USA > Indiana > Vanderburgh County > Evansville > Evansville and its men of mark > Part 20
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That was nearly forty-eight years ago. Kindly, indulg- ently, has my adopted country treated me since ; and well do I love her for it.
She has her peculiarities, of course, like other nations ; and it was not long before we came in contact with some of these. Martin Luther is said to have had his latter years em- bittered, perhaps his life shortened, by certain crotchety and ill-conditioned fanatics, as the Anabaptists, Libertines, and others, " who played such fantastic tricks before high heaven " as brought the name of Protestant, which they had assumed, into no little discredit for the time. A radical reformer, if he be of any note, commonly attracts around him erratics of this class; and my father did not escape the common fate.
One morning he had gone out on a visit, leaving Captain McDonald and myself in a parlor of the Howard House in Broad- way-where we had put up-writing letters home, when a waiter entering, handed me a strange-looking visiting card, with the message, " A gentleman to see your father, sir. I told him he was out, but he would have me bring up this card." It was of green pasteboard, and bore the single name, " Page." I bade him invite Mr. Page to walk up.
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" A singular fancy," said I to McDonald, " to color visit- ing cards green. But, of course, in new countries, we must expect new fashions."
Thereupon the door opened, and there stalked in, in a solemn way, a middle-aged personage, quite as queer-looking as his card. He was dressed, from head to foot, in light-green broadcloth ; his overcoat, cut with a plain Quaker collar, reached his ankles; his cap and boots were of green cloth, and his gloves of green kid, all matching the rest of his costume. His long hair was divided in the center and dropped, slightly curl- ing, on his shoulders.
McDonald and I were so taken aback by this sudden appa- rition, that we forgot to offer our visitor a chair. He seemed to prefer standing, as about to declaim. His manner was dig- nified, and his gestures had a certain grace, as he proceeded to say : "Gentlemen, I have come, in my public capacity, to wel- come a brother philanthropist. But you do not know who I am."
To this we assented, and he went on, "My name is Page. I am the page of Nature. She has enlisted me in her service. I wear her livery as, you see," (pointing to his dress), "as a re- minder of the official duty I owe her. She talks to me, instructs me in the way I should go, and tells me how I can best benefit my fellow creatures. In the olden time I was King David's page ; and I was a great comfort to him, as he had been to his master, Saul, when the evil spirit from the Lord was upon him, and when David's playing on the harp refreshed Saul and caused the evil spirit to depart. David had his dark hours also, when his sins weighed upon his spirit ; and at those times I was able to console and encourage him. But Nature's service is better than that of any king."
We were mute with amazement. He paused, then drew from a capacious pocket a thick roll of manuscript. It was written on long sheets of green paper.
" Some of the words of wisdom," he pursued, " that my gracious mistress has vouchsafed to commit to her votary. They ought to have been written in green ink; but to human eyes the words might not have been very intelligible. And black cannot be said to be inappropriate. In summer holiday, indeed,
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Nature's vestment is green ; but she has her seasons when all is black-the starless midnight hour, the wintry storm's murky darkness. That may justify the black ink."
He unrolled and smoothed out the manuscript ; but reading in our faces, perhaps, the alarm which we certainly felt at the threatened infliction, he seemed to change his purpose ; and with the air of a father making allowance for his thoughtless chil- dren, he said : " Young people have not always leisure or in- clination to hear divine truth. Hand these leaves from the Great Book to Robert Owen ; for he is a disciple of Nature, like me, and he will appreciate them."
With that, having bowed ceremoniously to us both, he swept slowly and majestically from the room.
McDonald sat looking intently at the fire for a minute or two after the door closed, then suddenly turned to me : "Are we all crazy, do you think, Robert ? Have we been poking into great subjects and thinking of a world's reform, until our brains are addled, and we are fit inmates of a lunatic asylum ?"
" Well," said I, " We knew already that there are harmless bedlamites who are suffered to go at large. We still dress like other people. We have not come to the conclusion yet, that the Goddess of Nature keeps a lot of pages to whom she dictates homilies to be written out on green foolscap; and we are not Hythagoreans, believing that our souls were once in the service of ancient kings."
" For all that," replied McDonald, " it's uncomfortable ; it gives one a shock."
The manuscript, like a hundred others which it has been my hard fortune since to glance over, was a dull tissue of senti- mental commonplaces, with mad streaks through it, but with a certain method in the madness. The author had sense enough to give his address at the close, and we carefully returned it to him.
In the course of two or three weeks several pleasant and intelligent people had joined us, bound for New Harmony ; among them Thomas Say, one of the founders of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, who six years before had accompanied Major Long on his expedition to the Rocky Moun- tains, as its naturalist ; Charles Lesueur, a French naturalist
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and designer, who had explored, with Peron, the coasts of Aus- tralia; Gerard Troost, a native of Hollond and a distinguished chemist and geologist, who was afterwards professor of chemis- try in the Nashville University ; also several cultivated ladies, including Miss Sistare-afterwards the wife of Thomas Say- and two of her sisters. Whether William Maclure, president of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, and one of the most munificent patrons of that institution, accompanied us, or came on a few weeks later, I am not quite certain. He afterwards purchased from my father several thousand acres of the Har- mony estate.
At Pittsburg, which we reached early in December, finding that steamboats had ceased to ply on the Ohio, we purchased a keel-boat and had it comfortably fitted up for the accommoda- tion of our party, then amounting to some thirty or forty per- sons. About eight miles from Beaver, Pennsylvania, the ice, closing in upon us, arrested our voyage for a full month.
During that month, immensely to my satisfaction, I took my first lessons in Western country wood-craft. A dense, al- most unbroken forest adjoined the spot where we had tied up our boat. I had bought in Pittsburg, an excellent rifle and appurtenances, together with a good supply of ammunition. The second or third day I came upon the cabin of an old hunter of the Leather-stocking school, named Rice, whose good-will I gained by the timely gift of a pound or two of excellent rifle powder. He taught me the names and qualities of the forest trees, the habits and haunts of the game then plentiful enough in that district ; but, above all, he trained me to rifle shooting with a patience which I yet gratefully remember. Before leav- ing home I had read, with enthusiasm, Cooper's Pioneers, and now some of the primitive scenes I had pictured to myself were enacted before my eyes. The eagerness with which I sought instruction, and the manner in which I profited by it, made me quite a favorite with the old man, and after a week or two, I was domesticated in his cabin. With his wife, also, I found fa- vor by telling her stories of the " old country." From her, I remember, came my first reminder that I had reached a land of practical equality, in which all [white ?] adult males, rich or poor, were men. I had a handsome silver-mounted powder
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horn which attracted the attention of one of the half-clad urchins who were running about the cabin, and I had ceded it for his amusement. He was making off with the coveted play- thing out of doors when his mother recalled him, " Here, you, George Washington, give the man back his powder-horn." Later, I learned the meaning which attaches in the West-fair- ly enough, too-to the word gentleman. I was bargaining with a young fellow who had agreed to make a few thousand rails to repair a fence on one of our farms ; and, profiting by Rice's in- struction, I warned him that they must be of such and such timber; I would accept none of inferior quality ; whereupon he said, " Mister, I'm a gentleman, and I wouldn't put any man off with bad rails."
Toward the close of our ice-bound sojourn 1 accompanied Rice to a shooting match. He obtained the first prize, and I, to his great delight carried off the fourth or fifth,-a wild turkey worth twenty five cents. I carried it home in triumph to our keel-boat.
Soon after the middle of January, 1826, we reached Har- mony ; but I must delay, until next month, the recital of what I found there .- Atlantic.
My Experience at New Harmony.
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BY ROBERT DALE OWEN.
EFORE I left England, in 1825, the facts already stated connected with the enormously increased power to produce, coexisting with the decreased and ever decreasing means to live, among the laboring millions in that country, had convinced me, not only that something was grievously wrong and out of adaptation to the new industrial aspect of things, but that the essential remedy for the suffering which I witnessed around me was, as my father declared it to be, the substitution of co-operative industry for competitive labor ; and I jumped
Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church.
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to the conclusion that, under a system of co-operation, men would speedily be able, by three or four hours of easy labor each day, to supply themselves with all the necessaries and comforts of life which reasonable creatures could desire. Nay, with Utopian aspirations I looked forward to the time when riches, because of their superfluity, would cease to be the end and aim of man's thoughts, plottings, lifelong toilings; when the mere possession of wealth would no longer confer distinc- tion, any more than does the possession of water, than which there is no property of greater worth.
To-day, with half a century of added experience, I think, indeed, that invaluable truths underlie these opinions ; but I think also that I much erred in judging one branch of a great social subject without sufficient reference to other collateral branches ; and that I still more gravely erred in leaving out of view a main, practical ingredient in all successful changes, namely, the element of TIME.
The human race, by some law of its being, often possesses powers in advance-sometimes ages in advance-of capacity to employ them. Alfred Wallace, in a late work on Natural Se- lection, reminds us that the oldest human skulls yet discovered are not materially smaller than those of our own times ; a Swiss skull of the stone age corresponds to that of a Swiss youth of the present day ; the Neanderthal skull has seventy-five cubic inches of brain-space ; and the Engis skull-perhaps the oldest known - is regarded by Huxley as " a fair average skull that. might have belonged to a philosopher." Wallace's inference is that man, especially in his savage state, " possesses a brain quite disproportionate to his actual requirements - an organ that seems prepared in advance only to be fully utilized as he pro- gresses in civilization.t
So also I think it is in regard to man's industrial powers. He has acquired these in advance of the capacity to take ad-
t Contributions to the Theory of Natural Seclection, by Alfred Russell Wallace, au- thor of the Malay Archipelago, etc., London and New York, 1870, p. 343.
Mr. Wallace adds : " A brain slightly larger than that of the gorilla-which is thirty to thirty-four cubic inches-would, according to evidence before us, have fully sufficed for the mental development of the savage "
Size of brain is the chief, though not the sole element which determines the mental power. An adult male European with less than sixty-five cubic inches of brain is inva- riably idiotic.
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vantage of them, except to a limited extent. The various de- partments of human progress must go forward, in a measure, side by side. Material, even intellectual, progress brings scanty result, unless moral and spiritual progress bear it company .
I still think it is true that social arrangements can be de- vised under which all reasonable necessaries and comforts could be secured to a nation, say by three hours' daily work of its able-bodied population. But in the present state of moral cul- ture, would that result, in this or any civilized country: be a benefit ? Would leisure throughout three-fourths of each day be a blessing to uneducated or half-educated men ? If such leisure were suddenly acquired by the masses, would life and property be safe ? Think of the temptations of intemperance Some of the reports even from the eight-hour experiment are discouraging.
Then, as to the popular worship of wealth, -characteristic of a period of transition or half-civilization,-that cannot be suddenly corrected. The gallants of Queen Elizabeth's day sought distinction by the help of rich velvets slashed with sat- in, costly laces, trussed points, coats heavy with embroidery. It would have been in vain, in those days, to take them to task about their finery. It has now disappeared, even to its last lin- gering remnant, the lace ruffle at the wrist; but common sense had to work for centuries, ere men were satisfied to trust, for distinction, to something better than gaudy apparel.
I still think that co-operation is a chief agency destined to quiet the clamorous conflicts between capital and labor; but then it must be co-operation gradually introduced, prudently managed, as now in England. I think, too, that such co-opera- tion, aside from its healthy pecuniary results, tends to elevate character. Evidence of this, ever multiplying, comes daily to light. I have just received a paper on that subject by Thomas Hughes, published in Macmillan's Magazine, in which the writer says : " It is impossible to bring before you, in the space I have at my disposal, anything like proofs of a tithe of the good which the co-operative movement has done; how it is steadily strengthening and purifying the daily lives of a great section of our people. From his own observation and that of a Mr. Lud- low, who he says, " has had as much experience in this matter as any living man," Mr. Hughes states :
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That the co-operative system, founded scrupulously on ready-money dealings, delivers the poor from the credit system.
That, if a co-operative workshop has elements of vitality sufficient to weather the first few years' struggles, it is found to expel drunkenness and disorder, as inconsistent with success ; to do away with the tricks and dishonesties of work, now fre- quent between employers and employed ; to bring about fixity of employment ; to create new ties, new forms of fellowship even a sort of family feeling between man and man ; and thus, after a time, to develop a new type of workingmen, character- ized " not only by honesty, frankness, kindness, and true cour- tesy, but by a dignity, a self-respect, and a consciousness of freedom which only this phase of labor gives."
The writer met with such a type first in the Associations Ouvrieres of Paris, and confidently regards it as a normal result of co-operative production.
Finally, as co-operative producers and consumers have a common interest, this system shuts out adulteration in articles of food, and dishonest deterioration of goods in general, whether caused by faulty workmanship, or by employing worthless ma- terials.
A point of vast importance, this last! The debasement of quality which, under the pressure of competition, has gradu- ally extended of late years to almost every article used by man, is notorious. Yet as few persons except the initiated re- alize the immense loss to society from this source, an illustrative experience of my own may here be welcome.
When my father left me manager of the New Lanark cot- ton mills, in the winter of 1824-25, a certain Mr. Bartholomew, who had long been a customer of ours to the extent of twenty- five or thirty thousand dollars a year, came to me one day, asking if I could make him a lot of yarn suitable for ordinary shirting, at such a price, naming it.
" We have but one price," I said, " and you know well that we sell such yarn twenty per cent. above the rate that you propose."
" I know that," he replied,; " but you could make it, so as to be sold at my price."
" Yes, by using waste and mixing in weak, short-stapled cotton,"
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" And it would look almost as well ?"
"Perhaps."
'Then I'll risk it."
"My father's instructions," I replied, " are not to lower the quality of our goods. I'm sorry, but I can't fill your order."
He went off in a huff, but returned two days later.
" See here," he said, " don't be Quixotic. I can have the yarn I asked you about spun elsewhere. What's the use of driving a good customer from you? I shall get the stuff I want, and use it, all the same."
" It would injure the character of our mill."
" Not if you leave off your trade mark. What do I care about the picture ? ; Mark it as you will."
I hesitated, and finally-not much to my credit-agreed to make the yarn for him.
I had it marked with a large B. " It will stand for Bar- tholomew or for bad," I said to him when he came to look at it. "I'm ashamed to turn such an article out of our mill."
But three weeks later he came again. "Just the thing !" he said, and he gave me a second order, thrice as large as the first.
The B yarn became a popular article in the market ; the shirting that was made from it looking smooth, and being sold at some ten per cent. less than that made from our usual qual- ity. Yet to my certain knowledge,-for I tried it,-it did not last half as long as the other.
That transaction sits somewhat heavily on my conscience still. Yet it helped to teach me a great lesson. It is my firm belief that, at the present time, purchasers of cotton, woolen, linen, and silk goods, of furniture, hardware, leather goods, and all other manufactured staples, lose, on the average, because of inferior quality, more than half of the money they pay out. And I doubt whether, except by co-operation, this crying evil can be remedied.
When I reached Harmony, early in 1826, these general ideas ruled in my mind, untempered by the " sober second thoughts " which an after life brought with it. I looked at
ยก On each ten-pound package we were wont to paste an engraving of the mills and village ; and our yarn, in consequence, went far and near, by the name of " picture- yarn."
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everything with eyes of enthusiasm, and for a time, the life there was wonderfully pleasant and hopeful to me. This, I think, is the common experience of intelligent and well dis- posed persons who have joined the Brook Farm or any other reputable community. There is a great charm in the good- fellowship and in the absence of conventionalism which charac- terize such associations.
Then there was something especially taking-to me at least -in the absolute freedom from trammels, alike in expression of opinion, in dress, and in social converse, which I found there. The evening gatherings, too, delighted me ; the weekly meeting for discussion of our principles, in which I took part at once, the weekly concert, with an excellent leader, Josiah Warren, and a performance of music, instrumental and vocal, much be- yond what I had expected in the backwoods; last, not least, the weekly ball, where I found crowds of young people, bright and genial if not specially cultivated, and as passionately fond of dancing as, in those days, I myself was.
The accommodations seemed to me, indeed, of the rudest and the fare of the simplest ; but I cared no more for that than young folks usually care who forsake pleasant homes to spend a summer month or two under canvas,-their tents on the beach, perhaps, with boats and fishing tackle at command, or pitched in some sylvan retreat, where youth and maiden roam the for- est all day, returning at nightfall to merry talk, improvised music, or an impromptu dance on the greensward.
I shrank from no work that was assigned to me, and some- times, to the surprise of my associates, volunteered when a hard or disagreeable job came up, as the pulling down of sundry dreadfully dusty and dilapidated cabins throughout the village; but, after a time, finding that others could manage as much common labor in one day as I in two or three, and being invited to take general charge of the school and to aid in editing the weekly paper, I settled down to what, I confess, were more congenial pursuits than weilding the axe or holding the plough handles.
I had previously tried one day of sowing wheat by hand, and held out till evening ; but my right arm was comparatively useless for forty-eight hours after. Another day, when certain
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young girls were baking bread for one of the large boarding- houses, lacked an additional hand, I offered to help them ; but when the result of my labors came to the table, it was suggested that one of the loaves should be voted to me as a gift for my diligence; the rather, as, by a little manipulation, such as apothecaries use in making pills, it might save me the trouble of casting bullets the next time I went out rifle-shooting.
To atone for these and similar mishaps, I sometimes suc- ceeded where others had failed. When I first took charge of the school, finding that the teachers occasionally employed cor- poral punishment, I strictly forbade it. After a time the mas- ter of the eldest boys' class said to me one day, "I find it impossible to control these unruly rascals. They know I'm not allowed to flog them ; and when I seek to enforce rules of order they defy me."
I sought to show him how he might manage them without the rod, but he persisted : " If you'd try it yourself for a few days, Mr. Owen, you'd find out that I'm right."
" Good," said I. " I'll take them in hand for a week or two."
They were a rough, boisterous, lawless set ; bright enough, capable of learning when they applied themselves; but accus- tomed to a free swing, and impatient of discipline to which they had never been subjected. I said to them, at the start, " Boys, I want you to learn ; you'll be very sorry when you come to be men if you don't. But you can't learn anything worth knowing, without rules to go by. I must have you or- derly and obedient. I won't require from you anything unrea- sonable, and I don't intend to be severe with you. But what- ever I tell you, bas to be done, and shall be done, sooner or later " Here I observed on one or two bold faces a smile that looked like incredulity ; but all I added was, " You'll save time if you do it at once."
My lessons, often oral, interested them, and things went on quietly for a few days. I knew the crisis would come. It did, in this wise. It was May, the thermometer ranging toward ninety, and I resolved to take the class to bathe in the Wabash, much to their delight. I told them in advance, that by the doctor's advice they were to remain in the water fifteen minutes
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only - that was the rule. When I called, " Time up! " they all come out, somewhat reluctantly, however, except one tall fellow, named Ben, a good swimmer, who detained us ten min- utes more, notwithstanding my order, several times repeated, to come on shore.
I said nothing about it till we returned to the school-room; then I asked the class, " Do you remember my saying to you that whatever I told you to do had to be done sooner or later?" They looked at Ben, and said, " Yes." Then I went on : " I am determined that if I take you to bathe again, you shall stay in fifteen minutes only, How do you think I had best manage that?" They looked at Ben again, and seemed puzzled, never, very surely, having been asked such a question before. "Has no one any plan ? " I said.
At length a youngster suggested, "I guess you'd better thrash him, Mr. Owen."
" I don't wish to do that," I replied ; I think it does boys harm. Besides, I never was whipped myself, I never whipped anybody, and I know it must be a very unpleasant thing to do. Can't some of you think of a better plan ? "
One of the class suggested, " There's a closet in the garret with a stout bolt to it. You might shut him up there till we get back."
" That's better than flogging; but is the closet dark ?"
" It's dark as hell."
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