s life to going about the
world telling people how much better they would be off if they would
stop competing with one another, and act together for their common good.
Why have one hundred kitchens, one hundred ovens, and one hundred cooks,
when the work done in them could be better done in one kitchen, with one
oven, by five cooks? This was one question that he asked.

Here is the steam engine, he would say, doing as much work in Great
Britain as the labor power of two worlds as populous as ours could do
without it. Yet the mass of the people find life more difficult than it
was centuries ago. How is this? Such questions Robert Owen pondered day
and night, and the results he reached were three in number:--

1. The steam engine necessitates radical changes in the structure of
society.

2. Cooeperation should take the place of competition.

3. Civilized people should no longer live in cities and separate homes,
but in communities of fifteen hundred or two thousand persons each, who
should own houses and lands in common, and labor for the benefit of the
whole.

In spreading abroad these opinions he spent forty of the best years of
his life, and the greater part of a princely income. At first, and for a
considerable time, such was the magnetism of his presence, and the
contagion of his zeal, that his efforts commanded the sympathy, and even
the approval, of the ruling classes of England,--the nobility and
clergy. But in the full tide of his career as a reformer he deliberately
placed himself in opposition to religion. At a public meeting in London
he declared in his bland, impressive way, without the least heat or
ill-nature, that all the religions of the world, whether ancient or
modern, Christian or pagan, were erroneous and hurtful.

Need I say that from that moment the influential classes, almost to a
man, dropped him? One of the few who did not was the Duke of Kent, the
father of Queen Victoria. He remained a steadfast friend to Owen as long
as he lived. Mr. Owen founded a community on his own system. Its failure
was speedy and complete, as all experiments must be which are undertaken
ages too soon. He came to America and repeated the experiment. That also
failed in a remarkably short period. Associated with him in this
undertaking was his son, Robert Dale Owen, who has since spent a long
and honorable life among us.

Returning to England, Mr. Owen continued to labor in the dissemination
of his ideas until the