William Wilson

The Angel and the Serpent

Immediately after Owen took over at New Lanark, he set about constructing roomier houses for his workers, removing the dunghills from their front dooryards and conducting regular inspections of housekeeping with special rewards for improvement. He purchased better goods to be sold in the company stores and saw to it that there was an adequate supply of fuel, food, and clothing for everyone. Where the Germans in Harmonie, Indiana, had eased the workers' lot with flowers in vases, Owen set up at each workbench in his New Lanark mill a device for recording his employees' deportment. This 'silent monitor' was a four-sided piece of wood, each side colored and numbered. Black and No. 4 denoted bad conduct; blue and No. 3, indifferent; yellow and No. 2, good; white and No. 1, excellent. Soon the results of Owen's efforts, in spite of sullen opposition among the workers in the beginning, were a general improvement in public health, decrease of vice, and increase of production.

Perhaps Owen would never have overcome the workers' opposition as he finally did if Thomas Jefferson had not inadvertently helped him by closing American ports to export trade about the time the Welshman took over the New Lanark mill. Owen converted into a blessing this embargo that seemed to others like a blow. With the supply of American cotton to England cut off, he had to close his mill like all the other British textile manufacturers, but unlike them he paid his workers full wages all the while they were laid off. When at last the embargo was lifted, he had the confidence and loyalty of all his employees.

At the end of eight years of preliminary reform at New Lanark, Owen undertook to rebuild the foundation of the town's social structure by establishing a school in the community in which he could educate children upon the three basic principles that he had conceived as the starting point tor reforming the human race:
 '1. Man does not form his own character; it is formed for him by the circumstances that surround him.
 '2. Man is not a fit subject for praise or blame.
 '3. Any general character, good or bad, may be given to the world, by applying means which are, to a great extent, under the control of human government.'
Owen believed that if the world was to be made over it was first of all necessary to take children away from their parents and thus break the chain of training in the accumulated wrong habits and superstitions of the ages. Children entered the New Lanark school at the age of two, and thus the school became the first infant school in history. The children 'were not to be annoyed with books,' for Owen believed books were only a hindrance to the formation of character before the age of ten. No attempt was made to teach the pupils reading or writing, not even their letters. Objects were their textbooks—natural objects mostly, from gardens, fields and woods, and maps and paintings of objects of nature; but even these objects were not explained until the pupils' curiosity about them arose naturally nd they began to ask questions. So there were no set lessons, and much of the children's time was spent on the playground. Nor was punishment administered for misconduct; the uncooperative child was expected to learn about good and evil from observing the social consequences of his acts.

Later, Owen was to send his own sons to Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg's 'Self-Governing College,' which he had admired in Switzerland, and where they were to have among their schoolmates Prince Alexander of Wurttemberg, a nephew of the Duke who had ruled that country when George Rapp and his followers departed. Emanuel von Fellenberg conducted his school in a castle at Hofwyl, two leagues from Berne, on principles he had learned from his friend Pestalozzi. The institution included a primary school, an industrial school, and workshops for improved agricultural instruments. The tuition was $1500 a year, no paltry sum to pay tor an education in those days. Among the students were numerous sons of dukes and princes, but coats of arms gave no special privileges. The boys were responsible for their own discipline and democracy was the order of the day.

The New Lanark experiment in education would have had a better chance of success if Robert Owen had concentrated on perfecting his methods and had not advertised success before it was achieved. He invited the world to come and see what he was doing when it was still yet to be done. Robert Dale Owen, one of the sons educated at Hofwyl, reported that between 1815 and 1825, the number of visitors at New Lanark was nearly twenty thousand. The schoolroom became a theatre, the pupils performers, and Robert Owen the publicity agent for the show. It was at this time that he began to develop that inability to stay in one place and to concentrate on one task at a time that was the undoing of all his later projects. Mistaking the word for the deed, he forever after traveled about making speeches, as if the sound of his own voice proclaiming the millennium were the millennium itself.