vice and misery in the towns. The people in New Lanark lived "almost without control, in habits of vice, idleness, poverty, debt, and destitution. Thieving was general." With such conditions existing in a model factory, under a master whose benevolence was celebrated everywhere, it can be very readily believed that conditions elsewhere must have been abominable.
As a result of the appalling poverty which developed, it soon became necessary for poor parents to permit their children to go into the factories. The mighty machines were far too powerful for the prejudices of parental hearts. Child wage-workers became common. They were subjected to little better conditions than the parish apprentices had been; in fact, they were often employed alongside of them. Fathers were unemployed and frequently took meals to their little ones who were at work—a condition which sometimes obtains in some parts of the United States even to this day. Michael Sadler, a member of the House of Commons and a fearless champion of the rights of the poor andoppressed, described this aspect of the evil in touching verse.[18]
During all this time, let it be remembered, the English philanthropists, and among them many capitalists, were agitating against negro slavery in Africa and elsewhere, and raising funds for the emancipation of the slaves. Says Gibbins,[19]"The spectacle of England buying the freedom of black slaves by riches drawn from the labor of her white ones affords an interesting study for the cynical philosopher."
As we read the accounts of the distress which followed upon the introduction of the new mechanical inventions, it is impossible to regard with surprise or with condemnatory feelings, the riots of the misguided "Luddites" who went about destroying machinery in their blind desperation. Ned Lud, after whom the Luddites were named, was an idiot, but wiser men, finding themselves reduced to abject poverty through the introduction of the giant machines, could see no further than he. It was not to be expected that the masses should understand that it was not the machines, but the institution of their private ownership, and use for private gain, that was wrong. And just as we cannot regard with surprise the action of the Luddites in destroying machinery, it is easy tounderstand how the social unrest of the time produced Utopian movements with numerous and enthusiastic adherents.
The Luddites were not the first to make war upon machinery. In 1758, for example, Everet's first machine for dressing wool, an ingenious contrivance worked by water power, was set upon by a mob and reduced to ashes. From that time on similar outbreaks occurred with more or less frequency; but it was not until 1810 that the organized bodies of Luddites went from town to town, sacking factories and destroying the machines in their blind revolt. The contest between the capitalist and the wage-worker, which, as Karl Marx says, dates back to the very origin of capital, took on a new form when machinery was introduced. Henceforth, the worker fights not only, nor even mainly, against the capitalist, but against the machine, as the material basis of capitalist exploitation. This is a distinct phase of the struggle of the proletariat everywhere.
In the sixteenth century the ribbon loom, a machine for weaving ribbon, was invented in Germany. Marx quotes an Italian traveler, Abbé Lancellotti, who wrote in 1579, as follows: "Anthony Müller, of Danzig, saw about fifty years ago, in that town, a very ingenious machine, which weaves four to six pieces at once. But the mayor, being apprehensive that this invention might throw a large number of workmenon the streets, caused the inventor to be secretly strangled or drowned."[20]In 1629 this ribbon loom was introduced into Leyden, where the riots of the ribbon weavers forced the town council to prohibit it. In 1676 its use was prohibited in Cologne, at the same time that its introduction was causing serious disturbances in England. "By an imperial Edict of the 19th of February, 1685, its use was forbidden throughout all Germany. In Hamburg it was burned in public, by order of the Senate. The Emperor Charles VI, on the 9th of February, 1719, renewed the Edict of 1685, and not till 1765 was its use openly allowed in the Electorate of Saxony. This machine, which shook all Europe to its foundations, was in fact the precursor of the mule and power loom, and of the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. It enabled a totally inexperienced boy to set the whole loom, with all its shuttles, in motion by simply moving a rod backward and forward, and in its improved form produced from forty to fifty pieces at once."[21]
The introduction of machinery has universally caused the workers to revolt. Much futile denunciation has been poured upon the blind, stupid resistance of the workers, but in view of the misery and poverty which they have suffered, it is impossible to judge them harshly. Their passionate, futile resistance tothe irresistible moves to pity rather than to condemnation. As Marx justly says, "It took both time and experience before the work people learned to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used."[22]
Under the new industrial régime, Robert Owen, erstwhile a poor draper's apprentice, soon became one of the most successful manufacturers in England. At eighteen years of age we find him entering into the manufacture of the new cotton-spinning machines, with a borrowed capital of $500. His partner was a man named Jones, and though the enterprise was successful from a financial point of view, the partnership proved to be most disagreeable. Accordingly it was dissolved, Owen taking three of the "mules" which they were making as a reimbursement for his investment. With these and some other machinery, Owen entered the cotton manufacturing industry, employing at first only three men. He made $1500 as his first year's profit.
Erelong Owen ceased manufacturing upon his own account, and became superintendent of a Manchester cotton mill, owned by a Mr. Drinkwater, andemploying some five hundred work people. A most progressive man, in his new position Owen was always ready to introduce new machinery, and to embark upon experiments, with a view to improving the quality of the product of the factory.[23]In this he was so successful that the goods manufactured at the Drinkwater mill soon commanded a fifty per cent advance above the regular market prices. Drinkwater, delighted at results like these, made Owen his partner. Thus when he was barely twenty years of age Owen had secured an eminent position among the cotton manufacturers of the time. It is interesting to recall that Owen, in that same year, 1791, used the first cotton ever brought into England from the United States. "American sea island cotton," as it was called from the fact that it was then grown only upon the islands near the southern coast of the United States, was not believed to be of any value for manufacture on account, chiefly, of its poor color. But when a cotton broker named Spear received three hundred pounds of it from an American planter, with the request that he get some competent spinner to test it, Owen, with characteristic readiness, undertook the test and succeeded in making a much finer product than hadhitherto been made from the French cotton, though inferior to it in color. That was the first introduction of American cotton, destined soon to furnish English cotton mills with the greater part of their raw material.
Owen did not long remain with Mr. Drinkwater. He accepted another profitable partnership in Manchester, and it was at this time that he became active in social reform work. As a member of an important literary and philosophical society, he was thrown much into the company of men distinguished in all walks of life, one of his friends and admirers being the poet Coleridge. Here he began that agitation which led to the passing of the very first factory act of Sir Robert Peel, in 1802. The suffering of the children moved his great humane heart to pity. He well knew that his own wealth and the wealth of his fellow-capitalists had been purchased at a terrible cost in child life. He was only a philanthropist as yet; he saw only the pitiful waste of life involved, and sought to impress men of wealth with what he felt. His mind was constantly occupied with plans for practical, constructive philanthropy upon a scale never before attempted.
On the first day of the nineteenth century, Owen entered upon the wonderful philanthropic career at New Lanark, which attracted universal attention, and ultimately led him to those social experiments and theories which won for him the title of "Father ofModern Socialism." We have already seen what the conditions were in the "model factory" when Owen assumed control. His influence was at once directed to the task of ameliorating the condition of the work people. He shortened the hours of labor, introduced sanitary reforms, protected the people against the exploitation of traders through a vicious credit system, opening a store and supplying them with goods at cost, and established infant schools, the first of their kind, for the care and education of children from two years of age and upward. Still, the workers themselves were suspicious of this man who, so different from other employers, was zealous in doing things for them. He really knew nothing of the working class, and it had never occurred to him that they might do anything for themselves. New Lanark under Owen was, to use the phrase which Mr. Ghent has adopted from Fourier, "a benevolent feudalism." Owen complains pathetically, "Yet the work people were systematically opposed to every change which I proposed, and did whatever they could to frustrate my object."[24]
Opportunity to win the affection and confidence of his employees came to Owen at last, and he was not slow to embrace it. In 1806 the United States, in consequence of a diplomatic rupture with England, placed an embargo upon the shipment of raw cottonto that country. Everywhere mills were shut down, and there was the utmost distress in consequence. The New Lanark mills, in common with most others, were shut down for four months, during which time Owen paid every worker his or her wages in full, at a cost of over $35,000. Forever afterward he enjoyed the love and trust of his work people. In spite of all his seemingly reckless expenditure upon purely philanthropic work, the mills yielded an enormous profit. But Owen was constantly in conflict with his business associates, who sought to restrict his philanthropic expenditures, with the result that he was compelled again and again to change partners, always securing their interests and returning them big profits upon their investments, until finally, in 1829, he left New Lanark altogether.
During twenty-nine years he had carried on the business with splendid commercial success and at the same time attracted universal attention to New Lanark as the theater of the greatest experiments in social regeneration the modern world had known. Every year thousands of persons from all parts of the world, many of them statesmen and representatives of the crowned heads of Europe, visited New Lanark to study these experiments, and never were they seriously criticised or their success challenged. It was a wonderful achievement. Had Owen's life ended in 1829, he must have taken rank in historyas one of the truly great men of the nineteenth century.
Let us now consider briefly the forces which led this gentle philanthropist onward to the goal of Communism. His experiences at New Lanark had convinced him that human character depends in large part upon, and is shaped by, environment. Others before Owen had perceived this, but he must ever be regarded as one of the pioneers in the spread of the idea, one of the first to give it definite form and to demonstrate its truth upon a large scale. In the first of those keen "Essays on the Formation of Human Character," in which he recounts the results of his New Lanark system of education, Owen says, "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 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."
We may admit that there is a good deal of overemphasis in this statement, but the doctrine itself does not seem strange or sensational to-day. It might be promulgated in any fashionable church, or in any ministerial conference, without exciting morethan a languid, passing interest. But in Owen's time it was far otherwise. Such a doctrine struck at the very roots of current theology and all that organized Christianity consciously stood for. It denied the doctrine of the freedom of the will, upon which the elaborate theology of the church rested. No wonder, then, that it brought much bitter denunciation upon the heads of its promulgators. A poet of the period, in a poem dedicated to Owen, aptly expresses the doctrine in somewhat prosaic verse:—
"We are the creatures of external things,Acting on inward organs, and are madeTo think and do whate'er our tutors please.What folly, then, to punish or rewardFor deeds o'er which we never held a curb!What woeful ignorance, to teach the crimeAnd then chastise the pupil for his guilt!"[25]
"We are the creatures of external things,Acting on inward organs, and are madeTo think and do whate'er our tutors please.What folly, then, to punish or rewardFor deeds o'er which we never held a curb!What woeful ignorance, to teach the crimeAnd then chastise the pupil for his guilt!"[25]
"We are the creatures of external things,
Acting on inward organs, and are made
To think and do whate'er our tutors please.
What folly, then, to punish or reward
For deeds o'er which we never held a curb!
What woeful ignorance, to teach the crime
And then chastise the pupil for his guilt!"[25]
Owen learned other things at New Lanark besides the truth that character is formed largely by environment. Starting out with no other purpose than to ameliorate the conditions of his work people, he realized before many years had passed that he could never do for them the one essential thing—secure their real liberty. "The people were slaves of my mercy," he writes.[26]He saw, though but dimly atfirst, that no man could be free who depended upon another for the right to earn his bread, no matter how good the bread-master might be. The hopelessness of expecting reform from the manufacturers themselves was painfully forced upon him. First of all, there was the bitter hostility of those of his class who had no sympathy with his philanthropic ideas, manifested from the beginning of his agitation at Manchester. Then there was the incessant conflict with his own associates, who, though they represented the noblest and best elements of the manufacturing class, constantly opposed him and regarded as dangerous and immoral his belief in the inherent right of every child to the opportunities of sound physical, mental, and moral culture. Class consciousness had not yet become a recognized term in sociological discussions, but class consciousness, the instinctive conformity of thought and action with class interests, was a fact which confronted Owen at every step.
The Luddite riots of 1810-1811 awakened England to the importance of the labor question, and Owen, who since 1805 had been devoting much time to its study, secured a wider audience and a much more serious hearing than ever before. Then came the frightful misery of 1815, due to the crisis which the end of the great war produced. Every one seemed to think that when the war was over and peace restored, there would be a tremendous increase inprosperity. What happened was precisely the opposite; for a time at least things were immeasurably worse than before. Peace did not bring with it plenty, but penury.
Owen, more clearly than any other man of the time, explained the real nature of the crisis. The war had given an important spur to industry and encouraged many new inventions and chemical discoveries. "The war was the great and most extravagant customer of farmers, manufacturers, and other producers of wealth, and many during this period became very wealthy.... And on the day on which peace was signed, the great customer of the producers died, and prices fell as the demand diminished, until the prime cost of the articles required for war could not be obtained.... Barns and farmyards were full, warehouses loaded, and such was our artificial state of society that this very superabundance of wealth was the sole cause of the existing distress.Burn the stock in the farmyards and warehouses, and prosperity would immediately recommence, in the same manner as if the war had continued.This want of demand at remunerating prices compelled the master producers to consider what they could do to diminish the amount of their productions and the cost of producing until these surplus stocks could be taken out of the market. To effect these results, every economy in producing was resorted to, and men being more expensivemachines for producing than mechanical and chemical inventions and discoveries so extensively brought into action during the war, the men were discharged and the machines were made to supersede them—while the numbers of the unemployed were increased by the discharge of men from the army and navy. Hence the great distress for want of work among all classes whose labor was so much in demand while the war continued. This increase of mechanical and chemical power was continually diminishing the demand for, and value of, manual labor, and would continue to do so, and would effect great changes throughout society."[27]
In this statement there are several points worthy of attention. In the first place, the analysis of the crisis of 1815 is very like the later analyses of commercial crises by the Marxists; secondly, the antagonism of class interests is clearly developed, so far as the basic interests of the employers and their employees are concerned. The former, in order to conserve their interests, have to dismiss the workers, thus forcing them into the direst poverty. Thirdly, the conflict between manual labor and machine production is frankly stated. Owen's studies were leading him from mere philanthropism to Socialism.
During the height of the distress of 1815, Owen called together a large number of cotton manufacturers at a conference, held in Glasgow, to consider the state of the cotton trade and the prevailing distress. He proposed (1) that they should petition Parliament for the repeal of the revenue tariff on raw cotton; (2) that they should call upon Parliament to shorten the hours of labor in the cotton mills by legislative enactment, and otherwise seek to improve the condition of the working people. The first proposition was carried with unanimity, but the second, and to Owen the more important, did not even secure a seconder.[28]The conference plainly showed the power of class interests. The spirit in which Owen faced his fellow-manufacturers is best seen in the following extract from the address delivered by him, with copies of which he afterward literally deluged the kingdom:—
"True, indeed, it is that the main pillar and prop of the political greatness and prosperity of our country is a manufacture which, as now carried on, is destructive of the health, morals, and social comfort of the mass of people engaged in it. It is only since the introduction of the cotton trade that children, at an age before they had acquired strength or mental instruction, have been forced into cotton mills,—those receptacles, in too many instances, for livinghuman skeletons, almost disrobed of intellect, where, as the business is often now conducted, they linger out a few years of miserable existence, acquiring every bad habit which they may disseminate throughout society. It is only since the introduction of this trade that children and even grown people were required to labor more than twelve hours in a day, not including the time allotted for meals. It is only since the introduction of this trade that the sole recreation of the laborer is to be found in the pot-house or ginshop, and it is only since the introduction of this baneful trade that poverty, crime, and misery have made rapid and fearful strides throughout the community.
"Shall we then go unblushingly and ask the legislators of our country to pass legislative acts to sanction and increase this trade—to sign the death warrants of the strength, morals, and happiness of thousands of our fellow-creatures, and not attempt to propose corrections for the evils which it creates? If such shall be your determination, I, for one, will not join in the application,—no, I will, with all the faculties I possess, oppose every attempt made to extend the trade that, except in name, is more injurious to those employed in it than is the slavery in the West Indies to the poor negroes; for deeply as I am interested in the cotton manufacture, highly as I value the extended political power of my country,yet knowing as I do, from long experience both here and in England, the miseries which this trade, as it is now conducted, inflicts on those to whom it gives employment, I do not hesitate to say:Perish the cotton trade, perish even the political superiority of our country, if it depends on the cotton trade, rather than that they shall be upheld by the sacrifice of everything valuable in life."[29]
This conference doubtless had much to do with Owen's acceptance of a communistic ideal approaching that of modern Socialism in many important respects. It certainly intensified the hatred and fear of those manufacturers whose interests he had so courageously attacked. In 1817 we find him proposing to the British government the establishment of communistic villages, as the best means of remedying the terrible distress which prevailed at that time. From this time onward his interest in mere surface reforms such as he had been carrying on at New Lanark seemed to wane. He became at this juncture an apostle of Communism, or as he later preferred to say, Socialism. His ideal was a coöperative world, with perfect equality between the sexes. He had completely demonstrated to his own mind that private property was incompatible with social well-being. Every month of his experience at NewLanark had deeply impressed him with the conviction that to make it possible for all people to live equally happy and moral lives they must have equal material resources and conditions of life, and he could not understand why it had never occurred to others before him.
Here we have the essential characteristic of Utopian Socialism as distinguished from modern, or scientific, Socialism. The Utopians regard human life as something plastic and capable of being shaped and molded according to systems and plans. All that is necessary is to take some abstract principle as a standard, and then prepare a plan for the reorganization of society in conformity with that principle. If the plan is perfect, it will be enough to demonstrate its advantages as one would demonstrate a sum in arithmetic. The scientific Socialists, on the other hand, are evolutionists. Society, they believe, cannot take leaps at will; social changes are products of the past and the present. They distrust social inventors and schemes. Socialism is not an ingenious plan for the realization of abstract Justice, or Brotherhood, but a necessary outgrowth of the centuries. Owen, then, was a Utopian. He regarded himself as one inspired, an inspired inventor of a new social system, and believed that it was only necessary for him to demonstrate the truth of his contentions and theories, by argument and practical experiment, to bring aboutthe transformation of the world. He conducted a tremendous propaganda, by means of newspapers, pamphlets, lectures, and debates, and established various communities in England and this country. In face of a bitter opposition and repeated failure, he kept on with sublime faith and unbounded courage which nothing could shake.
In 1825 Owen began the greatest and most splendid of his social experiments in the village of Harmonie, Indiana, in the beautiful valley of the Wabash. The place had already been the theater of an interesting experiment in religious communism, Owen having bought the property from the Rappites. In February and March, 1825, the brave reformer addressed two of the most distinguished audiences ever gathered in the Hall of Representatives at the national capital. In the audiences were the President of the United States, the Judges of the Supreme Court, several members of the cabinet, and almost the entire membership of both houses of Congress. Owen explained his plans for the regeneration of society in detail, exhibiting a model of the buildings to be erected. It is almost impossible to realize at this day the tremendous interest which his appeal to Congress awakened. His vision of a re-created world caught the popular imagination.
Among those whose minds were fired was a boy of sixteen, tall, lank, uncouth, and poor. Word hadcome to him of Owen's splendid undertaking, and he had caught something of the enthusiasm of the great dreamer. Above all, it was said that New Harmony was to be a wonderful center of learning, that the foremost educators of the world would establish great schools there, fully equipped with books and all sorts of appliances. To be a scholar had been the boy's one great ambition, so he yearned wistfully for an opportunity to join the new community. But his father forbidding, claiming his services, the boy suffered grievous disappointment. One wonders what effect residence at New Harmony would have had upon the life of Abraham Lincoln, and upon the history of America! And how much, one wonders, was that splendid life influenced by that boyish interest in the regeneration of the world?
That the influence of New Harmony was felt by Lincoln we know. It was a child of New Harmony, Robert Dale Owen, son of Robert Owen, who, when emancipation seemed to hang in the balance, penned his remarkable letter to President Lincoln, dated September seventeenth, 1862. "Its perusal thrilled me like a trumpet call," said the great President. Five days after its receipt the Preliminary Proclamation was issued. "Your letter to the President had more influence on him than any other document which reached him on the subject—I think I might say than all others put together. I speak of thatwhich I know from personal conference with him," wrote Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury.
New Harmony failed. Other communities established by Owen failed, but the story of their failure is nevertheless full of inspiration. The world has long since written the word "Failure" as an epitaph for Robert Owen. But what a splendid failure that life was! Standing by his grave one day, in the picturesque little churchyard at Newton, by a bend of the winding river, not far from the ruins of the ancient castle home of the famous Deist, Lord Herbert, the writer said to an old Welsh laborer, "But his life was a failure, was it not?" The old man gazed awhile at the grave, and then with a voice of unforgettable reverence and love answered, "I suppose it was, sir, as the world goes; a failure like Jesus Christ's. But I don't call it failure, sir. He established infant schools; he founded the great coöperative movement; he helped to make the trade unions;[30]he helped to give us the factory acts; he worked for peace between two great countries. His Socialism has not been realized yet, nor has Christ's—but it will come!"
Owen was not the only builder of Utopias in his time. In the same year that Owen launched his NewHarmony venture, there died in Paris another dreamer of social millenniums, a gentle mystic, Henry de Saint-Simon, and in 1837, the year of Owen's third Socialist congress, another great Utopist died in the French capital, Charles Fourier. Each of these contributed something to the development of the theories of Socialism, each has a legitimate place in the history of the Socialist movement. But this little work is not intended to give the history of Socialism.[31]I have taken only one of the three great Utopists, as representative of them all: one who seems to me to be much nearer to the later scientific movement pioneered by Marx and Engels than any of the others. In the Socialism of Owen, we have Utopian Socialism at its best.
What distinguishes the Utopian Socialists from their scientific successors we have already noted. Engels expresses the principle very clearly in the following luminous passage: "One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had ... produced. Like the French philosophers,[32]they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanityat once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as heaven from earth from that of the French philosophers.
"For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois world, based upon the principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust, and, therefore, finds its way to the dust hole quite as readily, as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. If pure reason and justice had not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chain of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born five hundred years earlier, and might then have spared humanity five hundred years of error, strife, and suffering."[33]
Neither of these great Utopists had anything like the conception of social evolution, determined by economic conditions and the resulting conflicts of economic classes, which constitutes the base of the philosophy of the scientific Socialists. Each of them had some faint comprehension of isolated facts, butneither of them developed his knowledge very far, nor could the facts appear to them as correlated later by Marx. Saint-Simon, as we know, recognized the class struggle in the French Revolution, and saw in the Reign of Terror only the momentary reign of the non-possessing masses;[34]he saw, too, that the political question was fundamentally an economic question, declaring that politics is the science of production, and prophesying that politics would be absorbed by economics.[35]Fourier, we also know, applied the principle of evolution to society. He divided the history of society into four great epochs—savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, and civilization.[36]But just as Saint-Simon failed to grasp the significance of the class conflict, and its relation to the fundamental character of economic institutions, which he dimly perceived, so Fourier failed to grasp the significance of the evolutionary process which he described, and, like Saint-Simon, he halted upon the brink, so to speak, of an important discovery. His concept of social evolution meant little to him and possessed only an academic interest. And Owen, in many respects the greatest of the three, realized in a practical manner that the industrial problem was a class conflict. Not only had he found in 1815 that pity was powerless to move the hearts of hisfellow-manufacturers when their class interests were concerned, but later, in 1818, when he went to present his famous memorial to the Congress of Sovereigns at Aix-la-Chapelle, he had another lesson of the same kind. At Frankfort, Germany, he tarried on his way to the Congress, and was invited to attend a notable dinner to meet the Secretary of the Congress, M. Gentz, a famous diplomat of the day, "who enjoyed the full confidence of the leading despots of Europe." After Owen had outlined his schemes for social amelioration, M. Gentz was asked for his reply, and Owen tells us that the diplomat answered, "We know very well that what you say is true, but how could we govern the masses, if they were wealthy, and so, independent of us?"[37]Lord Lauderdale, too, had exclaimed on another occasion, "Nothing [i.e.than Owen's plans] could be more complete for the poor and working classes, but what will become of us?"[38]Scattered throughout Owen's writings and speeches are numerous evidences that he at times recognized the class antagonisms in industrial society as the heart of the industrial problem,[39]but to him, also, the germ of an important truth meant practically nothing. He saw only the facts in their isolation, and made no attempt to discover their meaning or to relate them to his teaching.
Each of the three men regarded himself as the discoverer of the truth which would redeem the world; each devoted himself with magnificent faith and heroic courage to his task; each failed to realize his hopes; and each left behind him faithful disciples and followers, confident that the day must come at last when the suffering and disinherited of earth will be able to say, in Owen's dying words, "Relief has come." Perhaps no better estimate of the value of the visions of these great Utopists has ever been penned than that by Emerson in the following tribute to Owen:[40]—
"Robert Owen of New Lanark came hither from England in 1845 to read lectures or hold conversations wherever he could find listeners—the most amiable, sanguine, and candid of men. He had not the least doubt that he had hit on the plan of right and perfect Socialism, or that mankind would adopt it. He was then seventy years old, and being asked, 'Well, Mr. Owen, who is your disciple? how many men are there possessed of your views who will remain after you are gone to put them in practice?' 'Not one,' was the reply. Robert Owen knew Fourier in his old age. He said that Fourier learned of him all the truth that he had. The rest of his system was imagination, and the imagination of a visionary. Owen made the best impression by his rarebenevolence. His love of men made us forget his 'three errors.' His charitable construction of men and their actions was invariable. He was the better Christian in his controversies with Christians.
"And truly I honor the generous ideas of the Socialists, the magnificence of their theories, and the enthusiasm with which they have been urged. They appeared inspired men of their time. Mr. Owen preached his doctrine of labor and reward with the fidelity and devotion of a saint in the slow ears of his generation.
"One feels that these philosophers have skipped no fact but one, namely, life. They treat man as a plastic thing, or something that may be put up or down, ripened or retarded, molded, polished, made into solid or fluid or gas at the will of the leader; or perhaps as a vegetable, from which, though now a very poor crab, a very good peach can by manure and exposure be in time produced—and skip the faculty of life which spawns and spurns systems and system makers; which eludes all conditions; which makes or supplants a thousand Phalanxes and New Harmonies with each pulsation....
"Yet, in a day of small, sour and fierce schemes, one is admonished and cheered by a project of such friendly aims, and of such bold and generous proportions; there is an intellectual courage and strength in it which is superior and commanding; it certifiesthe presence of so much truth in the theory, and in so far is destined to be fact.
"I regard these philanthropists as themselves the effects of the age in which they live, in common with so many other good facts the efflorescence of the period and predicting the good fruit that ripens. They were not the creators that they believed themselves to be; but they were unconscious prophets of the true state of society, one which the tendencies of nature lead unto, one which always establishes itself for the sane soul, though not in that manner in which they paint it."