his employer failed, no lien law gave him a claim on the product of his labor. In many States he was still disfranchised. In all, he was liable under the common law of England to be punished for conspiracy if by strikes, by lockouts, or by combination with others he sought to better his condition or raise his pay. One thing he did not lack-he now had friends ready and willing to help on his cause.

The pleas they put forth in his behalf dwell at great length on the awful misery of drunkenness; declare that the poverty of the working-classes is the real cause of intemperance; call for legislation to "prevent the rich from swallowing up the inheritance of the poor "; hold up as a warning the "injurious consequences to the community of individuals amassing large landed property"; point out the dangers to which factory operatives are daily and hourly exposed; and ask for cleaner shops and healthier mills and lodgings.

Such pleas had small effect on the public, but much on the working-man and woman, who, after 1825, began to organize in earnest. Social unions of various crafts were formed in all the seaboard cities and manufacturing centres north of Baltimore. In New England the women weavers and cotton operatives led the way. In New York city the ship carpenters and calkers, following the example of the machinists of Philadelphia, in their turn began to agitate for a ten-hour day. So energetic was the labor movement that in 1828 an attempt was made in the New York Legislature to secure a mechanics' lien law, and a report strongly favoring such a measure of relief was presented. In Philadelphia the workingmen, breaking old ties, entered politics on their own behalf and formed a labor party. At a public meeting in August it was formally resolved to urge the working-men to support no candidate for a seat in the Legislature or in the city councils who would not pledge himself to further the interests and demands of "the working-classes," and a call was issued for organization.* The city and county were marked off into four districts, from each of which delegates were sent to a general

United States Gazette, August 14, 1828.

1828.

A WORKING-MAN'S PARTY.

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convention which nominated assemblymen, common councilmen, and auditor.*

The tickets were defeated; but the organization continued, and ere another year went by made two demands for reform— one that the managers of the House of Refuge, who had just introduced mechanical occupations into their institution, should see to it that the mechanics and working-men of Philadelphia suffered no injury; and another that the State of Pennsylvania should establish a system of free republican schools, open to the children of the rich and of the poor without distinction.

Judged by the standard of public instruction as now maintained in Pennsylvania, the demand of the working-men was reasonable and just. The constitution of the commonwealth, framed a generation before, required that the children of the poor should be educated at the public cost. The injunction was mandatory; the meaning was plain. Yet no steps were taken to carry it out till 1809, when a law was enacted requiring the assessors of taxes to make a census of the children whose parents were too poor to educate them, send the boys and girls to the nearest school, and assess the cost on the taxpayers. Even this wise provision was neglected. Some districts had no schools of any kind; in others the funds were embezzled, misapplied, perverted, or the law but partly executed, for the people refused to accept the benefit conferred lest their children should be looked on and treated as paupers. Meanwhile the cities increased in population, and the number of children growing up in absolute ignorance became so large that in 1818 a second step forward was taken, and the city and county of Philadelphia, the city and borough of Lancaster, and the city of Pittsburg were formed into three districts, with free schools in which children whose parents were too poor to educate them were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography. No child whose parents could pay his schooling was admitted, and this in the eyes of the working-men was an offensive class distinction. It separated the children of the rich from those of the poor, and said to the latter, "You

* United States Gazette, August 21 and October 1, 1828.

are paupers." That some men should be rich and others poor was inevitable, but to build up class hatred was not necessary, and no surer way of preventing it could be devised than a system of equal republican education, with free schools open to the children of all citizens alike.

The efforts which working-men were thus making to secure great social reforms, and especially their demands for free public schools, now warmly enlisted in their cause another body of reformers, known as the Free Enquirers, who were regarded at that day by conservative people with the same horror and detestation that anarchists and socialists are regarded in ours. The origin of this movement for free inquiry goes back to a little community of men and women who gathered in 1825 at New Harmony, near the Wabash river, in Indiana. The founder of the community, Robert Owen, was a native of Wales, where he was born in 1771. Forced to earn his living while still a lad, he became a clerk in a draper shop near London at ten, went to Manchester at fourteen, was made manager of a cotton mill at eighteen, and at twenty-seven bought the mills at New Lanark, in Scotland, from David Dale, whose daughter he married.

From the day when as a mere lad he entered the Manchester mills his mind seems to have been full of schemes for the social betterment of the laboring classes, held down by ignorance, by squalid poverty, and by lack of character. Once in control at New Lanark, Owen put his plans in operation, and after long opposition built and opened what he called an Institution for the Formation of Character, but what was, in fact, a great school for the instruction of children from the time they were infants till they were boys and girls of twelve. He shortened the hours of daily labor in the mills, introduced rules to enforce morality and promote cleanliness and good habits; he added to the comfort and happiness of all, and little by little established co-operation on the community system of living. The fame and the success of the New Lanark experiment spread far and wide. Co-operation, unrestrained co-operation on the part of all the members for every purpose of social life," became the reform hobby of the hour, and Owen the great teacher of a new economy. Co-operative

1825.

THE RAPPITES.

89

economical societies sprang up all over England and Scotland, and attracted the attention of men in the New World.

Among those whose attention was so attracted was an agent for the sale of a village built in the far West by one of the many religious communities which then flourished in the United States. The founder of this sect was George Rapp, the son of a small farmer and vine-dresser of Würtemberg, in Germany, where he was born in 1757. He was a man far more inclined to read and think than to plough and reap, and having no books save the Bible, he read it constantly, with the result so common in the case of bright men with little education. He began to see new meanings and to catch new ideas. Religious doubts tormented him; then firm convictions took their place, and a sense of duty arose which drove him to make known the new truths he had discerned for the good of mankind. He was moved to preach first in his own house, and then in public. But when he began to preach the clergy began to persecute, and as persecution continued, his followers increased in number and in earnestness. At last, wearied with the perpetual struggle for the rights of conscience, Rapp turned to the one land where men were free to worship as they pleased, and prepared to lead his followers to the United States of America. In 1804, with his son and a few friends, Rapp came to Baltimore, travelled over Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and finally chose a tract of land in the valley of the Conoquenessing, twenty-five miles northwest of Pittsburg, in Pennsylvania, and on it in 1805 seven hundred Rappites built the village of Harmony. Hitherto they had formed a religious body. Now they became a community, put all property into a common fund, adopted a simple style of dress, plain houses and plain living, and agreed that each should labor for the good of all.

As time passed the site of Harmony proved to be illchosen, for the soil and climate were unsuited for vine-growing, the only industry in which the people were skilful, and the town had no water communication with the outside world. A new home was therefore sought in the far West, and found in the valley of the Wabash, whither, in 1815, the society migrated and built a second Harmony. Once more the site

proved far from satisfactory. The wild rush of population westward brought them neighbors of a most unpleasant sort; malaria, or “the shakes," was worse than the neighbors, and so disheartened the people that in 1824 an Englishman named Richard Flower was offered five thousand dollars to find a purchaser for the land and houses. Flower went straight to Great Britain, sought out Owen, and sold him the town of Harmony, with all its mills, houses, factories, and thirty thousand acres of land, for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Three thousand acres were under cultivation, eighteen were covered by full-bearing vines and flourishing orchards, while the village itself was well built and well laid out, with broad streets and a public square, around which were brick buildings used by the Rappites for schools, churches, and community

purposes.

The purchase concluded, Owen, in December, 1824, came over to the United States, and, while the Rappites were on their way to a new home, which they built in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, and named Economy, he began preparations for the founding of the first Owenite community in our country. That his scheme and his views might be as widely known as possible, he went to Washington, secured the use of the Hall of Representatives, and in it, on two evenings,* delivered long addresses to most distinguished audiences. In making such appeals, it was his custom to begin by attempting to show that the construction of modern society was all wrong; that the prevalence of error, prejudice, vice, and crime was due to the practice of bringing up the young in a system of society which he called the individual, or selfish; and that there were two sets of circumstances which entirely regulated the formation of a man's character. The one was his religious belief, and the other was his education. Every child was possessed of a body and a mind over which he had no control; whether that mind was moulded for good or for ill depended on the circumstances with which the parents sur

* Two Discourses on a System of Society as delivered in the Hall of Representatives of the United States on the 25th of February and the 7th of March, 1825, etc. By Robert Owen, of New Lanark. The plan for a community is given on pages 42-52.