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Under the new industrial régime, Robert Owen, erstwhile a poor draper's apprentice, soon became one of the most successful manufacturers in England. At eighteen years of age we find him entering into the manufacture of the new cotton-spinning machines, with a borrowed capital of $500. His partner was a man named Jones, and though the enterprise was successful from a financial point of view, the partnership proved to be most disagreeable. Accordingly it was dissolved, Owen taking three of the "mules" which they were making as a reimbursement for his investment. With these and some other machinery, Owen entered the cotton manufacturing industry, employing at first only three men. He made $1500 as his first year's profit.

Erelong Owen ceased manufacturing upon his own account, and became superintendent of a Manchester cotton mill, owned by a Mr. Drinkwater, and employing some five hundred work people. A most progressive man, in his new position Owen was always ready to introduce new machinery, and to embark upon experiments, with a view to improving the quality of the product of the factory.[23] In this he was so successful that the goods manufactured at the Drinkwater mill soon commanded a fifty per cent advance above the regular market prices. Drinkwater, delighted at results like these, made Owen his partner. Thus when he was barely twenty years of age Owen had secured an eminent position among the cotton manufacturers of the time. It is interesting to recall that Owen, in that same year, 1791, used the first cotton ever brought into England from the United States. "American sea island cotton," as it was called from the fact that it was then grown only upon the islands near the southern coast of the United States, was not believed to be of any value for manufacture on account, chiefly, of its poor color. But when a cotton broker named Spear received three hundred pounds of it from an American planter, with the request that he get some competent spinner to test it, Owen, with characteristic readiness, undertook the test and succeeded in making a much finer product than had hitherto been made from the French cotton, though inferior to it in color. That was the first introduction of American cotton, destined soon to furnish English cotton mills with the greater part of their raw material.

Owen did not long remain with Mr. Drinkwater. He accepted another profitable partnership in Manchester, and it was at this time that he became active in social reform work. As a member of an important literary and philosophical society, he was thrown much into the company of men distinguished in all walks of life, one of his friends and admirers being the poet Coleridge. Here he began that agitation which led to the passing of the very first factory act of Sir Robert Peel, in 1802. The suffering of the children moved his great humane heart to pity. He well knew that his own wealth and the wealth of his fellow-capitalists had been purchased at a terrible cost in child life. He was only a philanthropist as yet; he saw only the pitiful waste of life involved, and sought to impress men of wealth with what he felt. His mind was constantly occupied with plans for practical, constructive philanthropy upon a scale never before attempted.

On the first day of the nineteenth century, Owen entered upon the wonderful philanthropic career at New Lanark, which attracted universal attention, and ultimately led him to those social experiments and theories which won for him the title of "Father of Modern Socialism." We have already seen what the conditions were in the "model factory" when Owen assumed control. His influence was at once directed to the task of ameliorating the condition of the work people. He shortened the hours of labor, introduced sanitary reforms, protected the people against the exploitation of traders through a vicious credit system, opening a store and supplying them with goods at cost, and established infant schools, the first of their kind, for the care and education of children from two years of age and upward. Still, the workers themselves were suspicious of this man who, so different from other employers, was zealous in doing things for them. He really knew nothing of the working class, and it had never occurred to him that they might do anything for themselves. New Lanark under Owen was, to use the phrase which Mr. Ghent has adopted from Fourier, "a benevolent feudalism." Owen complains pathetically, "Yet the work people were systematically opposed to every change which I proposed, and did whatever they could to frustrate my object."[24]

Opportunity to win the affection and confidence of his employees came to Owen at last, and he was not slow to embrace it. In 1806 the United States, in consequence of a diplomatic rupture with England, placed an embargo upon the shipment of raw cotton to that country. Everywhere mills were shut down, and there was the utmost distress in consequence. The New Lanark mills, in common with most others, were shut down for four months, during which time Owen paid every worker his or her wages in full, at a cost of over $35,000. Forever afterward he enjoyed the love and trust of his work people. In spite of all his seemingly reckless expenditure upon purely philanthropic work, the mills yielded an enormous profit. But Owen was constantly in conflict with his business associates, who sought to restrict his philanthropic expenditures, with the result that he was compelled again and again to change partners, always securing their interests and returning them big profits upon their investments, until finally, in 1829, he left New Lanark altogether.

During twenty-nine years he had carried on the business with splendid commercial success and at the same time attracted universal attention to New Lanark as the theater of the greatest experiments in social regeneration the modern world had known. Every year thousands of persons from all parts of the world, many of them statesmen and representatives of the crowned heads of Europe, visited New Lanark to study these experiments, and never were they seriously criticised or their success challenged. It was a wonderful achievement. Had Owen's life ended in 1829, he must have taken rank in history as one of the truly great men of the nineteenth century.