CHAPTER XVII

THE UTOPISTS: OWEN, SAINT SIMON, AND FOURIER

IT is now necessary for us to turn for a while from the political progress of Socialism, to note the school of thinkers who preceded the birth of modern scientific or revolutionary Socialism. These men thought it possible to regenerate Society by laying before it its shortcomings, follies, and injustice, and by teaching through precept and example certain schemes of reconstruction built up from the aspirations and insight of the teachers themselves. They had not learned to recognise the sequence of events that forces social changes on mankind whether they are conscious of its force

or not, but believed that their schemes. would win their way to general adoption by men's perception of their inherent reasonableness. They hoped to convert people to Socialism, to accepting it consciously and formally, by showing them the contrast between the confusion and misery of civilisation, and the order and happiness of the world which they foresaw.

From the elaborate and detailed schemes of future Society which they built up they have been called the Utopists. The representatives of the different phases of this school are three most remarkable men, born within a few years of each other, whose aspirations and insight did, in their day, a very great deal to further the progress of Socialism, in spite of the incompleteness

of their views.

Robert Owen was born at Newtown, Montgomeryshire, in 1771, of a lower middle-class family. He became a successful manufacturer through his own industry and quick-wittedness in the beginning of the rise of the Great Machine Industries, when "manufac

turing" was advancing "by leaps and bounds." He was a born philanthropist in the better sense of the word, and from the first showed in all matters unbounded generosity and magnanimity. In the year 1800, when he was not yet thirty, he became the manager of the New Lanark Mills, and set to work on his first great experiment, which was briefly the conversion of a miserable, stupid, and vicious set of people into a happy, industrious, and orderly community, acting on the theory that man is the creature of his surroundings, and that by diligent attention to the development of his nature he can be brought to perfection. In this experiment he was entirely successful, but it was not in him to stop there, as the plain words he said of his success showed clearly enough: "Yet these men. were my slaves." 1 He took part in all kinds of projects of a philanthropic nature, still founding all his action on his

1 In 1806, when owing to the rise in cotton he could not continue manufacturing, he stopped the mills and paid his people their full wages till he could go on again in four months' time, a proceeding that cost him £7000.

theory of the perfectibility of man by the amelioration of his surroundings, and became the first great champion of co-operation, although he did not suppose, as the co-operators of the present day do, that anything short of universal co-operation would solve the social question. In 1815 he pressed a meeting of Glasgow manufacturers to petition Parliament to shorten the hours of labour in the cotton mills, and the change which he experienced from the approbation of the governing classes to their reprobation, may very well date from that proceeding, as a bourgeois biographer of his hints. But he still kept his position as a popular philanthropist, even after his declaration in favour of co-operation, until he at last cut himself off from respectability by openly attacking Respectability through its received religion (21st August 1816), from which date onward he was scouted by all that "Society," of which he was now the declared enemy. But he was in nowise daunted. In 1823 he proposed communistic villages as a remedy for the distress in Ireland. He estab

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lished, in 1832, an exchange in Gray's Inn Road, in which labour was equitably exchanged against labour; in 1825 he bought New Harmony from a community already established there (the Rappites), and made his great experiment in living in common; and late in life he published his Book of the New Moral World, which contains the exposition of his doctrine.

It will be thus seen that he was unwearied in practical experiments. His shortcoming was the necessary one of the Utopist,-a total disregard of the political side of He failed progress. to see that his experiments, useful as they were from that point of view, could never develop out of the experimental stage as long as the constitution of Society implies the upholding of the socalled "rights of property." He ignored also the antagonism of classes which necessarily exists under this system, and which in the long run must bring about the Socialism that he, the most generous and best of men, spent his whole life in attempting to realise. He died in 1858. born of a noble

Saint Simon was