SKETCH OF DAVID DALE OWEN. 259 



SKETCH OF DAVID DALE OWEN. 



DAVID DALE OWEN was born at Braxfield House, near 

 New Lanark, Scotland, June 24, 1807. He was the fourth 

 son and sixth child in a family of eight children. All but the 

 first born, a son, lived to adult age. His father, Robert Owen, 

 the celebrated philanthropist, was a native of North Wales. 



Robert Owen, after working in the drapery business in Lon- 

 don and elsewhere, entered into partnership with a mechanic, at 

 eighteen years of age, in the manufacture of cotton-spinning ma- 

 chines. A year later he took a position as superintendent of a 

 mill employing five hundred hands, and at twenty-two years of 

 age he became a partner in an old-established spinning concern 

 of Manchester. Having become attached to Miss Anne Caroline, 

 the eldest daughter of David Dale, proprietor of large mills at New 

 Lanark, near Glasgow, he arranged with his partners to buy the 

 works of the father, and soon after obtained for himself the hand 

 of the daughter. They were married in 1797. Undertaking the 

 management of the works ("government" he called it), he steadily 

 improved the condition of the factory hands, which had been 

 there as elsewhere bad to a degree now almost incredible. Some 

 of his measures were opposed by his partners, and led to several 

 dissolutions of partnership through which he retained the man- 

 agement, but he was forced to retire in 1829 when fifty-eight years 

 of age. In spite of what he spent for the workers, Owen always 

 made the business pay well. For several years beginning with 

 1815, he worked for the passage of Acts of Parliament beneficial 

 to factory operatives. Becoming convinced that social reform 

 could be best secured through communism, he bought from the 

 Harmony Society a tract of thirty thousand acres, and the build- 

 ings of their settlement at New Harmony, Ind. The Harmony 

 Society was prosperous but wished to change its location. Com- 

 ing to America in the spring of 1825, he organized a community of 

 about nine hundred persons on a provisional plan. He returned to 

 Scotland to look after his business, leaving his two oldest sons 

 at New Harmony. 



William Maclure, of Philadelphia, a man of means and de- 

 voted to philanthropy and the advancement of science, took part 

 in founding the community. He heard of Owen's scheme on re- 

 turning to the United States after an attempt to found an agri- 

 cultural labor school in Spain, and believed that it would afford 

 favorable conditions for carrying out his cherished idea of an 

 educational institute founded on rational principles. He accord- 

 ingly bought a large tract of land in New Harmony and vicinity, 

 and removed thither his library and collection of minerals, which 



