Social reformer, born, a saddler’s son, at Newtown, Montgomeryshire, 14th May 1771. At ten he was put into a draper’s shop at Stamford, and by nineteen had risen to be manager of a cotton-mill. In 1799 he married the daughter of David Dale, the philanthropic owner of the New Lanark cotton-mills, where next year he settled as manager and part-owner. He laboured to teach his workpeople the advantages of thrift, cleanliness, and good order, and established infant education. He began social propagandism in “A New View of Society” (1813), and finally adopted socialism; he lost much of his influence by his utterances on religion. His socialistic theories were put to the test in experimental communities at Orbiston near Bothwell, and later at New Harmony in Indiana, in County Clare, and in Hampshire, but all were unsuccessful. In 1828 his connection with New Lanark ceased; and, his means having been exhausted, the remainder of his days were spent in secularist, socialistic, and spiritualistic propagandism. He died 17th November, 1858.

Personal

  Mrs. Browning tells me that Robert Owen of Lanark has been converted to a belief in the immortality of the soul by these spirit-rappings. Now, knowing Robert Owen, I think that he would most assuredly have been converted without them, for he, in spite of his crotchets, is a thoroughly kind and honest man, who has no interest in disbelieving a future state.

  He was the same placid happy being into his old age, believing and expecting whatever he wished; always gentlemanly and courteous in his manners; always on the most endearing terms with his children, who loved to make him, as they said, “the very happiest old man in the world;” always a gentle bore in regard to his dogmas and his expectations; always palpably right in his descriptions of human misery; always thinking he had proved a thing when he had asserted it, in the force of his own conviction; and always really meaning something more rational than he had actually expressed. It was said by way of mockery that “he might live in parallelograms, but he argued in circles;” but this is rather too favorable a description of one who did not argue at all, nor know what argument meant.

  On the whole, Owen’s private career was remarkably free from anything like romantic incident. He rose by his own skill and prudence, from a very humble place to that of a wealthy and influential manufacturer. He married young and happily, and frequently expressed his satisfaction in the family which grew up around him. Had he been intent on mere worldly greatness, his shrewdness and capacity for affairs might have made him a millionaire, a member of Parliament, the founder of a family. But the peculiarities of his understanding and of his sympathies, led him into a public course of life, in which he exhibited startling contrasts. His success in all his undertakings as a boy and a young man, his social influence and great popularity in middle life, were in curious opposition to his subsequent failure in all his projects, to the antipathy felt towards him by the world, and to the obscurity of his old age. The manly and well-directed vigour of the first half of his life, were in direct antagonism to the useless activity and hopeless ill-success of the latter half: the unbelief of his nonage and ripe manhood, show strangely by the foolish credulity of his old age. And from first to last there is a remarkable inconsistency, between his vehement denial of moral responsibility, and on the other hand, his kindness of disposition, his regular conduct, his universal benevolence, his contempt of riches and luxury, and his unwearied and munificent support of projects of philanthropy.

  Mr. Owen was ambitious, and his ambition prompted him to seek what he regarded as the good of his fellow-men. No dishonourable action is recorded of him, and his private life was free from reproach. Yet, however ample the folds of our charity, a candid review of his career, upon his own showing, leaves no room to doubt that “a deceived heart turned him aside,” and that his endowments and rare opportunities of usefulness were made unavailable for any great or permanent results by reason of the obliquity of his moral vision…. Deduct from our estimate of his life and character whatever such as think least of him may demand, and there is enough left to give him a place among those who have aimed and striven to benefit their fellow-men. He would have done great good if he had known how. Or add to such an estimate what ever his most ardent admirers may claim for him, and it will not raise him to the sphere of those who, in a humbler way, have actually accomplished much greater things for mankind.

  There was no magnetic influence from him, a man of one idea, unpoetic, without a spark of imagination, very wearisome in his singular capacity for reiteration.

  Owen may be described as one of those intolerable bores who are the salt of the earth. To the whigs and the political economists he appeared chiefly as a bore…. He was essentially a man of one idea; that idea, too, was only partially right, and enforced less by argument than by incessant and monotonous repetition. Yet he will certainly be recognised as one of the most important figures in the social history of the time. His great business capacities enabled him to make an important stand against some of the evils produced by the unprecedented extension of the factory system. He was not in sympathy with any political party…. Personally, according to Robert Dale Owen, who no doubt speaks the truth, he was most amiable. His ruling passion was benevolence; he was exceedingly fond of children; spent a fortune to promote the welfare of his race, and had a command of temper which enabled him to conciliate opponents. He had apparently all the obstinacy without the irritability generally attributed to his countrymen. His son says that he was so like Brougham in person that he might have been taken for him, but, with a vanity as great as Brougham’s, he had what Brougham unfortunately wanted—the power of making even his vanity subsidiary to his principles.

General

  It is surely not required of any one who forms an estimate of Robert Owen’s system, that all he has written must have been read and must be remembered. It would be as fair, in estimating the capabilities of a practical lawyer, to demand a remembrance of the contents of all the deeds he had drafted throughout a very long professional career. We question the power of human patience to accomplish the task. Owen seems to have even tired some of his own nearest and most devoted friends by his monotonous reiteration—a difficult thing for a social prophet to accomplish, and one that evinces powers of humdrum almost superhuman. Any specimen will do for a type of the whole continuous stream, of which any one passage is as like the rest as one bucketful of water from a burn is like every other. Things that are common enough in one time or place are curious in others; and though the sect have been so liberally treated to their master’s eloquence, it is as unknown to the ordinary public who read magazines and reviews as the works of Occam, Erigena, or Balbus.

  So entire was the suitability, thus far, of the man to his age, that there can be little doubt that if he had been gifted with the power in which he was most deficient—reasoning power—he would have been among the foremost men of his generation.

  Robert Owen, born in Newtown, North Wales, in 1771, was like my grandfather, a self-made man. His specific plans, as a Social Reformer, proved, on the whole and for the time a failure; and this, for lack of cultivated judgment and critical research, and of accurate knowledge touching what men had thought and done before his time; also because he strangely over-rated the ratio of human progress; but more especially, perhaps, because, until late in life, he ignored the spiritual element in man as the great lever of civilized advancement. Yet with such earnestness, such vigor, such indomitable perseverance, and such devotion and love for his race did he press, throughout half a century, these plans on the public, and so much practical truth was there, mixed with visionary expectation, that his name became known, and the influence of his teachings has been more or less felt, over the civilized world. A failure in gross has been attended by sterling incidental successes; and toward the great idea of co-operation—quite impracticable, for the present at least, in the form he conceived it—there have been, even since his death, very considerable advances made, and generally recognized by earnest men as eminently useful and important.

  Owen was thus a visionary, like St. Simon and Fourier; but, unlike them, he had a most beneficent effect on the social progress of his country. His economic doctrines were crude and often absurd; his theory of marriage was, to say the least, peculiar; his socialistic views were Utopian: but he succeeded in proving that a factory could be made to benefit both master and workman; he initiated the reform in the condition of the laboring classes; he laid the firm foundation on which the co-operative movement of our times is erecting its successful edifice. England must thank him, above all, for his success in preventing socialism from consolidating with Chartism—a movement different from the superficially analogous cases on the continent…. Owen deprecated all violence, and placed no reliance on the Chartist ideal. He desired reform, but it was voluntary, not compulsory reform. His kind heart and unquenchable confidence taught him to seek a change only through peace, love and education; his socialism was not destructive, but constructive; his activity engendered neither unrest nor disaffection.

  Robert Owen died in 1858 at the advanced age of eighty-seven years. He began as a pure philanthropist and ended as a socialist. His belief that man is the product of inherited capacities and external circumstances, early associations and social environment, led him to insist very truly upon careful education of the young, and upon the importance of ethical training generally. In this direction we of to-day owe him much, as we do to all pioneers, and it is as a pioneer that posterity will chiefly regard him.

  Robert Owen may justly be regarded as the founder of English Socialism, Co-operation, and indirectly of Chartism…. The strange chances which raised him from the position of a draper’s apprentice to that of a partner in a flourishing firm of Manchester manufacturers, and in 1800 installed him as chief partner at the New Lanark Mills, imprinted on his quietly tenacious nature the belief that external circumstances decided not only a man’s career, but also his whole character and conduct. Fortunately for his work-people, this usually noxious creed was transformed by the sunshine of his beneficent nature into a source of life-giving activity and persistent endeavour to mould his “hands” at New Lanark until they should become “fully formed men and women.” Spacious dining and lecture halls attested his care for their physical and mental welfare. His sale of provisions to them at nearly cost price, and distribution of the profits of this store, marked him out as the father of Co-operation in our land; and his profit-sharing arrangements gained him the same honour in regard to “industrial partnership.”

  The typical representatives of these Utopian socialists are St. Simon and Charles Fourier in France, and Robert Owen in England…. As I now attempt to make clear to you, through him, the essence of utopian socialism, it is because he is less known, but especially because in my opinion he is the most interesting of the three great utopists. It is he who on the one side most clearly shows to us the genesis of the modern proletarian ideal, and on the other side has been of the greatest influence upon other socialistic theorists…. We distinguish two periods in his life. In the first he is what we call an educationalist, a man who interests himself especially in the education of youth and expects through it an essential reformation of human society. The chief work of this epoch is the book “A New View of Society.” In the second period he is a socialist; and his most important work is “A Book of the New Moral World.”