BOOKS.

ROBERT OWEN.* Mx. SA.RGLET, a man of safe traditional opinions endowed with a fair share of common sense and literary ability, has written a Life of Robert ;Owen, believing that "he played an important part upon our stage, and left a deep impression upon the nation that was his audience." His estimate of Owen appears to us just ; his account of Owen's views accurate ; while his valuation of the distinctive doctrines of the Utopian hero's ethical philosophy will be acceptable to those whose foregone conclusions accord with the biographer's own ultimate speculations, and be rejected by those whose religious and moral beliefs are opposed to them. The Cal-

vinist and Necessarian,. for instance, see in Owen's doctrine of circumstance an equivalent of their own dogmas of predestina- tion and moral Fsequentialism ; while the Arminian and the arbi- trary volitionist will side with Mr. Sargent in his repudiation of that doctrine. For the rest, our author is fair, discriminating, and liberal. We might wish that the biography were more com- pact, and that we had been spared the occasional repetition and prolix refutation which detract from the merits of a really agree- able and interesting work ; but we must be content to take it as we find it.

Robert Owen, Mr. Sargent informs us, was born on the 14th of May, 1771, at Newtown, Montgomeryshire. His father was a shopkeeper and postmaster ; his mother's maiden name was Williams, and her kindred were respectable farmers. Robert, the youngest of a family of seven children, suffered from delicate health, but his weakness of digestion did not impair his activity as a child. At four or five years of age he was sent to school. At seven, he had made such progress in Lis studies that he was promoted to the rank of monitor, under the magniloquent title of

assistant master and usher." During the next two years this patriarchal pedagogue largely indulged his taste for reading ; Shakespeare, De Foe, Milton, novels, _poems biographies, alike entertained and instructed him. " He relict at the rate of a volume a day, and had the delight of believing every word to be true. Adam and Eve, Pamela and Crcesus were equally his- torical to his simple faith." The result of all this reading was curious. It rather stimulated the boy's understanding than ex- cited his imagination, till, finally, if we may accept his own statement, made in old. age, it occurred to him that truth must always be consistent with itself, and in accordance with all facts ; a prescription which Mr. Sargent calls a truism Or an absurdity, but which, if we are to distinguish truth from opinion, requires but little modification to convert it into a useful philosophical canon.

Owen's desultory course of reading induced a juvenile scepti- cism. He was startled at the antagonism existing between Chris- tian sects ; at the deadly mutual hatred of Jews, Christians,

Mahomedans and Hindoos ; and at the "age of ten he had a strong conviction that there was something fundamentally wrong in all creeds." Contemporaneous with this incipient unbelief was the love for natural scenery, increasing with his years, which was first awakened when he wandered with an Oxford student, ten . years older than himself, about the beautiful woods and lanes andw

rising grounds around Newtown. er From assistant-usher, Owen was transformed into a shop-boysiti

At first, he continued to live at home, but at ten years of age he was placed with a Mr. M`Gruffog (who had commenced the work% with half-a-crown, as a hawker,) at Stamford, on the borders oie- Lincolnshire. Here he remained for four years, submitting k_.V; powder and pomatum, two large curls, and a pigtail, in conform-is. ity with the costume regulations of the shop; - and receiving Lod: a remuneration for his boyish services a salary of 251. a year.tr At eighteen, at the instigation of a mechanic named Jones Owen ; left this situation ; and, borrowing 100/. of his London brother, began to make mules for spinning. Bought out by a wealthy. capitalist, he took a large new factory in Ancoats Lane, liancheag. ter, and ere long found himself earning 6/. a week. At twenty'r.% years of age, Owen personally answered the advertisement of Mr.er Drinkwater, a rich merchant, who was seeking a manager. Con-'f' scions of his own worth, he demanded no less than 300/. a yeaa for his salary. After due inquiries, Mr. Drinkwater agreed te,d give him the situation. Industrious, temperate, capable, this ' "boy-manager," at the end of the third year of his engagement, was admitted into partnership with Mr. Drinkwater and his son. Owen soon became known to manufacturing Manchester as the first spinner of fine cotton in the world. At this period of his life, he numbered among his acquaintance Dalton, the celebrated chemist, Coleridge, and Robert Fulton. Mr. Drinkwater's want of firmness, and Owen's quickness of feeling, eventually led to their ultimate separation. Owen then became joint-manager of the " Chorlton Twist Company." To visit his customers In the North of England, was one of the duties that devolved on him. "Having an accidental opportunity of going to New Lanark with his fel- low traveller, he embraced it, and made the visit. A casual in- troduction to Miss Dale gave Owen access to her father's mills. A negotiation which began as a stratagem, (are all things fair in love ? ended in the purchase of the land, village, and mills of New Lanark, in 1799, when Owen was about twenty-eight, by himself and his two partners. On the 30th of September of the same year, Miss Dale formed a matrimonial union with the enter- prising English adventurer. * Robert Owes and his Social Philosophy.Btg Williams Emu Sargent, Anther of " Social Innovators," Re. Published by Smi , Elder, and Co.

Owen's career as a philanthropist was now to receive a public inauguration. Out of his entire savings he had already applied a third (15001.) to the promotion of education. At New Lanark, his beneficence was still more conspicuously exhibited. On the 1st of January 1800, he entered on the government of this new acquisition. Space would fail us, if we were to attempt to give the details of the Association, or to describe the vicissitudes in its various management. During the five years preceding, we be- lieve, 1814, the annual net profit, independently of the interest of five per cent on capital and the additional moneys accruing from the successful sale of the works, amounted to nearly 32,0001. a year. At the dissolution of the then partnership, Owen's share was upwards of 70,000/. In 1813, abandoning New Lanark as a commercial speculation, Owen determined to carry it on for philanthropical purposes alone, with the view of teaching the world what great things might be done by an earnest desire to benefit the working classes. Among the new partners were included Allen, Forster, Walker, and Jeremy Bentham, the shy recluse, who, after some preliminary consultations with two intimate friends, agreed to meet the formidable stranger, half-way upstairs ; and, as he took his guest's hand, said in an excited manner, "Well, well, it is all over ; we are introduced."

These four gentlemen, reinforced by Michael Gibbs and Joseph Fox, entered, under the presidency of Owen, on their new career of benevolence. Once uncontrolled head of New Lanark, Owen set earnestly to work to prosecute the further improvements he had designed. The institution, projected in 1809, for the forma- tion of the character of the children was completed. Infant schools may be truly said to have originated with Owen. The population of New Lanark, which seems to have reached 2500, improved under his superintendence, in comfort, morals, and hap- piness, till no parallel could be found for it in the kingdom or in the world ; while, in 1816, the profits amounted to about 15,000/. Owen was now a celebrity. New Lanark, during ten years, is said to have received its ten thousand visitors a year. The late Czar of Russia was a guest at Owen's house, and tried to induce his host to accompany him to his Muscovite dominions ; the King of Prussia, who admired his theory, addressed a letter of thanks to Owen with his own hand ; foreign ambassadors conversed with him ; "the Dukes of York and of Sussex had some intercourse with him, and the Duke of Kent, until he died, exhibited an earnest interest in his proceedings." Owen was not a political reformer ; he was not a democrat ; he was not envious of rank ; nor were his schemes for the amelioration of the labouring classes politically anti-conservative. On the contrary, he denounced machinery ; he hated the economists ; and incurred the censure of the Radicals. In a word, he was a social reformer, "one of the three men," according to Southey, "who have in this gene- ration given an impulse to the moral world." A loyal subject, and the friend of order, this abhorred socialist of a later period had, in his earlier day applause from the laureate, admiration from the Quarterly Review, and sympathy from men of the Tory party. In the year 1824, Owen made a voyage to the United States. -4 Mr. Sargent attributes his disappearance from Great Britain i" about this juncture" to his disapproval of certain regulations proposed for the government of the Socialistic Society, which was hortly afterwards established at Orbiston, near Glasgow. Deter- ' 'lig to make trial of his plans in another hemisphere, Owen purchased of M. Rapp's German community, called HI armonians, estate of 30,000 acres of fertile land, in Indiana and Illinois. The principle on which the last partnership at New Lanark had d been framed, was that of applying to the benefit of the workpeople ? all profits beyond five per cent, an arrangement which, while it a enabled Owen to reduce the industrial day to ten hours and a half, I still, apparently, allowed profits largely to accumulate. The corn- imunity at New Harmony, was based on a different principle- i that of equal right and e9nal property, in order to get quit of 4" competition and opposition, jealousy and dissension, extraya- 4 gance and poverty, tyranny and slavery." After a five years' trial, the experiment failed. Its failure may be fairly attributed to one 4great generic cause. The impossibility of "moulding to commu- trmsm - the characters of men and women, formed by the present doe- - trines and practices of the world to intense individualism." Ignorance, prejudice, selfishness, intemperance, and above all, re- 4-ions dissension, led to the frustration of Owen's darling scheme. He had sunk a large sum at New Harmony ; but, true to his oho- :meter for munificence in the cause of education, he determined on leaving the colony, to subscribe 600/. for the support of the chil- dren who were not already provided for, from the funds contri- buted by the generous Maclure. In this connexion we may briefly mention the Orbiston project, an interesting ac-;count of which is given in Mr. Sargant's volume. This Scotch society was established about the time Owen first went to the United States, by the benevolent Abram Combe and the enthusiastic Mr. Hamilton of Dalzell. The principle adopted was neither that of New Lanark,—the philanthropical ; nor that of Iirev.7 Harmony,—the communistic; but that of socialism, which implies "the greatest possible amount of cooperation short of community of property." "The history of Orbiston is just that of all the projects that grew out of Owen's teachings, New Lanark always excepted." In about four years, its ill success was emphatically demonstrated. The experiment, "wrongly begun and ill-conducted," was abruptly and definitively ended. In 1828, the enterprise was finally abandoned. It is only fair to

add, that though Combe could hardly have saved the community, his decease in the preceding year was "the death-blow of Cr- biston."

On his retirement from the projects at New Harmony, Owen proceeded to Cincinnati to fulfil an engagement which had been made with a Reverend Mr. Campbell, for the discussion of the principles of religion. On the termination of this argumentative combat, in which both sides claimed the victory, our Social Reformer travelled to Washington on a mission of peace between Great Britain and the United States. Owen had previously had an interview with Lord Aberdeen, who listened patiently to his extra-official recommendation of international policy ; and Mr. Sargant seems inclined to regard "this spontaneous negotiation of his as highly honourable both to his good intentions and diplo-: matie skill. Mr. Sargant's volume contains a succinct account of Owen's voyage in 1828 to South America ; of his provisional approval of slavery as favourable to the happiness of the Negroes of Jamaica and Hayti ; of his enjoyment of the "magnificent plains and mountain scenery," of the brilliant light," and "the stillness and peculiar clearness of the atmosphere," during his journey to Mexico or sojourn there ; and of the failure of his grand project of Mexican colonization, which we can only thus briefly notice here. We must also pass rapidly over Owen's return to Europe ; the final cessation of his connexion with New Lanark ; his Sunday- lectures for the secular instruction of the working classes, which soon excited a Sabbatarian opposition, and were ac- cordingly voted down ; his Equitable Labour project, with its fatal omission of the claims of capital ; the Bishop of Exeter's ignorant attack on "the tenets and practices of the Socialists and of their great leader"; Owen's literary career, with its inexhaustible tediousnesses ; his millennial advertisements, with the-good time ever coming and never come ; and lastly his perversion to the contemptible imposture or pitiful self-delusion of spiritualism. It is sad to think that to this pass it was to come at length. We are not disposed to plead dotage or imbecility as an excuse. We are rather inclined to accredit with the mischief the defective educational system of this and every age, a system in which the "Cross-examining God" of Athenian philosophy is rarely al- lowed to catechize the pupils, a system which omits to recognize the duty of investigating the grounds of belief, or inquiring into the nature of evidence.

There is little more that need be told in Owen's history. His continental travel in earlier days, his visit to Hofwyl his public meetings at the London Tavern, his interviews with princes his excursions in Mississippi valleys and Indiana forests, his agitations, his toils, his successes and failures, his hopes and calumnies, were all soon to pass away, out of the remembrance of that busy brain. Owen's constitution had already begun to give way under the load of eighty-six years. In October 1858, he appeared at the second meeting of the Social Science Association, to proclaim in his grand manner, says Mr. Holyoak, his ancient message of science, competence and good-will to the world. "Lord Brougham, true to his friendship for him, took the veteran by the arm, led him forward, and obtained for him a hearing." When he was unable to complete his first period, Lord Brougham supplied the clause wanting, clapped his hands, and ut- tered words of encouragement. On the 17th of November of the same year Owen died, aged eighty-seven. His last words were

"relief has come." • Mr. Sargant's estimate of the "prophet of innovation" is highly favourable. He acknowledges both his intellectual ability and his moral worth. Among his many admirable qualities he dis- cerns temperance, untiring industry, constancy of purpose, some strength of understanding, disinterestedness, truthfulness, and gentleness of temper. He considers the purity of his motives un- impeachable; be pronounces his condemnation of religion the re- sult of a shallow theory, not of libertine excesses, nor of a philosophical conceit. To Owen he assigns the establishment of infant schools, the origination of various plans for the improve- ment of factory workers, the Prussian scheme of national edu- cation, and a Dutch system of pauper management. It was at the instigation of Owen that the movement of 1819, for restrain- ing by law the abuses of the factory system, commenced ; while "among the respectable Arkwrights and Boultons, and Marshalls and Strntts, we could not pitch upon one who made such sacri- fices, and who accomplished such good."

Owen was not an unsuccessful man, though he was doomed to see the ill success of most of his schemes. His life was assuredly not lived in vain, though his special projects, with one triumphant exception, all miscarried. It is not difficult to indicate the causes of his decline and fall. Though Owen had an administrative talent of a very high order, though he had a strong power of command and persuamon,_ he was singularly- one-sided, having neither intellectual variety nor intellectual discipline. On some subjects, his ignorance was supreme. He denounced machinery as prejudicial to the interests of the labouring classes ; and, while he inveighed against the infatuation of Horner and. Peel, knew no more about the currency question than he did about the theory of the tides. Suoh is the conclusion of Mr. Sargent, himself not a "partisan of the predominant school," and disclaiming all allegiance to Colonel Torrens and Lord Overstone. Owen's sympathy for trades unions, combinations, and strikes, his biographer? however, does not condemn ; being convinced that in many of the largest trades the workmen cannot, without them, succeed in keeping up their wages.

In Mr. Sargant's judgment, Owen's loss of social influence is

3xutinly attributable to his denunciation of the theologies or religions of the world, and his ill-considered moral philosophy. On the former, we offer no remark. The fundamental tenet of Owen's ethical system must be acknowledged, even by the thoughtful Calvinistic or Sequential moralist, not only to be liable to misconception, but, as usually. formulated by its promul- gator, to be a misconception. For, in addition to the controlling power of circumstances, human nature possesses a self-modifying

wer of its own. We cannot agree with Mr. Sargant that the quentialist, to be consistent, ought to abandon the system of rewards and punishments. The philosophical Necessarian in reply. to his objector, might surely contend that it is precisely because man is governed by motives attractive and repulsive, piloted, in Aristotle's phrase, by pleasure and pain, that, we are justified in having recourse to the machinery of retribution. He may, in- deed, wish to eliminate from the punitive theory, that purely vindictive element which considers the infliction of so much pain for so much crime as the essential constituent of punishment ; but, however he might incline to correct the theory or amend the nomenclature of penal ethics, he would not, we conceive, be under any obligation to reject the doctrine of moral responsibility, or the facts which it implies, or to abolish the system of rewards and punishments. That Owen both protested against the doctrine and desired to cancel the system seems to us attributable to his intellectual short- sightedness, to his defective analysis and want of philosophical training.

But, however this may be, Owen's impatient overstatement of the influence of circumstance, has served to popularize the truth which his dogma contains. It has helped to bring out into bold relief the undeniable verities, that it is better to prevent crime than to punish it; that it is incumbent on us, as far as possible, to diminish temptation, whether for man or child, when it is too strong for their power of resistance ; and that it is the duty of governments and influential persons to provide favourable "sur- roundings" for those under their care. Neither is it possible any longer to overlook the fact that circumstance is a modifying agent in the formation of character. Happily, too, we have lived to see the day when moral evil is proved by more than one practical de- monstrator, as especially by Walter Crofton, in Ireland, to be a variable quantity, more and more reducible under the prolonged influences of a wise training, a charitable coercion, and finally of that beneficent Circumstance, which, with all his faults and short- comings, Owen nobly endeavoured to interpret and create.