96 MY LIFE [Chap. 



to work from six in the morning to seven in the evening (with 

 an hour and three-quarters for meals) ; and it was only after 

 this task was over that instruction began. The poor children 

 hated their slavery ; many absconded ; some were stunted, 

 and even dwarfed in stature ; and when their apprenticeship 

 expired at the ages of thirteen to fifteen, they commonly went 

 off to Glasgow or Edinburgh, with no natural guardians, and 

 trained for swelling the mass of vice and misery in the towns. 

 " The condition of the families who had immigrated to the 

 village was also very lamentable. The people lived almost 

 vvithout 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 considerable 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 assure the more intelligent of the overseers and 



