Now began his connection with America, a country to which, by and by,
he was to give three valuable sons. While managing this mill he bought
the first two bales of American Sea Island cotton ever imported into
England, and he advanced one hundred and seventy pounds to Robert
Fulton, his fellow-boarder, to help him with his inventions. I cannot
relate all the steps by which he made his way, while still a very young
man, to the ownership of a village of cotton mills in Scotland, and to a
union with the daughter of David Dale, a famous Scotch manufacturer and
philanthropist of that day. He was but twenty-nine years of age when he
found himself at the head of a great community of cotton spinners at New
Lanark in Scotland.

Here he set on foot the most liberal and far-reaching plans for the
benefit of the working people and their children. He built commodious
and beautiful school-rooms, in which the children were taught better, in
some respects, than the sons of the nobility were taught at Eton or
Harrow. Besides the usual branches, he had the little sons and daughters
of the people drilled regularly in singing, dancing, military exercises,
and polite demeanor. He made one great mistake, due rather to the
ignorance of the age than his own: he over-taught the children--the
commonest and fatalest of errors to new-born zeal. But his efforts
generally for the improvement of the people were wonderfully successful.

"For twenty-nine years," as he once wrote to Lord Brougham, "we did
without the necessity for magistrates or lawyers; without a single
legal punishment; without any known poors' rates; without intemperance
or religious animosities. We reduced the hours of labor, well educated
all the children from infancy, greatly improved the condition of the
adults, and cleared upward of three hundred thousand pounds profit."

Having won this great success, he fell into an error to which strong,
self-educated men are peculiarly liable,--_he judged other people by
himself_. He thought that men in general, if they would only try, could
do as well for themselves and others as he had. He thought there could
be a New Lanark without a Robert Owen. Accustomed all his life to easy
success, he was not aware how exceptional a person he was, and he did
not perceive that the happiness of the people who worked for him was due
as much to his authority as a master as to his benevolence as a man. The
consequence was that he devoted the rest of hi