I have always expended to the last shilling my surplus wealth in
promoting this great and good cause of industrial betterment. The
right-reverend prelate is greatly deceived when he says that I have
squandered my wealth in profligacy and luxury. I have never
expended a pound in either; all my habits are habits of temperance
in all things, and I challenge the right-reverend prelate and all
his abettors to prove the contrary, and I will give him and them
the means of following me through every stage and month of my life.
--_Robert Owen, in Speech before the House of Lords_
[Illustration: ROBERT OWEN]
In Germany, the land of philosophy, when the savants sail into a sea of
doubt, some one sets up the cry, "Back to Kant!"
In America, when professed democracy grows ambitious and evolves a lust
for power, men say, "Back to Jefferson!"
In business, when employer forgets employee and both forget their better
manhood, we say, "Back to Robert Owen!"
We will not go back to Robert Owen: we will go on to Robert Owen, for
his philosophy is still in the vanguard.
Robert Owen was a businessman. His first intent was to attain a
practical success. He produced the article, and sold it at a profit.
In this operation of taking raw material and manufacturing it into forms
of use and beauty--from the time the seed was planted in the ground on
up to the consumer who purchased the finished fabric and wove it--Owen
believed that all should profit--all should be made happier by every
transaction.
That is to say, Robert Owen believed that a business transaction where
both sides do not make money is immoral.
There is a legal maxim still cited in the courts--"Caveat emptor"--let
the buyer beware.
For this maxim Robert Owen had no respect. He scorned the thought of
selling a man something the man did not want, or of selling an article
for anything except exactly what it was, or of exacting a price for it,
by hook or crook, beyond its value.
Robert Owen believed in himself, and in his product, and he believed in
the people. He was a democratic optimist. He had faith in the demos; and
the reason was that his estimate of the people was formed by seeing into
his own heart. He realized that he was a part of the people, and he knew
that he wanted nothing for himself which the world could not have on the
same terms. He looked into the calm depths of his own heart and saw that
he hated tyranny, pretense, vice, hypocrisy, extravagance and untruth.
He knew in the silence of his own soul that he loved harmony, health,
industry, reciprocity, truth and helpfulness. His desire was to benefit
mankind, and to help himself by helping others.
Therefore he concluded that, the source of all life being the same, he
was but a sample of the average man, and all men would, if not
intimidated and repressed, desire what he desired.
When physically depressed, through lack of diversified exercise, bad air
or wrong conditions, he realized that his mind was apt to be at war, not
only with its best self, but with any person who chanced to be near.
From this he argued that all departures in society were occasioned by
wrong physical conditions, and in order to get a full and free
expression of the Divine Mind, of which we are all reflectors or
mediums, our bodies must have a right environment.
To get this right environment became the chief business and study of his
life.
To think that a man who always considers "the other fellow" should be a
great success in a business way is to us more or less of a paradox.
"Keep your eye on Number One," we advise the youth intent on success.
"Take care of yourself," say the bucolic Solons when we start on a
little journey. And "Self-preservation is the first law of life," voice
the wise ones.
And yet we know that the man who thinks only of himself acquires the
distrust of the whole community. He sets in motion forces that work
against him, and has thereby created a handicap that blocks him at every
step.
Robert Owen was one of those quiet, wise men who win the confidence of
men, and thereby siphon to themselves all good things. That the
psychology of success should have been known to this man in Seventeen
Hundred Ninety, we might call miraculous, were it not for the fact that
the miraculous is always the natural.
Those were troublous times when Robert Owen entered trade. The French
Revolution was on, and its fires lit up the intellectual sky of the
whole world. The Colonies had been lost to England; it was a time of
tumult in Threadneedle Street; the armies of the world were lying on
their arms awaiting orders. And out of this great unrest emerged Robert
Owen, handsome, intelligent, honest, filled with a holy zeal to help
himself by helping humanity.
Robert Owen was born in the village of Newtown, Wales, in Seventeen
Hundred Seventy-one. After being away from his native village for many
years, he returned, as did Shakespeare and as have so many successful
men, and again made the place of his boyhood the home of his old age.
Owen died in the house in which he was born. His body was buried in the
same grave where sleeps the dust of his father and his mother. During
the eighty-seven years of his life he accomplished many things and
taught the world lessons which it has not yet memorized.
In point of time, Robert Owen seems to have been the world's first
Businessman. Private business was to him a public trust. He was a
creator, a builder, an economist, an educator, a humanitarian. He got
his education from his work, at his work, and strove throughout his long
life to make it possible for others to do the same.
He believed in the Divinity of Business. He anticipated Emerson by
saying, "Commerce consists in making things for people who need them,
and carrying them from where they are plentiful to where they are
wanted."
Every economist should be a humanitarian; and every humanitarian should
be an economist. Charles Dickens, writing in Eighteen Hundred Sixty,
puts forth Scrooge, Carker and Bumball as economists. When Dickens
wanted to picture ideal businessmen, he gave us the Cheeryble
brothers--men with soft hearts, giving pennies to all beggars, shillings
to poor widows, and coal and loaves of bread to families living in
rickety tenements. The Dickens idea of betterment was the priestly plan
of dole. Dickens did not know that indiscriminate almsgiving pauperizes
humanity, and never did he supply the world a glimpse of a man like
Robert Owen, whose charity was something more than palliation.
Robert Owen was born in decent poverty, of parents who knew the simple,
beautiful and necessary virtues of industry, sobriety and economy. Where
this son got his hunger for books and his restless desire for
achievement we do not know. He was a business genius, and from genius of
any kind no hovel is immune.
He was sent to London at the age of ten, to learn the saddler's trade;
at twelve he graduated from making wax-ends, blacking leather and
greasing harness and took a position as salesman in the same business.
From this he was induced to become a salesman for a haberdasher. He had
charm of manner--fluidity, sympathy and health. At seventeen he asked to
be paid a commission on sales instead of a salary, and on this basis he
saved a hundred pounds in a year.
At eighteen a customer told him of a wonderful invention--a machine
that was run by steam--for spinning cotton into yarn. Robert was
familiar with the old process of making woolen yarn on a spinning-wheel
by hand--his mother did it and had taught him and his brothers and
sisters how.
Cotton was just coming in, since the close of "George Washington's
Rebellion." Watt had watched his mother's teakettle to a good purpose.
Here were two big things destined to revolutionize trade: the use of
cotton in place of flax or wool, and steam-power instead of human
muscle. Robert Owen resigned his clerkship and invested all of his
earnings in three mule spinning-machines. Then he bought cotton on
credit.
He learned the business, and the first year made three hundred pounds.
Seeing an advertisement in the paper for an experienced superintendent
of a cotton mill, he followed his intuitions, hunted out the advertiser,
a Mr. Drinkwater, and asked for the place.
Mr. Drinkwater looked at the beardless stripling, smiled and explained
that he wanted a man, not a boy--a man who could take charge of a mill
at Manchester, employing five hundred hands.
Robert Owen stood his ground.
What would he work for?
Three hundred pounds a year.
Bosh! Boys of nineteen could be had for fifty pounds a year.
"But not boys like me," said Robert Owen, earnestly. Then he explained
to Mr. Drinkwater his position--that he had a little mill of his own and
had made three hundred pounds the first year. But he wanted to get into
a larger field with men of capital.
Mr. Drinkwater was interested. Looking up the facts he found them to be
exactly as stated. He hired the youth at his own price and also bought
all of young Mr. Owen's machinery and stock, raw and made up.
Robert Owen, aged nineteen, went at once to Manchester and took charge
of the mill. His business was to buy and install new machinery, hire all
help, fix wages, buy the raw material, and manufacture and sell the
product.
For six weeks he did not give a single order, hire a new man, nor
discharge an old one. He silently studied the situation. He worked with
the men--made friends with them, and recorded memoranda of his ideas. He
was the first one at the factory in the morning--the last to leave it at
night.
After six weeks he began to act.
The first year's profit was twenty per cent on the investment, against
five for the year before.
Drinkwater paid him four hundred pounds instead of three, and proposed
it should be five hundred for the next year. A contract was drawn up,
running for five years, giving Owen a salary, and also a percentage
after sales mounted above a certain sum.
Robert Owen was now twenty years of age. He was sole superintendent of
the mill. The owner lived at London and had been up just once--this
after Owen had been in his new position for three months. Drinkwater saw
various improvements made in the plant--the place was orderly, tidy,
cleanly, and the workers were not complaining, although Owen was
crowding out the work.
Owen was on friendly terms with his people, visiting them in their
homes. He had organized a day-school for the smaller children and a
night-school for the older ones who worked in the mills. His
friendliness, good-cheer and enthusiasm were contagious. The place was
prosperous.
* * * * *
Just here let us make a digression and inspect the peculiar conditions
of the time.
It was a period of transition--the old was dying, the new was being
born. Both experiences were painful.
There was a rapid displacement of hand labor. One machine did the work
of ten or more persons. What were these people who were thrown out, to
do? Adjust themselves to the new conditions, you say. True, but many
could not. They starved, grew sick, ate their hearts out in useless
complaining.
Only a few years before, and the spinning of flax and wool was
exclusively a home industry. Every cottage had its spinning-wheel and
loom. There was a garden, a cow, a pig, poultry and fruits and flowers.
The whole household worked, and the wheel and loom were never idle while
it was light. The family worked in relays.
It was a very happy and prosperous time. Life was simple and natural.
There was constant labor, but it was diversified. The large flocks of
sheep, raised chiefly for wool, made mutton cheap. Everything was
home-made. People made things for themselves, and if they acquired a
superior skill they supplied their neighbors, or exchanged products with
them. As the manufacturing was done in the homes, there was no crowding
of population. The factory boarding-house and the tenement were yet to
come.
This was the condition up to Seventeen Hundred Seventy. From then until
Seventeen Hundred Ninety was the time of transition. By Seventeen
Hundred Ninety, mills were erected wherever there was water-power, and
the village artisans were moving to the towns to work in the mills.
For the young men and women it was an alluring life. The old way gave
them no time to themselves--there was the cow to milk, the pigs and
poultry to care for, or the garden making insistent demands. Now they
worked at certain hours for certain wages, and rested. Tenements took
the place of cottages, and the "public," with its smiling barkeep, was
always right at the corner.
Hargreaves, Arkwright, Watt and Eli Whitney had worked a revolution more
far-reaching than did Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre and Marat.
Here creeps in an item interesting to our friends who revel in syntax
and prosody. Any machine or apparatus for lifting has been called a
"jack" since the days of Shakespeare. The jack was the bearer of
bundles, a lifter, a puller, a worker. Any coarse bit of mechanism was
called a jack, and is yet. In most factories there are testing-jacks,
gearing-jacks, lifting-jacks. Falstaff tells of a jack-of-all-trades.
The jack was anything strong, patient and serviceable.
When Hargreaves, the Lancashire carpenter, invented his
spinning-machine, a village wit called it a "jenny." The machine was
fine, delicate, subtle, and as spinning was a woman's business anyway,
the new machine was parsed in the feminine gender.
Soon the new invention took on a heavier and stronger form, and its
persistency suggested to some other merry bucolic a new variation and it
was called a "mule." The word stuck, and the mule-spinner is with us
wherever cotton is spun.
The discovery that coal was valuable for fuel followed the invention of
the steam-engine.
When things are needed we dig down and find them, or reach up and secure
them. You could not run a steamship, except along a river with
well-wooded banks, any more than you could run an automobile with coal.
The dealing in coal, or "coals" as our English cousins still use the
word, began in Eighteen Hundred Nineteen. That was the year the first
steamship, the "Savannah," crossed the ocean. She ran from Savannah to
London. Her time was twenty-five days. She burned four hundred fifty
tons of coal, or about two-thirds of her entire carrying capacity.
Robert Fulton had been running his steamer "Clermont" on the Hudson in
Eighteen Hundred Seven, but there were wooding-stations every twenty
miles.
It was argued in the House of Commons that no steamship could ever cross
the Atlantic with steam, alone, as a propelling power. And even as it
was being mathematically proved, the whistle of the "Savannah" drowned
the voice of the orator.
But the "Savannah" also carried sail, and so the doubters still held the
floor. An iron boat with no sails that could cross the Atlantic in five
days was a miracle that no optimist had foreseen--much less, dared
prophesy.
The new conditions almost threatened to depopulate the rural districts.
Farmers forsook the soil. The uncertainty of a crop was replaced with
the certainty of a given wage. Children could tend the spinning-jennies
as well as men. There was a demand for child labor. Any poor man with a
big family counted himself rich. Many a man who could not find a job at
a man's wage quit work and was supported by his wife and children. To
rear a family became a paying enterprise.
Various mill-owners adopted children or took them under the apprentice
system, agreeing to teach them the trade. Girls and boys from orphan
asylums and workhouses were secured and held as practical slaves. They
were herded in sheep-sheds, where they slept on straw and were fed in
troughs. They were worked in two shifts, night and day, so the straw was
never really cold. They worked twelve hours, slept eight, and one hour
was allowed for meals. Their clothing was not removed except on
Saturday. Any alteration in the business life of a people is fraught
with great danger.
Recklessness, greed and brutality at such a time are rife.
Almost all workingmen of forty or over were out of work. Naturally,
employers hired only the young, the active, the athletic. These made
more money than they were used to making, so they spent it lavishly and
foolishly. It was a prosperous time, yet, strangely enough, prosperity
brought starvation to thousands. Family life in many instances was
destroyed, and thus were built those long rows of houses, all alike,
with no mark of individuality--no yard, no flowers, no gardens--that
still in places mar the landscape in factory towns.
Pretty girls went to the towns to work in the mills, and thus lost home
ties. Later they drifted to London. Drunkenness increased.
In Seventeen Hundred Ninety-six, there was formed the Manchester Board
of Health. Its intent was to guard the interests of factory-workers. Its
desire was to insure light, ventilation and sanitary conveniences for
the workers. Beyond this it did not seek to go.
The mill superintendents lifted a howl. They talked about interference,
and depriving the poor people of the right to labor. They declared it
was all a private matter between themselves and the workers--a matter of
contract.
Robert Owen, it seems, was the first factory superintendent to invite
inspection of his plant. He worked with the Board of Health, not against
it. He refused to employ children under ten years of age, and although
there was a tax on windows, he supplied plenty of light and also fresh
air. So great was the ignorance of the workers that they regarded the
Factory Laws as an infringement on their rights. The greed and foolish
fears of the mill-owners prompted them to put out the good old argument
that a man's children were his own, and that for the State to dictate to
him where they should work, when and how, was a species of tyranny. Work
was good for children! Let them run the streets? Never!
It is a curious thing to note that when Senator Albert J. Beveridge
endeavored to have a Federal Bill passed at Washington, in Nineteen
Hundred Seven, the arguments he had to meet and answer were those which
Robert Owen and Sir Robert Peel were obliged to answer in Seventeen
Hundred Ninety-five.
When a man who worked a hundred orphans fourteen hours a day, boys and
girls of from six to twelve, was accused of cruelty, he defended himself
by saying, "If I doesn't work 'em all the time 'cept when they sleep and
eat, they will learn to play, and then never work." This argument was
repeated by many fond parents as conclusive.
The stress of the times--having many machines in one building, all run
by one motor power, the necessity of buying raw material in quantities,
the expense of finding a market--all these combined to force the
invention of a very curious economic expediency. It was called a Joint
Stock Company. From a man and his wife and his children making things at
home, we get two or three men going into partnership and hiring a few
of their neighbors at day wages.
Then we get the system of "shareholding," with hundreds or thousands of
people as partners in a manufacturing enterprise which they never visit.
The people who owned the shares were the ones who owned the tools. Very
naturally, they wanted and expected dividends for the use of the tools.
That was all they wanted--dividends. The manager of the mill held his
position only through his ability to make the venture bring returns. The
people who owned the shares or the tools, never saw the people who used
the tools. A great gulf lay between them. For the wrongs and injustices
visited upon the workers no one person was to blame. The fault was
shifted. Everybody justified himself. And then came the saying,
"Corporations have no souls."
Robert Owen was manager of a mill, yet he saw the misery, the ignorance
and the mental indifference that resulted from the factory system. He,
too, must produce dividends, but the desire of his heart was also to
mitigate the lot of the workers.
Books were written by good men picturing the evils of the factory
system. Comparisons were made between the old and the new, in which the
hideousness of the new was etched in biting phrase. Some tried to turn
the dial backward and revive the cottage industries, as did Ruskin a
little later. "A Dream of John Ball" was anticipated, and many sighed
for "the good old times."
But among the many philosophers and philanthropists who wrestled with
the problem, Robert Owen seems to have stood alone in the belief that
success lay in going on, and not in turning back. He set himself to
making the new condition tolerable and prophesied a day when out of the
smoke and din of strife would emerge a condition that would make for
health, happiness and prosperity such as this tired old world never has
seen. Robert Owen was England's first Socialist.
Very naturally he was called a dreamer. Some called him an infidel and
the enemy of society.
Very many now call him a seer and a prophet.
* * * * *
In Robert Owen's day cotton yarn was packaged and sold in five-pound
bundles. These packages were made up in hanks of a given number of
yards. One hundred twenty counts to a package was fixed upon as "par,"
or "standard count." If the thread was very fine, of course more hanks
were required to make up the five pounds. The price ranged up or down,
below or above the one-hundred-twenty mark. That is, if a package
contained two hundred forty hanks, its value was just double what it
would have been if merely standard.
Robert Owen knew fabrics before he began to spin.
First, he was a salesman. Second, he made the things he could sell.
The one supremely difficult thing in business is salesmanship. Goods can
be manufactured on formula, but it takes a man to sell. He who can sell
is a success--others may be.
The only men who succeed in dictating the policy of the house are those
in the Sales Department--that is, those who are on the side of income,
not of expense.
The man with a "secret process" of manufacture always imparts his
secret, sooner or later; but the salesman does not impart his secret,
because he can't. It is not transferable. It is a matter of personality.
Not only does the salesman have to know his goods, but he must know the
buyer--he must know humanity.
And humanity was the raw stock in which Robert Owen dealt. Robert Owen
never tried to increase his sales by decreasing his price. His product
was always higher than standard. "Anybody can cut prices," he said, "but
it takes brains to make a better article." He focused on fineness.
And soon buyers were coming to him. A finer article meant a finer trade.
And now, on each package of yarn that Owen sent out, he placed a label
that read thus, "This package was made under the supervision of Robert
Owen." Thus his name gradually became a synonym for quality.
Among other curious ideas held by Owen was that to make finer goods you
must have a finer quality of workman. To produce this finer type of
person now became his dream.