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his face, stood without anger, asking meekly and with love for an hour of their time. He might surely have been given that hour in return for his sixty-five years of blameless service; but he was refused: he bored them, he kept repeating the same thing and, most important, he deeply offended the crov·:d. He wanted to take away from them the right to dangle from the gallows and to watch others dangling there; he wanted to take away from them the loathsome wheel that pushes them on from behind and to open the locked cage, that inhuman mater dolorosa of the soul, which the secular inquisition has substituted for the monkish chests filled with knives. For this sacrilege the crowd was ready to stone Owen to death, but the crowd, too, had become more humane: stones had gone out of fashion ; they preferred mud, hisses and articles in the newspapers.
Another old man, just such a fanatic, was more fortunate than Owen when, with his feeble, hundred-year-old hands he blessed small and great on Patmos and only murmured, 'Children, love one another!' The simple and the poor did not laugh at him, did not say that his commandment was absurd: these plebeians did not know the golden mean of the vulgar world-a world more hypocritical than ignorant, more narrow-minded than stupid.
Compelled to abandon his New Lanark, Owen crossed the ocean ten times, thinking that the seeds of his teaching would grow better in new soil, forgetting that this had been cleared by Quakers and Puritans, and probably not foreseeing that five years after his death6 the republic of Jefferson, the first to proclaim the rights of man, would collapse over the right to flog Negroes. When he was unsuccessful there too, Owen appeared on the old soil again and went round battering at every door, at palaces and hovels, starting markets which would serve as a model of the Rochdale community' and of the co-operativP
associations, publishing books and magazines, writing epistles, holding meetings, making speeches, availing himself of every opportunity. Governments from all over the world were sending delegates to the 'World Exhibition.'s OwPn was among them at once, asking them to take with them an olive branch and the hews of a call to a life of reason and concord-but they did not 6 Robert Owen died in 1 858. (A.S.)
7 The first consumers' co-operative society was founded at Rochdale m 1844 by workers in the textile industry. ( A .S.) 8 In London in 1 85 1 . (A.S.)
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listen to him, for they \'\'ere thinking of the jewelled crosses and snuff-boxes to come. Owen was not discouraged.
On a foggy October day in 1 858 Lord Brougham, knowing very
\Vell that the leak in the ramshackle barn of society was always gaining but still hoping that it could be caulked so that it would last our time, sought advice about oakum and pitch at Liverpool at the second meeting of the Social Science Association.
Suddenly there was a stir, and Owen, ill and pale, was gently carried on a stretcher on to the platform. He had overtaxed his strength and had come from London on purpose to give again his good news of the possibility of a society fed and clothed, of a society without a hangman. Lord Brougham received the old gentleman with deference (they had been intimates at one time ) ; Owen stood up quietly and in a faint voice began to speak of the different time that was approaching, of a new harmony9-his strength failed him and his speech stopped . . . Brougham finished his sentence for him and gave a sign: the old man's body was drooping and he was insensible ; he was gently placed on a stretcher and carried in dead silence through the crowd, who this time were struck with a kind of reverence: it was as though they felt that this was the beginning of a funeral not entirely of the usual sort, that something great, something sacred, something outraged was being extinguished.
A few days went by; Owen recovered a little and one morning told his friend and assistant, Rigby, to pack, because he \'\'anted to leave.
'To London again?' Rigby asked.
'No. Take me to the place where I was born. That is where I shall lay my bones.'
And Rigby took him to Newtown in Montgomeryshire, where eighty-eight years before this strange man had been born, an apostle among mill-owners . . . .
'His breathing stopped so gently,' writes his eldest son, who alone managed to get to Newtown before Owen's death, 'that I, who was holding his hand, hardly noticed it. There was not the sl ightest struggle, not one convulsive movement.'
In exactly thf' same way neither England nor the whole world noticf'd wlwn this witnPss a Ia c/,;rhar�c in tlw criminal action against humanity ceased to breathe.
An English priest troubled his dust with a funeral service, in
!J 1\"ew Harmony was the namP of a co-operative labouring community founded by Owen in I ndiana, U.S.A., in 1 82·k It came to an end in 1 829.
( R. )
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spite of the wishes of a small group of friends who had come to the burial ; the friends dispersed, Thomas Allsop10 protested boldly, nobly-and 'all was over.'
I wished to write a few words about him but, carried away by the general Wirbelwind, I did nothing; his tragic shade withdrew farther and farther and began to disappear behind the heads of others, behind painful events and the dust of every day.
Suddenly, the other day, I remembered Owen and my intention of writing something about him.
Turning over the pages of the Westminster Review11 I came across an article about him, and I read the whole of it with attention. The article was written not by an enemy of Owen's but by a reasonable, reliable man who could give merits their due and defects their desert; nevertheless, I put down the magazine with an odd feeling of pain, of outrage, of something stifling, with a feeling approaching hatred of what I had been subjected to.
Perhaps I was unwell, in a bad humour, did not understand? I took the periodical up again, read here and there-the effect was still the same.
'More than the last twenty years of Owen's life are without interest for the public.
Ein unnii.tz Leben ist ein frii.her Tod. 1 2
'He summoned meetings, but hardly anyone came, because he went on repeating his old principles which everybody had long forgotten. Those who wanted to hear from him something useful for themselves had to hear again how the whole life of society was based on false foundations. To this dotage there was soon added a belief in the rapping of spirits . . . the old man harped on his talks with the Duke of Kent, with Byron, Shelley and so on . . . .
'There is not the least danger that Owen's teachings will be accepted in practice. They were such feeble chains as cannot hold a whole people. Long before his death his principles were refuted, forgotten, but he continued to imagine himself the benefactor of the human race, a sort of atheistical Messiah.
10 He refused to be present at the religious ceremony. (A.S.) 11 The Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review published in its issue of October 1860 a long article, unsigned, about Owen. (A.S. ) 1� Goethe: lphigenie auf Tauris, I, 2. (A.S. )
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'His turning to the rappings of spirits is not in the least surprising. People of no education constantly pass with extraordinary ease from extreme scepticism to extreme superstition. They wish to determine every question by the light of nature alone.