SKETCH OF RICHARD OWEN. 259 



RICHARD OWEN.* 



By President DAVID S. JORDAN. 



EIGHTY years ago in America the feeling was becoming gen- 

 eral that the age of competition was past, and that a new 

 social and industrial era was about to begin. Benjamin Franklin 

 held that if every man and every woman should work for three 

 hours a day at something useful, poverty would be banished, and 

 each one might spend every afternoon of his days and the whole 

 afternoon of his life amid the consolations of philosophy, the 

 charms of literature, or the delights of social intercourse. In 

 the words of Robert Dale Owen: "Every one looked forward to 

 the time when riches, because of their superfluity, would cease to 

 be the end and aim of man's thoughts, plottings, and lifelong 

 strivings ; when the mere possession of wealth would no longer 

 confer distinction any more than does the possession of water 

 than which there is no property of greater worth.'' 



William Maclure, a wise man and a learned geologist in those 

 days, refused to invest money in the city of Philadelphia, giving 

 as a reason that " land in cities can no longer rise in value. The 

 community system must prevail, and in the course of a few years 

 Philadelphia must be deserted, and those who live long enough 

 may come back here and see the foxes looking out of the win- 

 dows." 



It is not strange, therefore, that Robert Owen, of Lanark, 

 fresh from contact with the reforms in the Old World, and full 

 of projects for the development of the New, found in William 

 Maclure an ardent disciple and active co-worker. 



Owen and Maclure did not overestimate the power of co-opera- 

 tion in the struggle of humanity with Nature, but they did over- 

 look the fundamental law of Nature that co-operation means work- 

 ing together, and equality of reward must imply some degree of 

 equality of effectiveness. "The fatal error" of the New Har- 

 mony Community, according to Robert Dale Owen, lay in their 

 failure to recognize this law. No " industrial experiment," he 

 continues to say, " can succeed which proposes equal remuneration 

 to all men, the diligent and the dilatory, the skilled artisan and 

 the common laborer, the genius and the drudge. . . . Such a plan 

 of remunerating all alike will ultimately eliminate from a co- 

 operative association the skilled and industrious members, leav- 

 ing an ineffective and sluggish residue, in whose hands the ex- 

 periment will fail, both socially and pecuniarily." In other words, 



* So far as I know, Dr. Richard Owen, of New Harmony, was not related to the famous 

 comparative anatomist in London who bore the same name. 



