possession of the property, he did as much for the girl. So they were married and lived happily ever afterward.

Robert Owen took up his work at New Lanark with all the enthusiasm that hope, youth and love could bring to bear.

Mr. Dale had carried the flag as far to the front as he thought it could be safely carried—that is to say, as far as he was able to carry it.

Owen had his work cut out for him. The workers were mostly Lowland Scotch and spoke in an almost different language from Owen. They looked upon him with suspicion. The place had been sold, and they had gone with it—how were they to be treated? Were wages to be lowered and hours extended? Probably.

Pilfering had been reduced to a system, and to get the start of the soft-hearted owner was considered smart.

Mr. Dale had tried to have a school, and to this end had hired an elderly Irishman, who gave hard lessons and a taste of the birch to children who had exhausted themselves in the mills and had no zest for learning. Mr. Dale had taken on more than two hundred pauper children from the workhouses and these were a sore trial to him.

Owen's first move was to reduce the working-hours from twelve to ten hours. Indeed, he was the first mill-owner to adopt the ten-hour plan. He improved the sanitary arrangements, put in shower-baths and took a personal interest in the diet of his little wards, often dining with them.

A special school-building was erected at a cost of thirty thousand dollars. This was both a day and a night school. It also took children of one year old and over, in order to relieve mothers who worked in the mills. The "little mothers," often only four or five years old, took care of babies a year old and younger, all day.

Owen instructed his teachers never to scold or to punish by inflicting physical pain. His was the first school in Christendom to abolish the rod.

His plan anticipated the Kindergarten and the Creche. He called mothers' meetings, and tried to show the uselessness of scolding and beating, because to do these things was really to teach the children to do them. He abolished the sale of strong drink in New Lanark. Model houses were erected, gardens planted, and prizes given for the raising of flowers.

In order not to pauperize his people, Owen had them pay a slight tuition for the care of the children, and there was a small tax levied to buy flower-seeds. In the school-building was a dance-hall and an auditorium.

At one time the supply of raw cotton was cut off for four months. During this time Owen paid his people full wages, insisted that they should all, old and young, go to school for two hours a day, and also work two hours a day at tree-planting, grading and gardening. During this period of idleness he paid out seven thousand pounds in wages. This was done to keep the workmen from wandering away.

It need not be imagined that Owen did not have other cares besides those of social betterment. Much of the machinery in the mills was worn and becoming obsolete. To replace this he borrowed a hundred thousand dollars. Then he reorganized his business as a stock company and sold shares to several London merchants with whom he dealt. He interested Jeremy Bentham, the great jurist and humanitarian, and Bentham proved his faith by buying stock in the New Lanark Company.

Joseph Lancaster, the Quaker, a mill-owner and philanthropist, did the same.

Owen paid a dividend of five per cent on his shares. A surplus was also set aside to pay dividends in case of a setback, but beyond this the money was invested in bettering the environment of his people.

New Lanark had been running fourteen years under Owen's management. It had attracted the attention of the civilized world. The Grand Duke Nicholas, afterwards the Czar, spent a month with Owen studying his methods. The Dukes of Kent, Sussex, Bedford and Portland; the Archbishop of Canterbury; the Bishops of London, Peterborough and Carlisle; the Marquis of Huntly; Lords Grosvenor, Carnarvon, Granville, Westmoreland, Shaftesbury and Manners; General Sir Thomas Dyce and General Brown; Ricardo, De Crespigny, Wilberforce, Joseph Butterworth and Sir Francis Baring—all visited New Lanark. Writers, preachers, doctors, in fact almost every man of intellect and worth in the Kingdom, knew of Robert Owen and his wonderful work at New Lanark. Sir Robert Peel had been to New Lanark and had gone back home and issued an official bulletin inviting mill-owners to study and pattern after the system.

The House of Commons asked Owen to appear and explain his plan for abolishing poverty from the Kingdom. He was invited to lecture in many cities. He issued a general call to all mill-owners in the Kingdom to co-operate with him in banishing ignorance and poverty.

But to a great degree Owen worked alone and New Lanark was a curiosity. Most mill towns had long rows of dingy tenements, all alike, guiltless of paint, with not a flower bed or tree to mitigate the unloveliness of the scene. Down there in the dirt and squalor lived the working-folks; while away up on the hillside, surrounded by a vast park, with stables, kennels and conservatories, resided the owner.

Owen lived with his people. And the one hundred fifty acres that made up the village of New Lanark contained a happy, healthy and prosperous population of about two thousand people.

There was neither pauperism nor disease, neither gamblers nor drunkards. All worked and all went to school.

It was an object-lesson of thrift and beauty.

Visitors came from all over Europe—often hundreds a day.

Why could not this example be extended indefinitely so that hundreds of such villages should grow instead of only one? There could, there can and there will be, but the people must evolve their own ideal environment and not have to have it supplied for them.

By Owen's strength of purpose he kept the village ideal, but he failed to evolve an ideal people. All around were unideal surroundings, and the people came and went. Strong drink was to be had only a few miles away. To have an ideal village, it must be located in an ideal country.

Owen called on the clergy to unite with him in bringing about an ideal material environment. He said that good water, sewerage and trees and flowers worked a better spiritual condition. They replied by calling him a materialist. He admitted that he worked for a material good. His followers added to his troubles by comparing his work with that of the clergy round about, where vice, poverty and strong drink grouped themselves about a steeple upon which was a cross of gold to which labor was nailed—a simile to be used later by a great orator, with profit.

Owen was a Unitarian, with a Quaker bias. Any clergyman was welcome to come to New Lanark—it was a free platform. A few preachers accepted the invitation, with the intent to convert Robert Owen to their particular cause. New Lanark was pointed out all over England as a godless town. The bishops issued a general address to all rectors and curates warning them against "any system of morals that does away with God and His Son, Jesus Christ, fixing its salvation on flowerbeds and ragged schools."

New Lanark was making money because it was producing goods the world wanted. But its workers were tabu in respectable society, and priestly hands were held aloft in pretended horror whenever the name of Robert Owen, or the word "Socialism," was used.

Owen refused to employ child labor, and issued a book directing the attention of society to this deadly traffic in human beings. The parents, the clergy and the other mill-owners combined against