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Chapter Two The Battle for Minds and Secular Salvation “Utopia” and “Utility” 1. “Utopia” Community, the joyful sound, That cheers the social band, And spreads the holy zeal around, To dwell upon the land. —Owenite Hymn, No. 129 What other Utopians dreamed of, Robert Owen, son of a Welsh saddlemaker, tried to make reality. Undoubtedly a man of genius, he was a combination of the visionary and the realist. He had been moulded in the crucible of hard personal experience, had by his own efforts succeeded, achieved affluence, and thereafter had attempted to transform the lessons of that experience into broad social concepts, and these again into radical philanthropic experiments. That he ultimately failed was a great, even if predictable, tragedy, due as much to the unsoundness of his social premises, shortcomings of his personality, and failure to understand the changing times and the temper of factory workers after 1834, as to the implacable hostility he aroused within the establishment when the full implications of his growing radicalism in politics and religion became apparent. Genius is a mysterious thing. What are the forces at work when at a critical moment it breaks through the cocoon of the past—traditions, customs, filiations—and emerges in its own independent originality? At what point did this young shopassistant named Robert Owen, who had been sent out into the world to make his way, attain to that level of perception that resulted in an internal, personal revolution? We do not know. Owen himself was incapable of giving us the clues. Causes [he told his Lanark audience in 1816] over which I could have no control, removed in early days the bandage which covered my mental sight ... The causes which fashioned me in the womb ... these gave me a mind that could not rest satisfied without trying every possible expedient to relieve my fellow men from their wretched situation, and formed it of such a texture that obstacles of the most formidable nature served but to increase my ardor, and to fix within me a settled determination, either to overcome them, or to die in the attempt.1 He had risen fast when a very young man, and could have every incentive and temptation to enrich himself, like others, profiting from the interminable hours of 13 labor of the children, women and men in the cotton factories. At eighteen he was already manager of a Manchester cotton enterprise, soon become a partner in it, and rapidly developed the reputation of one of the most enterprising and astute cotton mill administrators in England or Scotland. At twenty-nine he married the daughter of a Scottish mill-owner at New Lanark, and it was here and at Orbiston, close to Glasgow, that he projected the staggering experiments that were intended to reform the society of his day from top to bottom. Owen was born in 1771 and died in 1858. He was thus the contemporary of what we may call two ages—the age of an expiring domestic industry and the age of the new triumphant industrialism. In his outlook he tried to assimilate both of them into the optimistic rationalism of the eighteenth century that permeated the thought of William Godwin and Shelley—namely, that Reason is an irresistible force for the elimination of the evils of society and for its re-creation once the veil of ignorance and superstition is lifted from the eyes of both the rulers and the ruled; and that there are immense possibilities inherent in the unprecedented productive powers unleashed by the new machines. He came to the conclusion that society may be formed to exist without crime, without poverty, and with health improved , with little, if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundred-fold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes, at this moment, except ignorance, to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal.2 He asked that the improvement of human beings—“vital machinery”—be placed on the same level as that which was “inanimate.” For examples of what society should not be like, he needed to look no farther than the factory of his own father-in-law David Dale at New Lanark, with its two thousand workers, of whom one quarter were children brought from poorhouses and elsewhere, six years of age and upward, who labored alongside their seniors for fourteen to sixteen hours daily. Yet Mr. Dale was a devout and well-meaning Christian, who no doubt regarded the condition...

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