IX. Owen's General Career

81 CHAPTER IX. OWEN'S GENERAL CAREER. CONFINING ourselves strictly to memoirs of Associations, we might leave Owen now and go on to the experiments of the Fourier school. But this would hardly be doing justice to the father of American Socialisms. We have exhibited his great failure; and we must stop long enough to acknowledge his great success, and say brieRy what \ve think of his whole life and influence. Indeed such a review is necessary to a just estimate of the Owen movement in this .country. We accept what he himself said about his early achievements, that he was under the guidance of the Spirit of God, and was carried' along by a wonderful series of special providences in his first labors for the good of the working classes. The originality, wisdom and success of his doings at New Lanark were mani festly supernatural. His factory village was indeed a light to the world, that gave the nations a great lesson in practical beneficence; and shines still amid the dark ness of money-making selfishness and industrial misery.

The single fact that he continued the wages of his operatives when the embargo stopped his business, actually paying out$3S,OOO in four months, to men who had nothing to do but to oil his machinery and l\~ep it 82 AMERICAN SOCIALISMS. clean, stamps him as a genius of an order high~r than Napoleon. By this bold maneuver of benevolence he won the confidence of his men, so that he could manage them afterwards as he pleased; and then he went on to reform and educate them, till they became a wonder to the world and a crown of glory to himself So far we have no doubt that he walked with inspiration and special providence. On the other hand, it is also manifest, that his inspi ration and success, so far at least as practical attempts were concerned, deserted him afterwards, and that much of the latter part of his life was spent in disastrous attempts to establish Communism, without the necessary spirituaL conditions. His whole career may be likened to that of the first Napoleon, whose "star" insured vic tory till he reached a certain crisis; after 'which he lost every battle, and sunk into final and overwhelming defeat.

In both cases there was a turning-point which can be marked. Napoleon's star deserted him when he put away Josephine. Owen evidently 103t his hold on prac tical success when he declared war against religion. In his labors at New Lanark he was not an active infidel. The Bible was in his schools. Religion was at least tol erated and respected. He there Inarried the daughter of Mr. Dale, a preacher of the Independents, who was his best friend and counsellor through the early years of his success. But when his work at New Lanark be came famous, and he rose to companionship with dukes and kings, he outgrew the modesty and practical wisdom of his early life, and undertook the task of Uni versal Reform. Then it was that he fell into the mistake of confounding the principles of the Bible with the charOWEN'S CAREER. acter and pretensions of his ecclesiastical opposers, and so came into the false position of open hostility to religion. Christ was in a similar temptation when he found the Scribes and Pharisees arrayed against him, with the Old Testament for their vantage ground; but he had wisdom enough to keep his foothold on that van tage ground, and drive them off: His programme was, " Think not that I am come to destroy the law and the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill."

Whereas Owen, at the turning-point of his career, aband oned the Bible with all its magazines of power to his enemies,· and went off into a hopeless warfare with Christianity and with all God's past administrations. From that time fortune deserted him. The splendid success of New Lanark was followed by the terrible defeat at New Harmony. The declaration of war against all religion was between them. Such is our interpreta tion of his life; and something like this must have been his own interpretation, when he confessed in the light of his later expenence, that by overlooking spiritual condi tions, he had missed the most important of all the elements of human improvement. And yet we must not push our parallel too far. Owen, unlike Napoleon, never knew when he was beaten, and .fought on thirty years after his Waterloo. It would be a great nlistake to imagine that the failure of New Harmony and of the attempts that followed it, was the end of Owen's achievements and influence, even in this country. Providence does not so waste its preparations and inspirations. Let us see what was left, and what Owen did, after the disasters of 1826-7.