Astray in his conceptions, entangled in words, man loses the flair for truth, the taste for nature. What a powerful intellect must you possess, to be suspicious of this moral carbon monoxide and, with your head swimming already, to hurl yourself out of it into the fresh air, with which, into the bargain, everyone round is trying to scare you! Owen's answer to this would have been that this was just why he was beginning his regeneration of society not with a Fourierist phalanstery, not with an lcaria,24
but at school, at a school into which he would take children of two and less.
Owen was right and, what is more, he demonstrated in prac-24 The Journal to Icaria, by Etienne Cabet, a Utopian novel, depicts an imaginary country run on communist lines. (A.S.)
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tice that he was: faced with New Lanark Owen's opponents were silent. That cursed New Lanark stuck in the throats of people who perpetually accused socialism of Utopianism and of inability to achieve anything in practice. '"What was done by Considerant and Brisbane, by the abbey of Citeaux, by the tailors of Clichy and by Proudhon's Banque du Peuple?'25 But against the brilliant success of New Lanark there was nothing to be said.
Savants and ambassadors, ministers and dukes, merchants and lords, they all came out of the school with wonder and veneration. The Duke of Kent's doctor, a sceptic, spoke of New Lanark with a smile. The Duke, a friend of Owen's, advised him to visit New Lanark himself. In the evening the doctor wrote to the Duke: 'I am leaving a report until to-morrow. I am so much excited and touched by what I have seen that I can write no more; several times my eyes filled with tears.' I expect my old gentleman to make this solemn admission. So he demonstrated his conception in practice-he was right. Let us go farther.
New Lanark was at the height of its prosperity. The indefatigable Owen, in spite of his trips to London, the meetings he attended and the constant visits from all the celebrities of Europe-even, as we have seen, from Nicholas Pavlovich-applied himself with the same loving energy to his school-cumfactory and the well-being of his workers, among whom he was developing a communal life. And the whole thing blew up.
"What do you think, then? That he went bankrupt? The instructors quarrelled, the children were spoilt, the parents took to drink? Forgive me: the factory prospered, the profits increased, the workers grew rich, the school flourished. But one fine morning there came into that school two buffoons in black wearing low-crowned hats and coats that were purposely badly cut: it was two Quakers,26 who were just as much proprietors in
�5 Considerant, who emigrated to America in 1 842, two years later organised, with the participation of Al bert Brisbane," the coloy of 'Reunion' in Texas. In the monastery at Citeaux, after the revolution of 1 848, there was founded one of the workers' productive associations. At Clichy, a small place not far from Paris, a great co-operative productive comradeship of tailors was organised in March 1 8·1-8, to a plan of Louis Blanc's and with the support of the Luxemburg Committee. The 'People Bank,' founded by Proudhon in 1 849, the object of which was the furnishing of workers with 'free credit.' All these undertakings proved to be failures. ( A .S.)
26 Quakers visited the school at New Lanark three times between 1 8 1 4
and 1 822 ( Podrnore, op. cit., I , 1 5 8 ) . (R.)
• ( 1 809-90) , father of the journalist Arthur Brisbane, who becarne "William Randolph Hearst's columnist and adviser. (D.M_)
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New Lanark as Owen himself was. They scowled at the sight of the merry children who were not grieving in the least over the Fall; they were horrified that the little boys wore no trousers,27
and demanded that some catechism of theirs should be taught.
Owen answered to start with by a stroke of genius: he gave them the figure of the rise in profits. Their jealousy for the Lord was quieted for a time; the sinful figure was so great.28 But the conscience of the Quakers woke up again, and they began to demand even more insistently that the children should not be taught dancing nor worldly singing, but-peremptorily-their own schismatic catechism.
Owen, with whom choral singing, correct movements and dances played an important part in education, did not agree.
There were long arguments; the Quakers decided this time to consolidate their places in paradise, and demanded the introduction of psalms, and of some sort of short trousers for the children who were going about a /'ecossaise. Owen realised that the Quakers' crusade would not stop there. 'In that case,' he told them, 'run the place yourselves: I decline to do it.' He could not have acted otherwise.29
'The Quakers,' says a biographer of Owen, 'when they entered on the management of New Lanark, began by lowering pay and increasing the hours of work.'
New Lanark collapsed.
It must not be forgotten that Owen's success discloses one more great historical novelty, namely, that it is only at first that the poor, oppressed workman, denied an education, trained from childhood in drunkenness, deceit and war with society, opposes innovations, and this out of mistrust; but as soon as he is convinced that the change is not to his detriment, that in the course of it he, too, is not forgotten, he follows with submission, and then with confidence and love.
27 They wore kilts. (R.)
28 New Lanark produced £1 60,000 pure profit in the first five years, and after that the average yearly profit came to £ 1 5,000. ( A .S. ) 29 The demands of the Quaker-companions were presented to Owen in January 1 824; he put his signature to their conditions and agreed to continue temporarily with the conduct of the undertaking until a new manager could be found. Owen's break with his co-proprietors and his forced departure from New Lanark happened later in 1 829. (A.S.) Podmore says (op. cit., I, 1 58) that the schools at New Lanark continued to flourish . . . until the institutic'1 of Board Schools in Scotland in 1 872. ( R. )
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The environment, which acted as a brake, is not here.
Gentz, the literary sycophant of Metternich, said to Robert Owen at a dinner in Frankfort:30
'Suppose you had been successful, what would have been the outcome of it?'
'It's very simple,' Owen answered. 'The outcome would have been that every man would have had enough to eat, would have been properly clothed and would have been given a sensible education.'
'But that's just what we don't want,' observed the Cicero of the Congress of Vienna. Gentz was frank, if nothing else.
From the moment that the shopkeepers realised, as the priests had, that those companies of 'play-workers' and teachers were something very much in earnest, the destruction of New Lanark was inevitable.
And it is for this reason that the failure of a small Scottish hamlet with its factory and school has the significance of a historical misfortune. The mins of Owen's New Lanark inspire in us no less mournful thoughts than were once inspired in Marius by other mins, with the difference that the Roman exile was sitting on the coffin of an old man and pondering the vanity of vanities, and we ponder the same thing, sitting at the fresh grave of a baby, a very promising one, killed by being badly looked after and through fear that it would demand its inheritance!