CHAPTER XVII

his own industry and quick-wittedness in the beginning of the rise of the Great Machine Industries, when “manufacturing” 208 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.”¹⁷¹ He took part in all kinds of projects of a philanthropic nature, still founding all his action on his 209 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 established, 210 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