96 MY LIFE 



mentable. The people lived almost without control in habits 

 of vice, idleness, poverty, debt, and destitution. Some were 

 drunk for weeks together. Thieving was general, and went 

 on to a ruinous extent. . . . There was also a consider- 

 able drawback to the comfort of the people in the high price 

 and bad quality of the commodities supplied in the village." 



When Owen told his intimate friends who knew all these 

 facts that he hoped to reform these people by a system of 

 justice and kindness, and gradually to discontinue all punish- 

 ment, they naturally laughed at him for a wild enthusiast; 

 yet he ultimately succeeded to such an extent that hardly any- 

 one credited the accounts of it without personal inspection, 

 and its fame spread over the whole civilized world. He had, 

 besides the conditions already stated, two other great diffi- 

 culties to overcome. The whole of the workers and overseers 

 were strongly antagonistic to him as being an Englishman, 

 whose speech they could hardly understand, and who, they 

 believed, was sent to get more money for the owners and 

 more work out of themselves. They, therefore, opposed all 

 he did by every means that ingenuity could devise, and though 

 he soon introduced more order and regularity in the work 

 and improved the quality of the yarn produced, they saw in 

 all this nothing but the acts of a tool of the mill-owners some- 

 what cleverer, and therefore more to be dreaded, than those 

 who had preceded him. An equally fierce opposition was made 

 to any improvement in the condition of the houses and streets 

 as to dirt, ventilation, drainage, etc. He vainly tried to as- 

 sure the more intelligent of the overseers and workmen that his 

 object was to improve their condition, to make them more 

 healthy and happier and better off than they were. This was 

 incredible to them, and for two years he made very little 

 progress. 



His second great difficulty was that his partners were busi- 

 ness men, who expected him to carry on the works on ordinary 

 business principles, so as to obtain for them at least as large 

 returns as any other factories in the country. Generally, he 

 was absolute and sole manager, but he knew that he could not 

 make any large or extensive alterations till he had obtained a 



